Poems of my Father #3 – The First Snowfall

https://medium.com/@russroberts/poems-of-my-father-3-797a00b44a00

18 4 6 years ago

I enjoyed the article until the questions at the bottom and then I got nasty flashbacks to high school English.

School killed any love I had for poetry for years. I thought poetry was this thing where you spent a minute reading a page, then spent an afternoon over-analysing it, looking for hidden meaning and writing 10 pages about it.

I think the best way to appreciate poetry is to simply read it, and that's it. Your mind will naturally ponder on it, if it wants to.

fsloth• 6 years ago

I agree up to a point, but disagree there is no value in analysis at all.

Lots of authors have intentionally inserted contextual references to their poems which are worthy to point out. Since lots of old poetry was written in time when everybody was supposed to be familiar with a certain classical body of work the poems might need some explaining sometimes to fully be read as the autor intended.

In our pop-culture filled context you could have a poem about a car called Falcon and a cat called Chewie and you would go a-ha, I wonder what deeper references are there.

But actually treating poem as an algebra problem really is taking it too far.

pattusk• 6 years ago

But actually treating poem as an algebra problem really is taking it too far.

Not really, a lot of poems (the symbolists come to mind) are actually meant to be treated as semantic puzzles or mathematical problems. Lewis Carroll is perhaps the most famous - and one of the greatest example of the intersection of maths, logic and poetry.

One of the best poetical analysis I had the pleasure of reading in recent years is a very probabilistic (rather than algebraic) reading of the French poet Mallarme, who was himself fascinated by randomness and probabilities:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/book-of-numbers-meillass...

The Number and the Siren argues that there is a Number at the heart of the poem [...] and the book cycles through a lot of textual analysis, along with close readings of related poems (themselves encrypted with numbers)

Highly recommended read.

imperialdrive• 6 years ago

Hidden mental treasure all around us. Beautiful. Thank you.

Poems of my Father #3 – The First Snowfall

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