Poetry

I never was into poetry much, I prefer music. "Where words fail, music speaks", that was a quote from the poet Hans Christian Andersen. I guess that, in a sense, they are the same thing if you think about it. Poetry is alright though, it makes you think, come up with motives; reflect on similar situations you've experienced.

I've probably read more poetry this past week than I have in my whole life. Honestly the only poet I knew from this section was Robert Frost, but I discovered many other poets like Carl Sandburg, T. S. Elliot, and Sylvia Plath from the reading. Out of the new authors I've read, Edwin Robinson would be my favorite. Why? I don't know exactly. I could relate to his character Miniver Cheevy but not so much as wanting to be born in the middle ages or drinking my problems away.

I didn't care very much for Sandburg's poems, the only one I liked was "Grass". There is much personification used in his writing and I liked that he made the grass as a sort of undertaker. "Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work- I am the grass; I cover all".

While Sandburg's poetry is rather simple, I had a hard time trying to wrap my head around the works of Sylvia and Anne Sexton. From what I had read about them in the Anthology, they liked to use imagination; a lot of imagination. It was difficult to understand the messages that they were trying to convey. From what I've gathered their poems mainly focus around death, pain, and hatred. Of course not all of their poems are absorbed by those three things, like the poem Anne had wrote for her daughter "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman". "Lady Lazarus was probably my favorite of Plath's. Their styles of writing are... interesting to say the least.

T. S. Elliot. I had to think about this one. I didn't hate his work but I didn't like it either. "The Waste Land" seemed to drag on and I just couldn't finish the poem. I thought "The Hollow Men" was alright. I remember hearing the quote from the end of the poem somewhere before. "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper". I can't remember where I heard it but it was interesting to find where it comes from.