Eighth Grade Education - POETRY

[Carol]

> Steve bboyminn wrote in
> <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPFGU-OTChatter/message/38724>:
> 
> << Still, I do find poems that I like and wish I had more resources
for good poetry. But poetry is like modern music, I can't afford to
buy tons of crap just to find a few scraps of grace. >>
> 
> There are poetry archives on-line. One is at
> <http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/59>. Another is at
> <http://www.bartleby.com/verse/>.
>
Carol responds:

Very true, but where should a person start if he wants to learn to
like poetry as an adult? He needs to know the names of at least some
major poets and have at least a general idea of what he likes, which
is why I suggested Whitman and Wilfred Owen for war poetry. 

Someone else, with an ear for beauty and irony, might like Shelley.
You can't go wrong with Shakespeare's sonnets, though some are
admittedly better than others. I'd recommend Keats's "Ode to a
Nightingale" to anybody. I once read it as a substitute teacher to a
class of rowdy fifteen-year-olds and, to my astonishment, saw them
held spellbound by the beauty and imagery. I forget whether I also
told them how young Keats was and that he was dying of tuberculosis
when he wrote it.

Anyway, here's a list of the more readable post-Shakespearean English
poets and their approximate era:

John Donne and Andrew Marvell ("Metaphysical" poets of the seventeenth
century); Robert Herrick ("Cavalier" poet of the same era)

Alexander Pope (eighteenth century--a little of any eighteenth-century
poet goes a long way because of the invariable heroic couplets
(end-stopped iambic pentameter couplets: AA, BB, CC, etc.)

The "old" Romantics, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
with their opposing styles, one finding poetry in Nature and the
everyday and the other in the supernatural or exotic, late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century.

The young Romantics, George Gordon, Lord Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley;
and John Keats, with their experimental verse forms and, again,
contrasting philosophies. Byron often wrote narrative poems with (not
to be obvious or anything) Byronic heroes; Shelley was philosophical
and sometimes political, like Wordsworth and Coleridge interested in
the shaping power of the Imagination; Keats, who believed in truth and
beauty and liked to lose himself in whatever he was observing,
becoming, so he said, a sparrow as it pecks about the gravel (early
nineteenth century).

The Victorians, Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
Matthew Arnold. Their poems, especially Arnold's, showed the influence
of Romanticism but lacked the Wordsworthian faith in Nature. ("Nature
red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson put it.) Robert Browning is best
known for his somewhat ironic dramatic monologues, his wife for her
love poems to her husband, "Sonnets from the Portuguese." I won't get
into the Pre-Raphaelites or Swinburne.

If you like a grim perspective, try the late Victorian Thomas Hardy,
also known for grim, pessimistic novels like "Jude the Obscure." I
mentioned wilfred Owne; there's also Rupert Brooke, whose optimistic
view of war probably results from never having experienced it firsthand.

Once you get further into the twentieth century, the major poets are
Americans like Eliot and Pound whose poetry is more complex. I
wouldn't recommend starting there. 

Before anyone jumps on me, I realize that I've greatly oversimplified
every poet and period on this list. I'm just trying to give an idea of
what's out there. Please feel free to expand on what I've written or
add new names, particularly Americans. (Other than Whitman, I haven't
recommended any.)

Does anyone else have favorite poets or poems that they recommend to
someone who's trying to overcome a prejudice against poetry because of
the joyless way it was taught to them? I promise not to tell you the
meter or rhyme scheme of the poem unless you ask!

Carol, who recommends browsing through the poetry section of a
bookstore on a rainy Saturday morning to find what moves or intrigues you