Robin Hood is fabulous!
Here's some culture. Don't try this at home, though! Randomly firing an arrow or any weapon is totally irresponsible.
The Arrow And The SongIs it just me or is 99.9% of all poetry pure BS? It's like Shakespeare...people are all snooty about it but they forget that it was written as pap for the peasants, catering to the lowest common denominator. Like sitcoms are today.
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
I shot an arrow into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For, so swiftly it flew, the sight
Could not follow it in its flight.
I breathed a song into the air,
It fell to earth, I knew not where;
For who has sight so keen and strong,
That it can follow the flight of song?
Long, long afterward, in an oak
I found the arrow, still unbroke;
And the song, from beginning to end,
I found again in the heart of a friend.
The only poem I like is by Robert Frost, the science fiction "What If?" one.
THE ROAD NOT TAKENChilling. It's like if Lovecraft wrote it if he liked puppies for something other than snacks.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
>> Is it just me or is 99.9% of all poetry pure BS?
ReplyDeleteSurely that's the equivalent of saying that all comics are just for children?
Poetry is a genre, written by thousands of authors over centuries. They can't all have been spouting nonsense. Plenty of people don't like the genre, but that's a different matter from saying it's all BS.
It's true that Shakespeare played to the peasantry, but he also did shows in front of royalty. Part of Shakespeare's genius was his ability to entertain at both a coarse and an intellectual level. He was also a poet - whole tracts of his plays were written in rhyme. Homer was a poet too - modern translations are prose, but the originals are poetry.
Myself, I adore poetry. If you don't like the heavy stuff, try some lighter poetry like Louis MacNeice's Bagpipe Music.
Many forms of torture existed over the centuries, too.
ReplyDeleteNah, poetry blows.
-- Nah, poetry blows.
ReplyDeleteThat's saying you don't like poetry, which is fair enough. I mean, I haven't found a single opera that didn't make me want to pull my own ears off. But I can still appreciate that it is a high art form, and one many people love.
To say "it's all BS" is saying something more - that all poets are writing garbage. Which means you consider the combined works of, say, Homer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Eliot and Auden to have no merit at all. A difficult argument to back up, I would have thought, and certainly one not shared by comic book writers like Moore or Gaiman who regularly show their poetic influences.