I know I’m not the only one on the SDMB who loves poetry, or quite a lot of it anyway. We seem to be a definite minority amongst the literate of the world, sadly, but we’re everywhere.
I also know that most poetry fans, if not all of us, harbor some deep disagreements with a majority of this minority we belong to. For one thing, every one of us has a few poems that we love to pieces, even though we know damned well the learned and lofty lords of High Taste would assure us is tripe; but that’ll be the topic for my next post. For now, I’d like to ask: what poets who are generally considered to be good, classic, major, excellent, can you just plain not stand to read the works of? Similarly, what specific poems are there which a concensus canon-happy professors, anthologists of record, and even the rest of the poetry-appreciative circles you know of, have declared Great Works, but are still shit on toast to your tastes?
Here are some of mine:
Paradise Lost – I’ve read many, many academic appreciations of John Milton in general, and PL in particular, that laud the blind Christian to the skies and back and call this dreary never-ending thing one of the greatest poems in the English language. What I see there (or would, if I were to subject myself to reading it again) is a tedious long-winded stretch of writing which has no music or passion to it but just goes on its deadly dull way with many a creak and thud. Not only was I subjected to that mess in two Lit classes (senior year of high school and first-year college), I’ve gone back and struggled with it on my own. And there’s nothing there but a cinderblock of starchy, prosy boredom shot through with annoying religious piety.
In one of his earlier novels, Richard Price makes a passing reference to Spenser’s The Faery Queen as a “sleeping pill”. He was correct. It is a deadening sedative that leaves one logy afterwardAnd if TFQ is Nembutal, then Malory’s Morte D’Arthur is Tuinal, and that other King Arthur poem I forgot the author and the title of is Seconal, to complete my elegasnt series of analogies to obsolete soporifics in tablet form.
The authors of many of those moldy old chestnuts that high-school English teachers have been subjecting teenagers to (and causing them to hate poetry by so doing, which is a tragedy and a grave misdeed AFAIAC) are keeping Mr. Milton company on my shit list: I speak of Mssrs Wordsworth, Whittier, Longfellow and (Thomas) Gray principally. Much of these gentlemens’ combined output is distinguished only by its ability to put a classroom full of 8th-graders to sleep.
Matthew Arnold (“the whiskered Wowser”, as the learned Mr. Crowley called him), with his stern and deadening edict requiring “High Seriousness”, escapes my shitlist of the Undeservingly Reverenced – but only by a hair, and only because he wrote “Dover Beach”. The rest of his poetry stinks on ice to the nostrils of my poetic ear, no matter how many learned lords of lofty literature insist it’s vitally important and elegantly swell.
Samuel Coleridge wrote one of my very favorite poems of thepre-modern epoch, Kublai Khan. He also wrote The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, though, and for that I cannot forgive him. It’s an over-wrought and under-abridged torrent of dreary drivel with unmusical rhymes, cursed with a storyline of sorts which takes ages to go nowhere. This so-called masterpiece strikes me as mostly another tool for sadistic lit teachers to torture their students with until they’re conditioned to loathe all poetry.
Moving into the 20th Century (I prefer the 20th Century poets to older ones anyway for the most part!), I have to confess that I simply cannot abide the poetry of that self-disgraced soi-disant Master Of His Poetic Era, Ezra Pound. My rejection of him has nothing to do with his unsavory and treasonous political activities, and everything to do with the fact that I cannot make head nor tail out of his poetry and there’s nothing I can see about it that makes me think it’d be worth the effort to learn about. Well, I’ll make an exception for the one poem “Ancient Music”('Winter is i-cumin in, / Lhude sing goddamn!"). In fact I think that that whole deliberately obtuse and opaque Modernist thing is the other major force that turns people off all poetry along with the narcoleptic boredoms of the moldy oldies.
Hart Crane is another poet I am assured by the nabobs of knowledge is great indeed, and perhaps beyond my capabilities, while I am convinced he’s actually an incomprehensible and incredibly boring waste of time and anthology pages.
And finally, let me mention Mr, Robert Frost – one of the most brutally boring and outrageously over-rated poets who wrote in English during the 20th Century.
There are more than just a few other well-respected poets and much-beloved poems I hold in similar heretical disdain, but these are just about the worst of all in my bookI don’t offer these examples up because I wanted to pick a fight about their merits or lack of same, but as my own list of qualified specimens of the topic of discussion.
Have at, fellow malcontents of versification!
