Andrey's questions about poems (split from the intro thread)

[AndreyGaganov]

If you don't find any music and sound in poetry, then yes, poetry is not for you. Fortunately, unlike in music, poetical tone-deafness has a cure: study.

Later on you make a good point about alliteration, assonance, and such as sound devices, though I wouldn't call it 'music' in the way I understand or used to understand it (melody, the vocal timbre, etc.). So, with that being said, that 'music' can be added as a dimension to poetry using the aforementioned sound devices, perhaps there's really no need for me to study as I understand the appeal of these devices. 

... then there are other rhythms, too -- stress timed meter, for example, where you COUNT all the PUNCHy TERMS the AUthor USes, or syllabic meter, where you count the syllables. Getting used to those (I suggest starting with stress timed, since that's classic to English -- see Beowulf), you'll eventually learn how simply extending or shortening either can have certain, universal effects (see all the free verse shite of, well, I'll start with TS Eliot, actually) -- just like how Bob Dylan's songs get the point across better than most pop drivel nowadays, with the number of words he packs per line (I think he was inspired by Ginsberg).

It is nice to read something succinct, although I, as a reader, am more concerned with the originality and profundity of the main thought in a poem. That's beautiful to me, and making it all sound nice is just an extra. But if it's a song, then it's entirely different. 

... emphasis and emotion really don't matter when reading poetry aloud, if the poem's any good, as long as the pronunciation of the reader follows how the word is typically pronounced -- which, even with the separation of accents, is universal, unless dictionaries really are that useless), ...

Well, that's something for me to get used to. 

... then moving on to the classics, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton and the Romantics and the Modernists and the postmodernists and you get the picture. By solid translation, I mean not the prose ones, duh -- I actually like the Gummere version, although its wordings are super old, but I suppose Heaneywulf could work, too.

Duly noted. 

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Although to say that poetry to you seems like self-indulgent white tower bullshit in a forum that's explicitly all about poetry is like shouting "but this makes 0 sense" in a church/evolutionary scientists convention.

Well, this isn't a church, but make no mistake: that was just how I reflected my impression of how poets seem to treat the language I was taught to read in the prosaic way exclusively. I came here to learn, not to scold poetry.