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After some delays and enjoying America’s 250th anniversary, yours portly is back with some reading, now featuring a once-great literary form: poetry.
Poetry gets a bad rap, likely because the former has largely devolved into the latter. It’s pretty easy to write prose and then chop it up into sentence fragments with some white space and indents and call it poetry.
Here’s that last sentence as “poetry”:
Poetry gets a bad
rap, likely because the former
has largely
Devolved
into the latter. It's pretty
easy to write
Prose and then
chop
it
up
into sentence frag
ments with some
white space and
indents
and call it
Poetry.
Well, you can see the problem right away. It’s obvious that this style isn’t really poetry at all. A humorous example of this phenomenon is the gag book The Collected Poems of Donald J. Trump, 2009-2019, which Dr. Wife (then Dr. Girlfriend) got me for my fortieth birthday. The “poetry” consists of our president’s tweets formatted into various blends of shapes and white space akin to my example above. It’s fun and a big, beautiful addition to my collection, but part of the joke is that it’s not poetry (although there is a poetic quality to President Trump’s tweets, at time).
That said, one needn’t harken back to the days of yore to find good poetry. All of today’s examples are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Naturally, there’s tons of great poetry from the first half of the twentieth century (apologies to W. B. Yeats for not making the list this time; you will soon!), but the twenty-first century tends to be moms writing lengthy odes to their children on Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with the latter, but the efforts are rarely “poetic” in the truest sense of the word.
But poetry is vitally important, as is the ability to read and analyze it. Consider that large chunks of the Bible consist of poetry. The Book of Psalms is a collection of poems and song lyrics. Song of Solomon is a sensual love poem that depicts both the intense passion of a groom for his bride while also echoing the intense love of The Groom (Jesus Christ) for His Bride (us, the Church).
All that preamble aside, here are four works of poetry and/or collections you should add to your home library:
- Robert Frost, Robert Frost’s Poems – This collection of poetry from one of the most popular and enduring poets of the twentieth century is well-worth having at hand. Frost’s ability to evoke the Beauty of God’s Creation through verse is nourishing food for the soul.
- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets – This collection is on my “to-read” list. I remember reading The Wasteland in high school English class, and I loved Eliot’s obtuse thicket of classical allusions. I’m likely taking this slim volume on the cruise.
- Jeremy Miles, A Year of Thursday Nights (and the more affordable greyscale edition) –
- Rachel Fulton Brown and Dragon Common Room, Centrism Games: A Modern Dunciad –
You can pick up all of these in paperback on Amazon for between $36.88 and $51.88 (Jeremy Miles’s—God Rest his soul—collection in full color is $30, but the greyscale edition is half the price). Centrism Games is the best value at just $5.57, and I highly recommend it.
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