Poetry Forum - Poetry Discussion

Shakespeare revisited, but…

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 02:32:25 +0000

…there’s no point reading him unless it’s from a large, sumptuously bound book with smooth, silky pages and a crisp, beautiful font. And a few colour plates here and there, showing Flastaff with friends. In fact, that’s how I remember the Collected Works volume from childhood.

But all that costs money these days. What sad times we live in.

What makes a found poem?

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:33:27 +0000

(10-13-2026, 07:30 AM)Quixilated Wrote: I think you have not changed enough from the original text to be considered your own work. I know that a "found poem" uses the original words of the text, but for it to be a found poem and not just copying/stealing, the choices you make in presentation have to put some kind of unique twist on it that makes it different from reading the original.

This poem reads almost exactly like the original. The effect is the same. Most of the sentences are exactly the same, most of the changes are very slight synonym switches. There is only one sentence of original content. If you were taking something like a dry newspaper article and framing it in a way that suddenly makes it seem poetic, that is one thing. But everything Rowens writes already sounds like poetry. A found poem has to come from a source that is not already a poem. With Rowens' writing, that is a very fuzzy line. It's not a found poem to take a poet's poetic sounding comment and change a few words and give it line breaks.

I think for this to be considered your own work, you would need to write the whole thing in your own words, keeping no more than maybe one line from the original. Otherwise, it's just Rowens' poem but now he's sharing the credit.

I feel like this will spark a whole debate about what is and is not found poetry. I will also post this comment in the poetry discussions forum where those comments can spill out. I'm curious to know whether or not I am wrong and, if so, why.

I am willing to listen to logic and explanations. But as my current understanding stands, I would, personally, consider this plagiarism. The only reason I'm not treating it as plagiarism is because you did credit the original and I know you were attempting to do a found poem, the rules of which do allow for direct copying (apparently?). However, IMO, it doesn't pass.

"Avoid "patchwriting" (mosaic plagiarism): Swapping out a few synonyms while keeping the original sentence order or phrasing still counts as plagiarism."

"Insufficient transformation: Merely copying large blocks, entire passages, or keeping long sequences of another writer's text intact—rather than refashioning and re-contextualizing the material—is considered unoriginal duplication."

"Impose new meaning: Re-order, isolate, and juxtapose words or phrases so that the final product functions as a distinct, independent artistic creation."

"Verbatim Copying: Using even a short sequence of consecutive words (often more than 3 to 5 words) from a source without quotation marks and an in-text citation according to guidelines from the APA Style."

Found poem rules:
Use an Existing Source: You must start with an external text that was not originally written as a poem."

"Found poetry takes words from existing texts to create new, unique poems with fresh meanings."

"writers of found poetry risk plagiarism if they merely copy, summarize, or paraphrase their sources. Successful found poems offer unique word arrangements and new meanings. The borrowed words may be unrecognizable in the context of the found poem."

So, in my opinion, this poem does not land as an original nor found poem 1. because it has not put a new twist or an original spin or new meaning into the words. It is literally just the same thing Rowens said and in the same way he said it but with some line breaks. And 2. it was basically already a prose poem, hence why it seemed like a natural idea to turn it into one.

Words in red are identical. Words in blue are the same meaning. Words in black are original.

matsunosuperfan dateline='[url=tel:1791312602' Wrote: 1791312602[/url]']
Who knows when Death might come?
after Rowens

I was at a Bob Dylan concert, this was in the 90s when
we all didn't have phones. He wouldn't come out
on stage (palm tree, lightning). I asked the woman
mixing drinks if I could get drinks with cash. She said
No you have to put your money through the machine
and get a card. I said what if I have no ID, I didn't want
to go through all the trouble having her mix a drink
(I just say put in all the hard stuff) only to be carded.
She said she couldn't serve me. By now I was feeling
honestly a bit depressed, the booze was no big deal
but does there always have to be another goddamn
hill? I asked her if I hadn't said the thing about not
having ID, would she have asked for it. She said she
couldn't tell me that.

