How can it be that most poets and playwrights can't hold a candle to Shakespeare?
Take his poetic language: he creates so many beautiful metaphors such as one only finds here and there on the work of most other poets. Seriously: almost all other poets are boring and grey compared to him (and I am talking of most of the giants of western literature).
Take his drama: most other playwrights who create great plays produce 1, 2, at most 5 masterpieces. Shakespeare has some 20 of them. Not to mention the fact that he is probably the only one who can tame poetry (and one of the most fertile and wildest poetry in existence) and make it work in the service of telling a story. Goethe and Moliere are dusty and tedious compared to him (both in poetic powers and character). Ibsen, Tenesse Williams, O'Neill, Lorca, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, David Mamet and Tony Kushner never achieve anything similar to Shakespeare's poetry. Even Aeschylus is not comparable as a poet (and he is certainly far simpler and more archaic as a story-teller - though not his fault, being as ancient as he is).
Why only he did what he did so consistently. It's very fucking frustrating. You go to other poets and playwrights and screenplay writers (I'm thinking on movies like Children of Paradise, Sweet Smell of Success, Network, Shakespeare in Love) and only find glimpses of what Shakespeare did. There is poetry, but not so much poetry, and above all, not THAT GOOD poetry.
You have someone like Emily Dickinson and her awe-inspiring poetic language, but she doesn't tell stories. You get surprised with people like Tony Kushner and Eugene O'Neill for writing monumental contemporary dramas, but you may give up trying to find sublime poetry in their plays (it will happen only here and there).
I would like to see something like Shakespeare happen again, but god damn, it borders on impossible.
>Shakespeare has some 20 of them You're a fanboy. He has 7 masterpieces being generous.
Brandon Ortiz
>Goethe and Moliere are dusty and tedious compared to him (both in poetic powers and character). I doubt you've read them in the original.
Angel Scott
>screenplay writers (I'm thinking on movies like Children of Paradise, Sweet Smell of Success, Network, Shakespeare in Love) and only find glimpses of what Shakespeare did. Films work different than theatre, you filthy pleb.
Zachary Carter
Have you? Speak about the difference if so.
Chase Parker
It's certain that if we take the most poetic lines from the poets, Shakespeare will have the most. And you will not find another, it what it is my friend. It doesn't mean that Shakespeare was better, just that he worked more than other poets, more prolific.
Take these lines, good as what Shakespeare wrote.
>The night was fair, and countless stars >Studded heaven's dark blue vault, >Just o'er the eastern wave >Peeped the first faint smiles of morn (Shelly)
>The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven, >And blow the morning from their nostrils, (Marlowe)
>Spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldring Whales >Great whirlpooles, which all fishes make to flee (Spenser)
>. . . and like a comet burned, >That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge >In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair >Shakes pestilence and war.” (Milton)
Russian poets Vladislav Khodasevich and Afanasii Fet or the german Georg Büchner or the romanian poet Vasile Voiculescu, and the persian poetry written in the Khorasani style are in the same vein of true poetry, at least of what I remember, I sure there are more, and if you know, please tell me. But about Shakespeare is really just hard work, every poet worth his salt, with enough work would write like him.
Noah Carter
Meh. Donne was a better poet.
Cameron Lewis
How blinded can you be. I’ve read some Shakespeare in Spanish and it’s fucking lifeless compared to the original. It’s POETRY. If you can’t imagine the same effect taking place in translating legends like Goethe, you’re a either an idiot or a monolingual who doesn’t understand that a language has aesthetic beauty on its own.
Benjamin Green
I loved the Marlowe lines, especially the second and most impactful one.
Grayson Hernandez
not him, but true poetry can be translated and does not suffer if the translator is any good, there is a difference between versification and poetry
Ian Morgan
poetry can't be translated, don't be delusional. it can help you to try to understand the original but nothing more.
Wyatt Myers
If the poetry depends more on the imagery and the meaning than sonority (rhythm, alliteration, assonance, rhyme) it can be translated without much harm.
Matthew Diaz
this guy gets it
Camden Stewart
see translate any of the and you will not lose anything
what if it's a perfecy hybrid between imagery/meaning and sonority?
Adam Perry
>perfect
Logan Brooks
balanced, then.
Aaron Butler
Jesus christ. How much of a pleb can YOU be to not realize that I'm interested in the specific intricacies of a particular author's writing that are lost in translation? Not whether things are lost in translation in general?
I will say that I think a good aim for poets is to try and BE translatable, in terms of having the poetry reside not in the mere versification but in the more fundamental concepts.
