When it comes to poetry, I’ve always been a total philistine. I never got it. I could analyze it, understand it, recite it, and even enjoy it, but it almost never left a lasting impression.
I liked poems that told stories. I liked poetic language. Older poetry had a better shot of finding a home in my memory, but invariably, my school kept sending me to modern poetry. Artsy poetry. Poetry that didn’t rhyme, or had no meter, or didn’t use verbs, because it was trying challenge my expectations or make me feel unsettled.
People who liked poetry, I thought, didn’t care for poetry that rhymed, or had a repetitive structure, or which was just pretty or fun, and that was the poetry I liked best. Those were cliches and antiquated conventions that stifled creativity. Sure, you could appreciate Shakespeare and song lyrics without garnering a scowl, but generally when it came to poetry, weirder was better. I tried to like the “right” poetry, but it all left me cold. Even when I could intellectually see that it was good poetry, I just couldn’t connect, and it made me feel like maybe poetry just wasn’t for me.
It wasn’t until I finished school that I realized there was a whole world of poetry out there that fit my tastes.
Ancient epics. Arthurian Romances. Children’s poetry. Anything Tolkien approved. Poetry that was deep and thought-provoking, but still rhymed, played with alliteration, and felt musical and rhythmic. Poems that could stand alone yet still evoke a larger context. Poems that spoke to me rather than at me. It turns out that I didn’t actually dislike poetry – I just didn’t like the poetry to which I’d been exposed in school.
It came upon me gradually, but now I love poetry. I’m also very, very picky about it. I’ll finish this post with two people who helped save the art of poetry for me: A.E. Housman, who I only just discovered this year (and am still trying to figure out), and A.A. Milne, author of Winnie the Pooh. If you enjoy the same kind of poetry I do, I highly encourage you to click the accompany links and read more of these poets’ works.
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From Clee to Heaven the Beacon Burns, by A.E. Housman, from A Shropshire Lad
FROM Clee to heaven the beacon burns,
The shires have seen it plain,
From north and south the sign returns
And beacons burn again.
Look left, look right, the hills are bright,
The dales are light between,
Because ’tis fifty years to-night
That God has saved the Queen.
Now, when the flame they watch not towers
About the soil they trod,
Lads, we ’ll remember friends of ours
Who shared the work with God.
To skies that knit their heartstrings right,
To fields that bred them brave,
The saviours come not home to-night
Themselves they could not save.
It dawns in Asia, tombstones show
And Shropshire names are read;
And the Nile spills his overflow
Beside the Severn’s dead.
We pledge in peace by farm and town
The Queen they served in war,
And fire the beacons up and down
The land they perished for.
‘God save the Queen’ we living sing,
From height to height ’tis heard;
And with the rest your voices ring,
Lads of the Fifty-third.
Oh, God will save her, fear you not:
Be you the men you ’ve been,
Get you the sons your fathers got,
And God will save the Queen.
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Wind on the Hill, by A.A. Milne, from the amazing site allpoetry.com
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.
It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.
But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.
And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.
So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.
18 thoughts on “Discovering Poetry”
whitefrozen
‘Anything Tolkien approved’
And some things not Tolkien approved – Wagner, for example.
Michelle Joelle
Oh do I ever have thoughts on Wagner. Coming soon to a blog near you, in fact!
whitefrozen
giggidy
James Pailly
I actually had something of a prejudice against poetry for a long time because of the poems I was forced to read in school. Certain teachers gave me the completely wrong idea.
Michelle Joelle
It’s amazing how influential teachers are. I had the same experience!
stephencwinter
I drove my daughter from her grandmother’s, where she stayed last night, over to her school for the last day of term. As we dropped down a hill coming out of Birmingham the view westwards opened out before us and we could see a broad mass of a hill on the horizon. “What is that?” she asked. I looked again in order to be sure and then answered, “That is Clee Hill,” I answered “Even today it is quite a wild place.” How wonderfully Houseman takes the idiom of a folk song in order to make his argument. We are lured in unawares until we find that he is subverting the safe world that we thought he brought us too. And all this came from the views he could see from the Worcestershire countryside in which he grew up. He never actually walked on the hills he described but what he could see evoked so much. Thank you so much for sharing it.
Michelle Joelle
Thank you, as always, for your wonderful comment. And Housman is fascinating – he’s so gifted. I’ve only just recently gotten through The Shropshire Lad, and I’m looking forward to giving them deeper study, and learning more.
robstroud
This parallels my own experience. For most of my life, poetry did absolutely nothing for me. I still prefer it in small doses, and the idea of reading a book of poetry sends shivers down my spine.
I enjoy reading poems written by people whose history intrigues me (e.g. the Inklings) and poems written by people I know… but I have realized that these are the reasons I enjoy each. It’s seldom something intrinsic in the poetry itself.
That said, particularly well-crafted metaphors can usually penetrate even my poetry-resistant mind.
Michelle Joelle
I’m very similar – most of the poetry I do like comes inside of a larger context. Myth cycles, cultural tropes, bigger stories work for me in the same way that knowledge of the author does.
rung2diotimasladder
I still haven’t made the breakthrough with poetry. The only poem that ever really moved me was the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I still don’t know what it’s all about, but the imagery just punched me in the gut. The odd thing is when I first met my husband, he started quoting that poem one day out of the blue as we were getting out of the car. And then I joined him in reciting lines that suddenly came back to me. It was like a bad romantic comedy except that being real life, it wasn’t bad. 🙂 The even odder thing is he doesn’t really read poetry either, and we both felt the same way about that poem.
Michelle Joelle
That’s amazing! If that’s not a sign that you two were meant to be, then nothing is 🙂
Nimue Brown
If you like Houseman, you may also like John Clare and Yeats. Seamus Heaney might be worth a look, too. Poetry, like everything else is subject to fashions, and some of those fashions can, with hindsight, look a bit too much like 70s disco attire…. which is fine if you like the 70s disco look, I guess.
Michelle Joelle
I love Yeats, but I’ve never read Seamus Heaney – or even heard of John Clare. Thank you for the recommendations, I will definitely check them out!
Steve Morris
I’m with you. Housman definitely. Tennyson too.
Michelle Joelle
I’ve only ever mildly dabbled in Tennyson, but he’s a bit hit or miss for me. While I think his work is beautiful, I sometimes have trouble getting into some of his rhyming and rhythmic schemes. There’s plenty I do love, though – my favorite Tennyson is easily The Splendor Falls, though – it’s just so haunting.
SelfAwarePatterns
I fear I’m still a philistine. I like the second poem in a whimsical sort of way, but the first had that poetry feel in the first stanza that caused me to reflexively skip the rest and see if I could get by without it (I did briefly scan the rest but it didn’t draw me in). The amount of poetry I like is so vanishingly small that I fear I’m a hopeless case with it.
Michelle Joelle
Oh, I still do that with most poetry, so there’s no judgement here. I’ve just shifted my interpretation of it – instead of thinking that because I don’t like most poetry that I must not like poetry, I just think I’m a connoisseur because I have the most exacting standards that most poetry fails to pass. Rather, it’s because I so love poetry that I hate most of it. That makes sense, right?
I’m the same with wine.
SelfAwarePatterns
I like the way you think. I’m not uncultured, just extremely exacting 🙂
Of course, there’s the little matter that most of what the cultured people like in poetry I find opaque and disappointing. I’m pretty much the same with wine. I tend to like the sweet stuff that most wine connoisseurs turn their nose up at.