Original:

rowens dateline='[url=tel:1791306672' Wrote: 1791306672[/url]']

When I was at a Bob Dylan concert, he wouldn't come out on stage as it was lightning.
I asked the woman mixing drinks if I could get drinks with cash. She said no I had to concert my money through a machine to a card.
I asked what if I had no ID, I didn't want to go through all the trouble and have her mix me a drink (I just say mix all the hard stuff together, really) and then get IDed.
She said that she can't serve me. I said, if I hadn't said that I have no ID, would have she asked for it. She said she couldn't tell me that.
She was visually upset, at least she was seeing things that way.

Rock Lyrics Are Poetry (Maybe)

Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:21:45 +0000

While this would fit very well in the thread on the Beatles....

https://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/lyrics-che.php

For an essay published in 1967, a lot of what it says still rings true today, and not just over what it says about 1967. I encourage y'all to read the whole essay, but here are some snippets.

> A term like "Rock" is impossibly vague; it denotes, if anything, something historical rather than aesthetic.
> Poems are read or said. Songs are sung...."My Back Pages" is a bad poem. But it is a good song, supported by a memorable refrain....Dylan is a songwriter, not a poet.
> An art advances through technical innovation. Modern American poetry assumes (and sometimes eliminates) metaphoric ability, concentrating on the use of line and rhythm to approximate (or refine) speech, the reduction of language to essentials, and "tone of voice". Dylan's only innovation is that he sings....
> Not much better is the self-indulgence of the Doors' Jim Morrison....
> "Mass art" and "kitsch" are pretty vague as well....Kitsch is a more snobbish concept, and a more sophisticated product. It usually has the look of slightly out-of-date avant-garde in order to give its audience the illusion of aesthetic pleasure, whatever that is. An important distinction, I think, is that many of the craftsmen who make kitsch believe thoroughly in what they are doing. That may be true of the creators of mass art, too, but their attitude is more businesslike--they don't worry about "art," only commercial appeal....Paul Simon's lyrics are the purest, highest, and most finely wrought kitsch of our time. The lyrics I've been putting down are not necessarily easy to write--bad poetry is often carefully worked, the difference being that it's easier to perceive flaccidly--but the labor that must go into one of Simon's songs is of another order of magnitude.
> This kind of mindless craft reaches a peak in Simon's supposed masterpiece, "The Dangling Conversation," which uses all the devices you learn about in English class--alliteration, alternating concretion and abstraction, even the use of images from poetry itself, a favorite ploy of poets who don't know much of anything else--to mourn wistfully about the classic plight of self-conscious man, his Inability to Communicate....If Simon were just a little hipper, his couple would be discussing the failure of communication as they failed to communicate, rather than psychoanalysis or the state of the theatre. But he's not a little hipper.
> It is by creating a mood that asks "Why should this mean anything?" that the so-called rock poets can really write poetry--poetry that not only says something, but says it as only rock music can. For once Marshall McLuhan's terminology tells us something: rock lyrics are a cool medium....The only songwriters who seem really to have mastered it are John Phillips and Lennon-McCartney.
> Phillips achieves rock feel with his arrangements....Lennon-McCartney do it with diction. Their early work is all pure rock....By the time of A Hard Day's Night the songs are more sophisticated musically, and a year later, in Help!, the boys are becoming pop songwriters....Words like "self-assured" and "insecure" are not out of rock diction, nor is the line: "My independence seems to vanish in the haze." This facet of their talent has culminated (for the moment) in songs like "Paperback Writer," "A Little Help From My Friends," and "When I'm Sixty-four," which show all the verbal facility of the best traditional pop and none of the sentimentality, and in deliberate exercises like "Michelle" and "Here, There and Everywhere," which show both....Other songs like "Norwegian Wood," "Dr. Robert," "Good Morning, Good Morning" are ambiguous despite an unerring justness of concrete detail; little conundrums, different from Dylanesque surrealism because they don't fit so neatly into a literary category (Edward Lear is their closest antecedent)....Often the Beatles' "I" is much harder to pin down than the "I" in Donovan or Jagger-Richard....This concern with angle of attack is similar to that of poets like Creeley....Lennon and McCartney are the only rock songwriters who combine high literacy (as high as Dylan's or Simon's) with an eye of concision and a truly contemporary sense of what fits.
> [Lennon-McCartney] have written two songs which are purely colloquial: "She Said She Said" and "All You Need Is Love"...."She Said She Said" is at once one of the most difficult and banal of Beatle songs. It is a concrete version of what in "The Dangling Conversation" (despite all those details) remains abstract, a conversation between a hung-up, self-important girl who says she knows "what it's like to be dead" and her boy friend, who doesn't want to know...."All You Need Is Love," deliberately written in basic English so it could be translated, makes the connection clearer by quoting from "She Loves You" while conveying the ironic message of the title. Is love all you need? What kind of love? Universal love? Love of country? Courtly love? "She Loves You" love? It's hard to tell. The song employs rock-and-roll--dominant music, big beat, repeated refrain, simple diction--and transforms it into something which, if not poetry, at least has a multifaceted poetic wholeness. I think it is rock poetry in the truest sense.
> Maybe I am being too strict. Modern poetry is doing very well, thank you, on its own terms, but in terms of what it is doing for us, and even for the speech from which it derives, it looks a bit pallid. Never take the categories too seriously. It may be that the new songwriters (not poets, please) lapse artistically, indulge their little infatuations with language and ideas, and come up with a product that could be much better if handled with a little less energy and a little more caution. But energy is where it's at. And songs--even though they are only songs--may soon be more important than poems, no matter that they are easier too....Once there were bards and the bards did something wondrous--they provided literature for the illiterate. The bards evolved into poets and the poetry which had been their means became their end. It didn't seem to matter much after a while, since everyone was literate anyway. But semiliteracy, which is where people go when they're not illiterate any more, is in some ways a worse blight.