Alexander Barnes
See
Jayden Allen
shakespeare was very dedicated to his craft and constantly working to be a better playwright. goethe was a statesman who wrote in his free time, moliere probably saw himself as an actor more than writer.
Nicholas Bennett
actually he wanted to be a full-time poet, thats why most of his plays are written in verse.
Asher Edwards
Shakespeare loses force when translated to a Romance tongue. Too melodramatic without the poetic grace found in the original. The Shakespeare pasta is partially true.
Dylan Martinez
eh which one
Connor Cook
What pasta?
Anthony Thompson
he was constantly trying to use drama as the means to realize his dream of being a full time poet. he wanted to elevate drama to the status of poetry.
Nathaniel Wright
>t. Retarded monolinguals who have never written a single verse of poetry
Imagery is absolutely worthless unless its combined with metre, sonority, and rhyme. Might as well be slam poetry. Many poetic genres are even defined by syllable lengths or rhyke schem, translate that without butchering. If you think you’re getting the full impact of japanese haikus in English you are fucking retards. If yu dont think rhyme and metre compose the majority of a poem’s impact that you don’t even know what makes up the most basic difference between it and prose. If it’s about imagery then why write poetry and not good prose? Idiots
Camden Nelson
>If it’s about imagery then why write poetry and not good prose Why do you have to say something that it's actually right, but precede it by saying equally retarded stuff like: >Imagery is absolutely worthless unless its combined with metre, sonority, and rhyme It's not a brainlet competition, user, you don't need to win it.
Eli Cooper
>If it’s about imagery then why write poetry and not good prose?
Many scholars (Samuel Johnson included) saw blank iambic pentameter as a kind of elevated prose, something that was not quite prose and yet so flexible and loose that it didn’t qualify as hardcore pure poetry. (See pic)
But it is, user. Imagery is absolutely worth nothing unless it’s presented within the bounds of skill and taken. Otherwise you get blank canvases that “represent” the emptiness of human meaning, blah blah, my vagina. Creativity is a dime and a dozen, skill isn’t.
Daniel Peterson
>>Studded heaven's dark blue vault, Lermontov has a like just like this, 'the lilac vault of heaven'
Camden Nguyen
context The dancing choirs of the stars were interwoven in wondrous patterns on the distant horizon, and, one after another, they flickered out as the wan resplendence of the east suffused the dark, lilac vault of heaven, gradually illumining the steep mountain slopes, covered with the virgin snows
Jeremiah Hill
How does one write poetry in a meter other than iambs or trochees? It seems nearly impossible to write something in English with rhythm without using one or the other, if you want it to be sensible that is.
Or, and I can't believe I forgot it, Charge of the Light Brigade.
Noah Reyes
Yes, but his second rate is better than anyone else's first.
Mason Edwards
The writing is strong but the works themselves are still thematically underdeveloped. So I'm 50/50 with you.
Brandon Lee
Holy shit, now, this is the meter I should write. There's a power and movement of drums.
Brody Miller
unbelievably fucking good, that is only the second poem I loved by Byron after Darkness. ty for sharing
also I didn't even know that was a specific metre but I very often write my poems in that rhythm
Kevin Sanchez
idk he was a big brain nibba that's for sure, with a very high ability for empathy. It's like he experienced every human emotion, pain, love, ecstasy, depression, etc. He seemed to be able to imagine himself in anyone's shoes and really understand what they would be feeling, to the highest degree. I truly wish I could've lived in his time, I would have followed him around like a holy disciple, and he probably would have found me annoying as fuck and roasted me with his godlike bantz.
Oliver Edwards
Can you briefly explain and/or recommend some books that’ll explain poetic techniques like meter and rhyme?
Hudson Russell
How is rhyme a hard thing? I suppose the one thing I can think of is when and where to most effectively use it. As for meter, (I assume English isn't your native language) it has to do with stressed and unstressed syllables. The Destruction of Sennacherib is written in anapestic tetrameter. An anapest is x x / where / is the stressed syllable and x is the unstressed syllable, so two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable; tetrameter means that there are four of these. So taking a look at the first two lines of The Destruction of Sennacherib:
>The Assyr(/)ian came down (/) like the wolf (/) on the fold (/), >And his co(/)horts were gleam(/)ing in pur(/)ple and gold (/);
All of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans write in iambic pentameter (x / 5 times).
