Poetry and the Masses

[Truerenigma]

Collins seems to have had a bit of a thing for demystifying poetry -- but I tend to feel he went too far with that, and ended up dumbing it way down. You don't have to beat your audience over the head with a meaning, you don't have to use blatantly obvious metaphors and it doesn't matter if the reader doesn't get it first go.

He might not have meant this, but that seems to be where people have taken it.

I can't get into his poems either, perhaps because there's not much to get "in" to. One quick read seems to do the trick. (Although I do enjoyed the humor in the closing couplet of "Introduction to Poetry".--it's more like "light" toilet reading though, than the type of poetry I'm into.)


Lately, if it isn't metered, with subtle, or even blatant, metrical variation to scan and study how they've worked so well for a particular poem, I have a lot of difficulty holding my interest in the poem past one or two reads. Lately I've been dissecting Robert Browning's "My last duchess", picking through "Paradise Lost" for the millionth time, this time targeting Milton's eliding anapests, and going over all those pyrrhics and "falling lines" in William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" that are deceptively iambic.

I guess it just depends on where you're at, and what interests you.