The general observations still hold true more than fifty years later. Modern American poetry is still aptly described as Christgau put it. Semiliteracy is arguably a bigger problem now than it was back in Christgau's time, considering the hell that is social media. And his particular observations on the artists he mentions are, I think, correct. I enjoy Dylan's songs, but they are difficult to anthologize as poetry: the Nobel got from him much more than he got from the committee. Ditto Paul Simon's songs post Garfunkel....with Garfunkel, I find him pretty dull. Jim Morrison's also pretty dull, but in the exact opposite way, pretending to the fundamentals as Simon and Garfunkel pretended to sophistication, and he sometimes gets so dull that he loops back around to being exciting again, though likely not as he meant. John Phillips does match the level of the songwriters Ella Fitzgerald meticulously anthologized in the late 50s to the early 60s. And John Lennon and Paul McCartney go beyond John Phillips, setting the standard for their era like Cole Porter or Irving Berlin did for their own.

Where things get really interesting, for me, is how the observations might also hold true for hip hop, as well as how exactly the torch was passed between rock and hip hop. I think I've attempted to highlight some rap songs in PotD before. When starting out, I believe I once made the mistake of posting what was effectively a Paul Simon or a Jim Morrison: good song, terrible poem. Then gradually I alternated between the levels of Dylan and Lennon-McCartney. I find it fascinating how Kendrick Lamar, probably the biggest rap star at the moment, is very much like Dylan in that, even on the page, his erudition is readily apparent, but his works are difficult to anthologize as poetry: as poetry, they perhaps depend on devices too archaic for modern sensibilities, however much his diction might suggest otherwise. Aesop Rock and Noname have proven surprisingly easy to anthologize....only Aesop Rock is white, and Noname once complained that her audiences very rarely featured people of the same race as her, to the point that she's had to feature Jay Electronica in her latest album. Which makes me wonder: is it just me, or is "Modern [American] poetry" a more or less white standard? But then, where do figures like Langston Hughes fit into this?

