Thread: Who's The Hardest Poet To Understand?

Alexander Pope.

Allen Ginsberg. In the sense that I just can't understand why anybody thought he was so great. Personally a total asshole, literarily a superficial ranter. But people go on and on about how wonderful he was.

Right up there with Milton as over-rated purveryors of English poetry.

Plath. Never understood why she whined so much, or put us all out of her misery many years earlier. If self-indulgent self-pity is an art-form, she's a master.

Originally Posted by Jolly McJollyson

If you understood "The Wasteland" in High School, then congratulations, you are a friggin genius.

If you understand The Wasteland at all, you're a genius.

Spike Milligan

Originally Posted by Baron

Spike Milligan

Nooo!

It was a cough
that carried him off
It was a coffin
they carried him off in.

Spike Milligan

Basically I'm a philistine when it comes to a lot of this stuff. If it doesn't rhyme, preferably although not essentially in ballad form, it goes over my head.

And poetry that makes sense without having to puzzle over it, does it for me.

If a poem's complexity or other-worldliness or whatever makes it difficult to understand, I say why bother? Why tax your mind? Why not be satisfied with simplicity?

Some of Ezra Pound's stuff's ok.

For me, the more recent poetry gets, the harder it is to understand.

Old stuff is quite often at least semi-transparent in its meaning; it is obvious what Shakespeare is saying in a sonnet, and nobody really needs more than a little vocab help to decipher Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner".

Chaucer takes a bit of work, but if you learn your way around the language, you find it's just simple, cheerful narrative poetry.

Come into the twentieth century and things get less simple. Sylvia Plath is difficult, though I think worth puzzling over in her finer moments, particularly "Full Fathom Five" and "The Colossus".

There is a fashion for the utterly impenetrable in poetry now. John Berryman and Stephen Dunn both demand to be wrestled with before they will give up a hint of sense. In fact, Fleur Adcock is my favourite living poet largely because her poems are understandable the first time you read them.

Chaucer had his dark side! "The smiler with the knife beneath his cloak" not to speak of that horrible Nun's tale (I think) about ritual murder by Jews. Then there is the whole question about whether a lot of the descriptions in the Prologue are more satirical than we realise.
What's nice about the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is that the accounts of Cook's in the South Pacific had just been published and Coleridge was a passionate reader of accounts of travels.

It was a cough
that carried him off
It was a coffin
they carried him off in.

That's pretty understandable, I'd say.

A Silly Poem


Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

Spike Milligan

Milligan was a master of nonsense poetry (google 'On the Ning Nang Nong') primarily aimed at children, and the infantile at heart.

Why is rain thin?

Originally Posted by The Backward OX

Why is rain thin?

It's the zero calorie option. And no fat!

That is rather an acid comment..

It's because it comes out of thin air.