And not perhaps because the majority of plays at that time were in verse?>goethe was a statesman who wrote in his free time, Had a fuckton of free time, if I may say so. >moliere probably saw himself as an actor more than writer That's a delightfully retarded assumption source? >"imagery" vs. sound dichotomy Not even in high school did I witness such literary stupidity "Skill" in writing in metre and rhyme is comically overrated, it's a question of practice. Thousands of poets have written formally perfect poetry of practically no actual aesthetic worth. You probably tried to write a couple of rhymed poems, so it seems difficult to you, yet a poet who is skilled in this can typically write rhymes almost reflexively, and the true problem of art finally arises to him - that which is not mere "imagery" (what an american concept) or acoustic effects.
Jayden Barnes
My first language is English, and I still struggle with picking up on stressed and unstressed syllables. It may be because my voice is naturally flat and monotone (probably autism), which is very disappointing because I know I’ll never be a skilled poet if I can’t hear the music in language.
Carson Jackson
watch the video
Colton Gonzalez
It's alright, user. I find it difficult as well. I sometimes have to consult dictionaries to be sure that one syllable ir properly accented. Then there's the fact that are words that have half-stress (can't remember the actual term), an example being rosebud, which is stressed on the first syllable and half-stressed in the second. The major thing about things in meter is that it's deficient when you read it unless it stands out, two examples that come to mine is Byron's poem mentioned in the thread and Poe's The Raven. But don't take my word for it, listen to Venus and Adonis read: archive.org/details/venusandadonis_1107_librivox
It is wondrous.
Carson Cox
>Goethe and Moliere are dusty and tedious compared to him (both in poetic powers and character) No way man. Faust is hilarious and entertaining. We must have read something different.
Ryder Roberts
Proper word stress is unrelated to how monotone your voice is because it depends on the amount of breath you use to produce a syllable. Unless you talk like a Frenchman, you still stress properly (and you don't talk like a Frenchman because you were never taught to - you know English and simply know that it's not pronounced "EngLISH"). >hear the music in language I suggest you get rid of these mystifications of art. The position of the stress in a word is a simple linguistic fact and it is up to the poet to turn it into an artistic device.
Isaac Parker
thank god, someone not a retard. but say why you think "imagery" is a bad concept. not criticizing, interested.
Ryder Howard
>Proper word stress is unrelated to how monotone your voice is because it depends on the amount of breath you use to produce a syllable. Unless you talk like a Frenchman, you still stress properly you are confused. Word stress is about the length of the syllable. The French stress the last syllable of every word, and they carry it over into the way their phrases work.
think of the word 'begin' be-gin, the gin is longer the be slower, be- giiin a little bit you could alter it to bee-gin, where the first syllable is longer
Russian is extreme about this, you can sometimes barely hear the nonstressed vowels. Maybe why their language pours consonants together.
Asher Thompson
also for a lot of languages you would change the 'be' in begin from bih to bee to make it stressed and longer, so an actual different vowel sound even if the same letter, but it doesn't always follow that pattern.
Cameron Murphy
yeah i think the sky is blue in russia also
Aiden Johnson
you'd be wrong though. The sky as light blue in russia is goluboy, which is different than the dark blue colour of the sea, which they call siniy. They dont have a word for blue. The sky is in the blue hour siniyy i guess and the sea can be pale blue in the shallow places like the caribbean islands, but the russians don't see those as being the same colours.
Also my point was that it was the exact same phrase, the dark blue vault of heaven, the dark lilac vault of heaven. It''s a bit uncanny the word choice.
Aaron Miller
also lilac is purple, which was about sunrise, not blue
Chase Morris
damn nigger, i was just making a joke i was not expecting all that smart shit, i dont even read book holy fuck
Logan Cox
What are his best sonnets? I know of the famous ones like #73 (my favorite so far)
Jacob Powell
you are my nigger either way so don't worry
Charles Jenkins
Shklovsky buried the concept of poetry as images a century ago. Literature manifests through language with all of its possibilities, which encompasses much more than the visual ones. It's the same as talking about the "music of a language", it shifts the question of what constitutes literature to a different artistic medium (music or, implicitly, painting) - in fact not explaining anything. You can call poetry the "music of language" or "linguistic painting" just as much as you can call music the "poetry of tones" and painting "poetry of vision". Fun stuff, but it's just tautologies. >Word stress is about the length of the syllable. Not quite. The strength of the air stream is the central aspect, which can manifest in longer pronunciation of the vowel, but not necessarily. Noticeably reduced length and barely intelligible vowels can simply be produced by fast informal speech - which is what you're describing in Russian, most likely, assuming you're not talking just about its timbral reduction. In ancient Greek the stress was clearly not related to the vowel length - ἄνθρωπος has stress on the first syllable, but ω has greater duration. In standard forms of Serbo-Croatian, as an another example, the stressed vowel can either be short, just like the unstressed ones, or long (and also have rising or falling intonation). also >French (some authors add Chinese[6]) can be considered to have no real lexical stress.