Vocabulary

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 11:59:14 +0000

I recently found a list of 111 prohibited words (on a web site called 'Pretend Genius' so it might possibly be irony).

So my question is: what's the legitimate vocabulary for poetry? I'll reserve my opinions to avoid bias.

Better Critiques

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 16:48:09 +0000

Hi, I notice there is a paucity of fulsome reviews lately. So I have decided to Be the Change.

I'm gonna do 5 max effort crits to try to reset the norms. Let me know if you have something you want read in detail.

<3

The problem with poetry

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 02:24:48 +0000

The problem with art in general is that it’s all been done before
I find myself unable to appreciate any modern poetry, even the very well written examples thereof.

Geoffrey Hill was a far better craftsman than Shakespeare, and moreover knew things an almost medieval bard (yes, yes, Renaissance and voyages of discovery but also beheadings galore and no baths) with his utterly destitute and practically illiterate world view couldn’t have imagined, but we can see Geoff Hill. He’s on a hill, you know where he’s going. You know the setup. You can expect the revelation at the end of the poem.

It’s so formulaic it’s rubbish.

And this is craft, mind you - not anyone can write like Hilll or Ted Kooser. But you, the reader, are tired of being manipulated.

And so the only poetry worth reading is primitive poetry. Even Chaucer, because he was a hack. But from before the internet.

Maybe one way to salvage poetry is to write about other planets

Natural language or don't bother

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:26:57 +0000

The older I get, the more I read, the less patience I have for affectation in poetry. Even a lot of what I used to think was great poetry, I now think is just okay, mostly because it can't exist without the aid of artifice, without the reader wilfully suspending that particular disbelief and agreeing to indulge with the speaker in the obviously false fantasy that the diction before us on the page is anything the speaker might actually utter in any context other than "poem on the page."

It is harder to write poetry with plain language because now you actually have to just go find compelling ideas and images. There's no "I don't have much to say but it SOUNDS like I have something to say." You either bring an offering or an empty dish. None of this fancy-Tupperware-holding-a-single-dry-chicken-tender shit.

Go read some James Tate, a poet who had the nerve to actually explore what a poem is at its essence, with all the emperor's decidedly not-new clothes stripped off. It's good for what ails, we swears, frodo bagginses.

"Poemy" voice

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:03:18 +0000

How often do you realize you're writing a certain way just because part of you thinks, "this is what poems are supposed to sound like?"

If I am honest, for me the answer is "all the fucking time."

Working on ferreting out and actively resisting this impulse!

Other than Bubba Clinton - who feels my pain??

A Room with a Bath

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 04:10:21 +0000

good morning,

I am not I'm afraid a writer of poetry, unless you count the drivel I wrote to my girlfriend when I was a love-struck teenager, but I am a reader of poetry and I am researching a book on poetry in film. I have just come across a reference in a film to a poem that possibly exists but confirming the details of the poem, or even its author, is proving problematic and I was hoping that someone here might be able to help.

the film is Band á part (1964) by Jean-Luc Godard. the film is set in Paris, and an early scene is set in an English class where the teacher explains that they will be using classical teaching methods which means that "it is not necessary to learn A Room With a Bath but it is necessary to spell Thomas Hardy correctly," at which point she turns round and writes Thomas Hardy on the blackboard.

A Room With a Bath is an obvious reference to a poem the students do not need to learn. Google search seems to think A Room With a Bath (ARWAB) is a humorous poem and has offered me both A.P. Herbert and Ogden Nash as possibilities for its author. the first time it said that A.P. Herbert was also a co-founder of the American Professional Golfers Association, which I took to be a pretty obvious AI hallucination. then it said the author was Ogden Nash with no further details, and on a third try it claimed that A.P. Herbert wrote it and it was first published in Punch in 1922 and then appeared in Mild and Bitter (1936).

the online Punch archive does not include ARWAB in any edition between 1910 when Herbert first started submitting verse to them and 1922 when the archive ends (there is no 1912 in the archive). copies of Mild and Bitter in the Internet Archive are covers only with no text inside so I have been unable to independently confirm any of these details.

