Thread: Who's The Hardest Poet To Understand?

Hardest poet to understand has to be Robert Frost. People take his poems too literally and so fail to understand even an iota of the meaning he tries to convey subtly. "A Road Not Taken" is a great example of this.

Wallace Stevens is a tough read if you're just trying to understand and not enjoy. Though Robert Frost is also a tough one. I had to work a lot of his poems in college.

Robert Burns. Thats hard work and unlike some other poets I like, I havent found it worth the effort. I LOVE Keats and Yeats

It took reading through this entire thread to finally come to my two favourite poets whose work is difficult to understand but well worth the time needed to work out what is said. One of my top of the list poets is Wallace Stevens; has been since a university poetry course 50 years ago. He shares top billing for me with Robert Frost. Stevens makes no effort to make his poems easy, but he makes every effort to make them meaningful. Frost is the reverse of Eliot. Where Eliot clothes fairly simple ideas in complex rhetoric, Frost clothes complex themes in simple language. Stevens' rhetoric is complex, but so are his ideas. The reader who takes Frost at face value might as well not read him at all.

Try reading a Spike Milligan piece, especially written during one of his manic depressive moments. I still love him though, a very gifted and funny man.

"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. " -lin

Personally a total asshole? Where do you get that? However you feel about his work is warranted but you must not know Ginsberg to make such a harsh statement.

A great deal of time and effort would have been saved if this thread had been titled "Who's The Easiest Poet To Understand?" All poets are hard to understand, so nobody would have bothered.

I think that Ted Hughes is sometimes a bit hard to understand. The poem 'Pike' has some very weird descriptions like 'green tigering the gold'.

There's no such thing as a difficult or complicated poem. At least not one intended by the poet because there's no virtue in complexity for its own sake. It may be complex in nature, theme or language but with reason. And that reason is a portal of discovery for every reader. For someone unfamiliar with the language in which the poem below was written the piece I have provided and others like it can present just as many so-called "difficulties" as a written text by the likes of Eliot or Pound; Byron, Shelley, or even Keats if you like...

When þe nyhtegale singes þe wodes waxen grene.
Lef ant gras ant blosme springes in aueryl y wene,
Ant love is to myn herte gon wiþ one spere so kene
Nyht ant day my blod hit drynkes myn herte deþ me tene.
Ich have loved al þis er þat y may love namore,
Ich have siked moni syk lemmon for þin ore.
Me nis love never þe ner ant þat me reweþ sore.
Suete lemmon þench on me—ich have loved þe ore.
Suete lemmon y preye þe of love one speche,
Whil y lyve in world so wyde oþer nulle y seche.
Wiþ þy love my suete leof mi blis þou mihtes eche,
A suete cos of þy mouþ mihte be my leche.
Suete lemmon y preȝe þe of a love bene
ȝef þou me lovest ase men says lemmon as y wene,
Ant ȝef hit þi wille be þou loke þat hit be sene,
So muchel y þenke upon þe þat al y waxe grene.
Bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndeseye, Norhamptoun ant Lounde,
Ne wot y non so fayr a may as y go fore ybounde.
Suete lemmon ypreȝe þe þou lovie me a stounde!
Y wole mone my song
On wham þat hit ys on ylong.

An anthology of these could leave any number of good readers soaked with sweat! A beautiful text if one puts in the effort to learning it.

But my point is this: it is not the poet nor the poem but the reader and the manner or methods we adopt in trying to comprehend the object of study. I mean, we all assume that we can see well enough when we walk down a busy street without knocking into other people but in a study it was estimated that the average time any one person spends looking at a "classic" painting or masterpiece is only a couple of seconds. In this sense, the painter hardly gets back the time and effort he put into his creation for the viewer. But then, my question is this: are they, the viewers or onlookers equipped to look at it properly? What do people think when they stand in front of a Pollock or Bacon or van Gogh? I'm not so sure van Gogh was working his fingers to the bone or cutting off parts of his ears so that people could appreciate a new type of wallpaper or gallery decoration.

