Once upon a time in my life I was madly in love with poetry......Does it mean that I don't love poetry anymore? The answer is somewhat neurotic...I love some poems more than others but I do realise that there is an abundance of terrible poems that people for some reason like, like for example poets of the Beat generation...I don't really get them...I mean I do on some level understand the gist behind their writing but not really connect to their verse like say the World War 1 poets like Wilfred Owen, or the Romantics or John Donne, Christopher Marlowe and Alexander Pope.
I guess I am no longer going through the thoroughly maudlin phase that I went through in my late teens...poetry at that time of my life was my way of telegraphing all my teenage angst through poems. Now that I am older I have learnt to really enjoy the beauty of certain poems just for the great works that they are and on an unselfish level really let it be about the brilliance of the person behind the poems.
A good poems can really change one's perceptions about life. I can say with a lot of certainty that there are a lot of people who would agree with me when I say that some powerful lines from great works of poetry really changed their lives.
In times of turmoil I always find myself remembering lines from poems and they really provide me with solace, strength, and a sense of belonging even. How wonderful is that? Novels are in my opinion powerful works of prose that can shape one's philosophy, and yet it takes you some time to read through one. Poems on the other hand have the magical quality of conveying so many impactful emotions in short bursts. Especially those times in our busy 21st century lives when we are compelled to stop and really take in the surroundings.
I feel that we have lost the ability to be eloquent like our ancestors, in this day an age we have this constant compulsion to be up-front; which is not necessarily a bad thing, and yet we have somehow forgotten to feel and convey those feelings. I wish that someone still had the ability to write about a simple flower like a daffodil that Wordsworth wrote about, or convey separation like Pope did in his Eloisa to Abelard, In our constant modern chatter, we have perhaps lost that unique ability to convey a lot in really few words and that in my opinion is one of the unspoken tragedies of the modern 21st century society.
I guess I am no longer going through the thoroughly maudlin phase that I went through in my late teens...poetry at that time of my life was my way of telegraphing all my teenage angst through poems. Now that I am older I have learnt to really enjoy the beauty of certain poems just for the great works that they are and on an unselfish level really let it be about the brilliance of the person behind the poems.
A good poems can really change one's perceptions about life. I can say with a lot of certainty that there are a lot of people who would agree with me when I say that some powerful lines from great works of poetry really changed their lives.
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| Abelard and his pupil Heloise by Edmund Blair Leighton |
I feel that we have lost the ability to be eloquent like our ancestors, in this day an age we have this constant compulsion to be up-front; which is not necessarily a bad thing, and yet we have somehow forgotten to feel and convey those feelings. I wish that someone still had the ability to write about a simple flower like a daffodil that Wordsworth wrote about, or convey separation like Pope did in his Eloisa to Abelard, In our constant modern chatter, we have perhaps lost that unique ability to convey a lot in really few words and that in my opinion is one of the unspoken tragedies of the modern 21st century society.
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