I have obviously searched considerably further than the AI summary at the top, I have visited all my usual poetry haunts, but all I have for my trouble is a large number of poems about baths and bathing and poems set in Bath but no substantive evidence of for or about a poem called ARWAB.

does anyone here have anything to add?

many thanks,

Kaarlo Tuomi

Anya Johnson

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:29:02 +0000

https://onlypoems.com/poems/anya-johnson

I'm completely infatuated.

where are the poets writing to be read?

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:54:18 +0000

feels like we have more "I write for myself" poets here than the other kind. I don't really know how to crit those kinds of poems. by which I mean, I do, but you guys won't like it. :3

Signatures

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:33:20 +0000

AI warning: This is another thread about AIs and their effect on writing (including poetry), not *by* an AI, as far as I know.

I recently read a news story in which Anthropic, developer of AIs such as Claude, is planning to include "code" in Claude's output which - though invisible to human readers - would allow Claude to determine if a written document had been written by Claude. It was claimed that this signature would be unaffected by typography, file format, etc., and could be recognized (by Claude) even in incomplete samples of text.

First off, the motivations are obvious: judges will only need to run electronically submitted legal documents through Claude to find out if the AI had created them (with severe consequences for the parties filing them). The same for publishers, editors, professors, and Hollywood producers.

Second fork: of course this aspect of Claude's services would motivate courts, producers, etc., to "hire" Claude - to the benefit of Anthropic.

Third fork: this would also motivate even slightly sketchy writers *not* to use Claude specifically - the same way law firms refuse to use Word™ due to its tendency to hide comments, approvals, and old drafts in the file. In a roundabout way, this could actually increase trust... a sort of public service by Anthropic even among communities that don't hire them... the way concealed firearm carriers benefit those who don't: deterrence.

Question: how does/will this affect (unassisted) writers, and poets in particular? Does it?
In case it may seem poetry is too short for a "signature" like this to fit, a thought on what it might involve. Not linguistic tics, but easily (for a massive machine) followed rules. For example, "From the tenth sentence on, every prime-numbered sentence will contain a prime number of words." I think this would be undetectable and (since it effectively counts spaces instead of syllables) workable, especially for long documents. Remember, it's the machine (with its resources) that has to conform and detect, not a person who can't look at the whole document as he composes it. The actual rule could be more complicated (ignoring sentences, for example).

Man this forum is so inactive, it's a real drag

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:36:57 +0000

I like it here but it is a bummer that people don't even post daily. Also it seems there are like, 6 truly active users. Suffer the little poets to come unto us?

(08-08-2026, 09:36 AM)matsunosuperfan Wrote: I like it here but it is a bummer that people don't even post daily. Also it seems there are like, 6 truly active users. Suffer the little poets to come unto us?

I don't even need to post as often as I draft, I just want something to crit XD

The Epic

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:58:36 +0000

Last week I watched Nolan's Odyssey, and many years ago (let's say ten) I read a prose translation of it.

My general thoughts on Nolan's Odyssey are that it's sufficiently faithful, and that Nolan's obsession with chronological disorder works well to give an impression of the original poem's overall vibe. The chuds were dead wrong, not only by being racist, but also because I think the movie's best performances were delivered by Lupita Nyong'o and Elliott Page, even if one of those actors had only a bit role. Those who had more general misgivings over the trailers were only half-wrong: the trailers definitely highlight the worst aspects of the film, namely its drabness, but when one actually views the film one gets so thoroughly impressed by what Nolan and company do right that one doesn't care if, say, Odysseus' ships are more Viking than Greek, or that Agamemnon's costuming is too angular.

