Re: Poems for beginners
Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:28 pm
'Performance" I think must mean about the same as "drama," and dramatically the poem does change in those final lines, when as geo says, we suddenly consider a different thesis about the narrator. Up to that point, he's over the top, but in a way that is more or less in keeping with a tradition of idealized romance. The poem plays with our expectations, which do not initially include, as ant said, the narrator as necrophiliac.
One idea about lyric poetry is that there is always a turn, a shift from an initial perspective to a different one, a posing of a problem and an answer, something like that. In "Annabel Lee," maybe we think the turn comes with the death of the lady, but we find out that's not it at the very end of the poem.
This thread is a good idea, geo. I sometimes feel modern poetry got lost somewhere. When you say poetry for beginners, you're talking about the poetry written before the dawn of the age of difficulty, which T. S. Eliot is said to have ushered in. The audience for poetry then changed as well, from the common reader to the in-the-know or academic reader with a taste for obscurity and nuance and willing to indulge a poet who spoke in his own private terms. Most of the poetry of the Nineteenth Century or earlier is not difficult, and when it seems to be, as in Shakespeare or John Donne, the difficulty is from verbal intricacy or unfamiliar diction rather than idiosyncracy of thought, as in modern poetry.
How's that for gross generalization. I'd be remiss not to note that some modern poets didn't abandon the general reader, people like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver.
One idea about lyric poetry is that there is always a turn, a shift from an initial perspective to a different one, a posing of a problem and an answer, something like that. In "Annabel Lee," maybe we think the turn comes with the death of the lady, but we find out that's not it at the very end of the poem.
This thread is a good idea, geo. I sometimes feel modern poetry got lost somewhere. When you say poetry for beginners, you're talking about the poetry written before the dawn of the age of difficulty, which T. S. Eliot is said to have ushered in. The audience for poetry then changed as well, from the common reader to the in-the-know or academic reader with a taste for obscurity and nuance and willing to indulge a poet who spoke in his own private terms. Most of the poetry of the Nineteenth Century or earlier is not difficult, and when it seems to be, as in Shakespeare or John Donne, the difficulty is from verbal intricacy or unfamiliar diction rather than idiosyncracy of thought, as in modern poetry.
How's that for gross generalization. I'd be remiss not to note that some modern poets didn't abandon the general reader, people like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver.