TS Heavy Hitters Poll #1: Yeats vs. Shakespeare

dare we approach Virgil's rostrum

*I* would be down for something involving GMH but I'm aware I'm pretty much alone on that. Go with your gut, dude

Thomas Hardy vs D.H. Lawrence

virgil vs dante

or homer vs milton

Flaubert vs Nabokov

Albarn vs Gillespie

oh wait I got it now

dickinson vs whitman

oh you already started it

lets get some women up in these polls tho, and by women, i mean, emily dickinson

max OTM iirc

(that poll's impossible to answer, tho)

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning, but yeah dickinson is the business

was lucky to have had a prof who was a Dickinson scholar tbh

or, if he didn't publish on Dickinson -- i don't know -- she was definitely one of his favorite poets, if not his favorite, and we did a lot of work on her stuff

I was looking at elizabeth bishop & marianne moore this morning

there's painful choosing. ow.

*I* would be down for something involving GMH

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

I would guess that Dickinson would be hard to beat by almost anyone - actually Dickinson vs. Donne might be a fair fight

or Dickinson vs Herbert

dickinson vs..... herself

Dickinson v GMH! US/UK shut-ins of the 19th century. (another tough un).

this poll would be amazing and would probably lead to me reading some Dickinson, who like Frost is a massive black hole in British poetic education

god you guys are missing out

i dont know if youd like dickinson tho louis? dont you like big epic type bros? maybe whitman would be more your style?

Um...more or less my favourite poetry (that 1930's modernist biz) is decidedly UN-epic! Or at least, doesn't really go on for more than 20 pages at a pop, and usually keeps to one or two pages. The epic form is delightful when done well, however, so I'm open-minded about who I read.

great modern female poets: Susan Howe anyone? Elizabeth Bishop did that poem about a fish didn't she - the one that got polled up against some other poems - it's GREAT and I voted for it

*WHOM if we're being PERNICKETY

actually GMH is pretty much my favourite poetry fuck tha h8rs

I want to love Hopkins, but the rhymes and rhythms jangle in an awkward way. Behind the rhetorical legerdemain is content that Donne and Herbert have approached more...delicately, let's say.

maybe GMH is a unique synthesis of anguished melodrama and infernal systemic-scattergun complexity, two things which have always defined my youthful thoughts

or he's just got an ear for cadence that I haven't heard the like of, ever else

it only deepens my affection, that he makes up compound-adjectives and expressions like 'inscape' and 'instress' to suit his wild purposes - he seems genuinely to be inventing and discovering a new poetic, one that in this pure moment of creation only he can compose - and this new poetic enables him to look within mystical processes in a manner that reveals the very structure of his sensual imagination - his entire comprehension of life is splattered manically onto the page as if attempting to chronicle the totality of God - observe how elongated I have become in response - it is silly but no poet has evinced such throes - such exquisite tortures

'rollrock highroad roaring down' are seven of my favorite syllables of all time. the rest is hit or miss.

LJ OTM imo -- good post

'Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves' is the most perfect document of English language, IMO, but enough of this - I need sleep

xpost

although, tbh, the only GMH i've encountered was a little bit here and there in college -- all scattershot

go on then, I've posted this to ILX like 3 times before but why not again

accents are for stress

Spelt From Sibyl's Leaves

EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ' vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous
Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ' womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.
Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ' her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height
Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ' stárs principal, overbend us,
Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ' her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-
tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ' self ín self steedèd and páshed — qúite
Disremembering, dísmémbering ' áll now. Heart, you round me right
With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ' whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.
Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ' damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,
Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ' Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind
Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ' upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck
Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds — black, white; ' right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind
But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ' twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack
Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ' thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

i don't know who did the seeding but there's just no way Yeats runs into the Shakespeare buzzsaw in round one. Shoulda tossed him a sacrificial Romantic or something.

aw i missed this! i had such an embarrassing yeats obsession as a teenager that i couldn't read him for a while after that. also think he suffers because i know more about him as a dude than shakespeare and yeats was kind of silly.

i mean, shakespeare is the "i want you back" by the jackson 5 of polls, so i would have voted for him, but <3 yeats so ponderous.

For me there is something about Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats that places them above everyone else in the English language. Don't know if I'll feel this way in five years or not...

i like your picks. shelley maybe squeezes in there too imo, but that's based on nothing more than ozymandias really.

Yep, love Shelley.

HAD I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

i've been drunkenly reading this several times per day for the last week. fuck

The last two stanzas of "Adam's Curse"!

i've been drunkenly reading this several times per day for the last week. fuck

aww K3v hope you are ok. those lines make me sob even when everything is right in my life, they are the most perfect thing

Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire, are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, call’d you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak, and despis’d old man.

^^^ I think the pyrotechnics of the earlier parts of the soliloquy get all the attention but this right here is the business

collapses on itself v nicely

thanks to alfred for posting frost's 'desert places.' never read that before; utterly gorgeous.

is there a consensus on the best frost collection to own?

The collected Frost is really one of the rare COMPLETE collections you need own. He only wrote two volumes of fluff (his last two).

we should do more of these

my sophomore HS english teacher had to drive frost to and from the airport when he was in college. he described him as 'the crabbiest old bastard i've ever met.'

SEPTEMBER 1913
by William Butler Yeats
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the ha’pence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save?,
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You’d cry ‘Some woman’s yellow hair
Has maddened every mother’s son’:
They weighed so lightly what they gave.
But let them be, they’re dead and gone,
They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

100th anniversary of publication, and all is changed, changed utterly (not likely)

in the pub, with a friend, he's just gone to drain the weasel, read that while he was away. and well, it moved the hell out of me. time to get a pint.

this is the best thread on ilx

Old ILE's dead and gone
It's with Passantino in the UK