The example you post depends, again, on the clarity of pronunciation. The syllables can be pronounced with equal duration while still retaining the stress in its proper position on "gin".
Jordan Gomez
in Ancient greek stress was about intonation, a kind of minor version of what the Chinese do, not length of syllable or breath
Zachary Diaz
>Shklovsky buried the concept of poetry as images a century ago. How did he do that? What are his main points?
Hudson Hernandez
>Literature manifests through language with all of its possibilities No shit
Christian Gutierrez
>source? his plays
read theory of prose
Brody Lopez
>What are his main points? Explain them right now or you're only a brainlet regurgitating trash you've read on wikipedia.
Jason Lewis
>Had a fuckton of free time, if I may say so. its still not the same as dedicating your life to poetry. he had other things on his mind, Shakespeare probably didn't.
>That's a delightfully retarded assumption he left his life to become an ACTOR (Shakespeare did it to become a PLAYWRIGHT), he was already an actor for years before he ever wrote any of his works
i'm not going to spoonfeed you a book that you should have read yourself. he believed that art in general functioned via 'enstrangement' (a concept later repurposed by other thinkers in a more specific way as 'foregrounding'). you should read him.
Jeremiah Price
Please rec books about poetry, please.
William Collins
These two aspects are inseparable.
Jackson Turner
Based egghead
Robert White
Good book.
Jaxon Torres
What book is that, i’m bery interested in blank iambs
I also advise you to buy Shakespeare’s Metrical Art. The main lessons is that you should use metric as a friend, but not be a slave to it.
Joseph Reed
Marlowe is pretty much the only. elizebethan wordsmith on par with Shakespeare, not that too many got their notoriety at least, I'm sure there's a few unknown gems.
Sebastian Parker
Tru
Posted from my e reader
Aaron Robinson
So much potential lost with Marlowe
>Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, >And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
>O, thou art fairer than the evening air >Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
>By shallow rivers, to whose falls >Melodious birds sing madrigals
>Yet should there hover in their restless heads, >One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the best!. >Which into words no virtue can digest.
>As princely lions when they rouse themselves. >Stretching their paws and threatening herds of beasts. >So in his armor looketh Tamburlaine.
>With hair that gilds the water as it glides
>Infinite riches in a little room.
>Unto the watery mornings ruddy bower
Sebastian Taylor
Are those taken from different poems?
Aiden Howard
Let me contribute with these lines:
>With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled >Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools, >And scale the icy mountains' lofty tops, >Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv'd:
Leo Robinson
Yes, just read these lines
>A stately builded ship, well rigged and tall, >The ocean maketh more majestical; >Why vowest thou then to live in Sestos here, >Who on love's seas more glorious wouldst appear? >Like untuned golden strings all women are, >Which long time lie untouched, will harshly jar; >Vessels of brass oft handled brightly shine; >What difference betwixt the richest mine >And basest mold but use? For both not used >Are of like worth. Then treasure is abused >When misers keep it. Being put to loan >In time it will return us two to one. >Rich robes themselves and others do adorn; >Neither themselves nor others if not worn. >Who builds a palace and shuts up the gate >Shall see it ruinous and desolate. >Ah, simple Hero, learn thyself to cherish!
>Whose sorrows lay more siege unto my soul >Than all my armies to Damascus' walls.
>Where Beauty, Mother of the Muses, sits, >And comments volumes with her ivory pen.
Man I love poetry, but here idiots start arguing about what constitutes poetry instead of posting lines and going from there, I am sure that I am the only one who actually reads here
>Madam, sooner shall fire consume us both >Than scorch a face so beautiful as this, >In frame of which Nature hath shew'd more skill >Than when she gave eternal chaos form, >Drawing from it the shining lamps of heaven.
>And from her countenance behold you might >A kind of twilight break, which through the air, >As from an orient cloud, glimpsed here and there; >And round about the chamber this false morn >Brought forth the day before the day was born.
>Nay, could their number countervail the stars, >Or ever-drizzling drops of April showers, >Or withered leaves that Autumn shaketh down, >Yet would the Soldan by his conquering power >So scatter and consume them in his rage >That not a man should live to rue their fall