I'm kind of surprised that no one has mentioned Dylan Thomas. I'm not talking about his more famous stuff, like "Do Not Go Gentle..." and "Fern Hill." I'm talking about... well, pretty much everything else he wrote, haha. I mean, I love reading his poetry, but I don't have the slightest clue what he's talking about half the time; I just enjoy the sounds he puts together.

Eliot is actually my favorite poet after Emily Dickinson. I don't really care for "The Waste Land", but "Prufrock" is absolutely mind-blowing. Still, I can understand why someone wouldn't like him. I enjoy him mainly for the emotions he evokes within me, even if I don't always know what he means.

E.E. Cummings is actually ridiculously easy to understand, once you crack his code. I loved Cummings in high school, and I still have a nostalgic fondness for some of his work ("anyone lived in a pretty how town" is what got me interested in poetry in the first place), but I've kind of outgrown him. Plath was my favorite in college, but I feel as though I've outgrown her, too.

Dylan Thomas, though. Yikes. I just can't parse that guy.

Originally Posted by Bachelorette

I'm kind of surprised that no one has mentioned Dylan Thomas. I'm not talking about his more famous stuff, like "Do Not Go Gentle..." and "Fern Hill." I'm talking about... well, pretty much everything else he wrote, haha. I mean, I love reading his poetry, but I don't have the slightest clue what he's talking about half the time; I just enjoy the sounds he puts together.

Eliot is actually my favorite poet after Emily Dickinson. I don't really care for "The Waste Land", but "Prufrock" is absolutely mind-blowing. Still, I can understand why someone wouldn't like him. I enjoy him mainly for the emotions he evokes within me, even if I don't always know what he means.

E.E. Cummings is actually ridiculously easy to understand, once you crack his code. I loved Cummings in high school, and I still have a nostalgic fondness for some of his work ("anyone lived in a pretty how town" is what got me interested in poetry in the first place), but I've kind of outgrown him. Plath was my favorite in college, but I feel as though I've outgrown her, too.

Dylan Thomas, though. Yikes. I just can't parse that guy.

Have you tried listening to the recordings of his poems? They are a marvel to say the least. I enjoy the poetry of Dylan Thomas but by times I find his work terribly sentimental. I might read some of his lines later today in fact.

Probably due to an oversight on my part, but I haven't seen this name on any of the lists yet. I imagine that anyone approaching this poet is going to have difficulty in unearthing all of his intended conceits and twisting metaphors. In fact, I've never met a single soul who has managed it completely or entirely on a single reading. John Donne is not an easy read by any stretches of the imagination. He makes the reader work hard in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the true meaning of his poems. I love his work. The sonnet cycles are amazing to me. It is with Donne as it is with Blake, Eliot and a few other poets, in order to read them properly and understand them thoroughly you will be required to learn their systems otherwise it is damn near impossible to fully grasp the concept of their vision. A proper reading of their poems is utmost in my mind as these men expected nothing less from us. Anyway, here is one by Donne:

The Sun Rising

BUSY old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I;
Nothing else is;
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

The Paradox
by
John Donne


NO lover saith, I love, nor any other
Can judge a perfect lover ;
He thinks that else none can or will agree,
That any loves but he ;
I cannot say I loved, for who can say
He was kill'd yesterday.
Love with excess of heat, more young than old,
Death kills with too much cold ;
We die but once, and who loved last did die,
He that saith, twice, doth lie ;
For though he seem to move, and stir a while,
It doth the sense beguile.
Such life is like the light which bideth yet
When the life's light is set,
Or like the heat which fire in solid matter
Leaves behind, two hours after.
Once I loved and died ; and am now become
Mine epitaph and tomb ;
Here dead men speak their last, and so do I ;
Love-slain, lo ! here I die.

I just read Derek Walcott's A far cry from Africa. That was the most stupendously beautiful poem I have ever read.

i find t s eliot and margaret atwood hard to comprehend. eliot specially scares me away.