Thread: Who's The Hardest Poet To Understand?

I read the wasteland in high school. Not as part of my English course, but just for myself. I won't claim to have understood all of it (or even much of it) but I still thought the language use and imagery was fantastic. I'm still finding new meanings and stuff in it, to be honest. It is an incredibly complex piece of poetry.

Too complex. A sort of "look at how smart I am as I masturbate all over the paper!" kind of complex.

Originally Posted by Hodge

Too complex. A sort of "look at how smart I am as I masturbate all over the paper!" kind of complex.

Hahaha, a fair critique. Still, it's a great poem, even if it is a little consciously exclusionary.

I agree about Eliot. If you say that you understood The Waste Land without help in high school, you are either a liar or someone who spent innumerable late nights pulling out your hair and trying to track down all of Eliot's references.

Some of Yeats' stuff is not the easiest to grasp.

Also, Keats is not the best of the Romantic Era. Wordsworth and Shelley have him beat. Furthermore, Ozymandias singlehandedly destroys just about anything.

Originally Posted by Hodge

Too complex. A sort of "look at how smart I am as I masturbate all over the paper!" kind of complex.

Hehehe, I wish you'd said that to me 18 years ago when I was in a stuffy classroom in a hot June, suffering from morning sickness, trying to figure out the labyrinth that is "The Waste Land" and wishing TS Eliot had never been born.....

Has anyone read Robert Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came'? That poem confused the hell out of me for a good few years.

Dr. Seuss.

Honestly, they didn't give that man a Ph.D. for nothing.

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P.S.

Banzai, do you have a thing for some dame named Lisa?

Why is everyone noticing that all of a sudden, when it's been there since I joined? And yes. Kind of. Well, she was my girlfriend, until we broke up a week ago, due to the fact that long distance relationships are incredibly stressful. I just haven't gotten around to changing it yet. I might do it now, actually...

Actually, I've only seen your signature once.

It's just ironic that its now that people notice it. And you aren't the first person to comment on it in the last week, by the way.

Well, I don't claim comprehensive knowledge of Eliot, but I find his poems thematically simple, and rhetorically difficult. "Prufrock" and "The Wasteland" both deal with relatively simple themes, for example Prufrock, with its spiritual exhaustion, social disillusionment, anxiety, etc., has familiar emotive appeal which is immediately apparent. However, he develops these with complex rhetorical devices: obscure allusions, symbolism which becomes as important as the narrative, intermingling and birthing meaning, i.e. "masturbating all over the page."

So Eliot creates a dichotomy of sorts: his poems are easy, yet on another level extremely difficult. They appear daunting, but communicate relatively common emotions through the "continual extinction of personality" which he describes in "Individual Talent."

In this sense, a poet such as Robert Browning is much harder to understand. There is no immediate apprehension of theme through the syntax, diction, and imagery. Think of "Caliban Upon Setebos," in which some previous knowledge of the philosophes, the reversion to primitive nature worship he perceived in Shelley and the Romantics, and constant references to Paley's natural theology and Darwinism are required to understand even why the characters are developed as they are.

But these two operate on an intellectual level, and opposite this we have, for example, Philip Larkin or Thomas Hardy, who speak colloquially and whose themes are relatively easy, and unobscured by their learning.

Anyways:

I've always found Yeats a complex poet. Not difficult on a surface level, but every time I read and reread "The Second Coming" or (the "mourning lips" poems, I forget the name) I find ideas and emotions I missed previously.

eliot, margaret avison too.

apart from Child and another one or two by Plath, her work was really hard to understand, long and complex, not very easy to access like Frost's

I got an A for Plath in my English coursework I suppose it helped that I have had her 'Collected Poems' since I was 13.

For me it has to be Chauser. Didn't get the language. :p

I got an A for Plath in my English coursework I suppose it helped that I have had her 'Collected Poems' since I was 13.

I don't think Sylvia Plath is very difficult to understand! Some poems like Daddy are tricky but nothing compared to poets like Eliot.