The problem with poetry

[RiverNotch]

I don't really see it as a problem so much as a challenge. I prefer reading older poets less because I think most poets nowadays are bad---most poets of every age are bad, with the success of Ben Jonson or Pope's Dunciad as good evidence---and more because things so often go back to them. If you want to distinguish yourself as either a writer or as a reader, you have to read a lot of the old farts, either to reference them (for readers, to understand when they're being referenced) or to studiously avoid them. Plus certain old poets survive because they were such masters of their respective forms that it would be stupid not to try and follow their example at some point, whether one desires to generally write in form or not, like how the most accomplished visual artists at one point or another drew nude models. The challenge, then, is how not to get bored reading Pope's perfect couplets (because greatness does not necessarily equate to excitement), or how to find the Shakespeare or Milton of one's era (albeit that probably comes down to luck, more than anything else).

Be honest: how many good sonnets did Shakespeare write? Perhaps 5.
The best sonneteer in English was Spenser and he’s read only because no one can understand him. The language is quaint.
Milton wrote two good sonnets and invented affectation

You have to go to the early Elizabethans and before, when English poetry was about dung and poo, and therefore authentic

I didn't know Shakespeare only wrote sonnets. Besides, if you really want to read sonnets, go read Petrarch. I might read him next when I get back to reading Italian more seriously (him or Tasso).

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I'll add that I can understand Spenser near perfectly (though I'm reading The Faerie Queene at the moment, not yet his sonnets---and also the part of the Faerie Queene that gets a bit iffy in terms of Ireland). I guess I'm no one xD