In fact, Agamemnon's aura of menace is emblematic of what the film typically gets bang on, which is that the aura or vibe of what sequences it chooses to adapt match the aura or vibe of Homer's story, certain adaptational differences aside. (Here we get into spoilers, not so much for Homer's story as for how Nolan chose to adapt it.) The encounters with Polyphemus, Circe, the Sirens, and the dead are terrifying in ways that capture the overall spirit of terror in those episodes as written, even if the scenes were somewhat truncated. The Fall of Troy is a spectacle one cannot help but cry over, much as every veteran in the book cries when they hear people sing of their war, though that episode of the war itself I don't remember being so directly described by Homer. Odysseus' final encounter with his dog and the slaughtering of the suitors are truly cathartic, even if the latter feels more in the spirit of a contemporary action film.

As for the overall spirit of the adaptation, three things stood out for me, two as I watched the film and one more in retrospect. Most obvious is Nolan's historicizing of the Odyssey qua the Bronze Age collapse, to the point that characters outright mention "peoples of the sea" (and Odysseus himself says "Our age of bronze is ending"). I liked what Nolan meant to do here, even in terms of overall message---that old social contracts, being broken, have left our world in ruins, though we'll get to this in a bit more detail later on---but, I mean, those quoted lines made me roll my eyes in the theatre. Nolan messing with time is a 'Nolanism' that really works for a narrative as sprawling as this, but Nolan writing lines like those....

Next is Nolan's sanitizing of the Odyssey, in particular Odysseus' character. The truncation of the encounter with Polyphemus involved cutting Odysseus making the cyclops drunk, telling the cyclops his name is nobody, and later shouting to everyone but the cyclops that his name is actually Odysseus---this is a sanitization of Odysseus' character that I really didn't mind, since in the film his particular actions still get his men killed, which I believe was the final point of his hubris in the book. But where the sanitizations become....interesting....is in the way the film emphasizes the Fall of Troy, especially Odysseus' culpability in it, such that it becomes a sort of 'ancestral sin' for posthomeric society being as broken as Odysseus or Nolan assay it to be; in the way the film emphasizes the virtue of Xenia, in the film called "Zeus's law", being far more based in the essential dignity of individuals---in their being made in the image of God, essentially---than being as rooted in notions of social class as in Homer; in the way the film frames Odysseus' departure from Ogygia as a "leap of faith", faith thus being framed more as the theological virtue than as the more straightforward loyalty or fidelity of the book; in the way the film omits the slaughtering of Odysseus's unfaithful slaves, again making it seem like Odysseus actually thought of his slaves as anything more than property. The combination of all these choices makes Nolan's Odysseus, not just 'modern', but also markedly 'Christian', which I personally liked, but which more generally is a choice neither good nor bad.

Now for a bad choice, or rather set of choices. Nolan completely omits the Phaeacians, including Nausicaa and Arete, conflating their role in the story with Calypso; Calypso herself gets Odysseus hooked on lotus, rather than the two episodes being entirely separate; Odysseus and his men spend much less time with Circe; Odysseus' time in the Underworld is reduced to a meeting with Tiresias, Agamemnon, and the movie-only character of Sinon, completely omitting his conversation with Anticleia; Athena is reduced to Odysseus's post-traumatic hallucination; and Penelope doesn't actively test Odysseus and his identity at the very end of the story. Some of those choices are for the sake of shortening or historicizing the story, sure, making it feel more verisimilitudinous to the modern audience, but added up, Nolan's adaptation is an oddly regressive one, when it comes to its women, even when compared to the millennia-old original.

What this adaptation means to say, overall, is probably a lot sharper than what the Odyssey has meant for its various audiences, and that's to be expected, since it's a three-hour-long film adaptation of a twenty-four-book-long epic poem, and it mainly goes back to Nolan's historicizing of the narrative, to his notion that certain old virtues such as Xenia, once broken by individuals, lead to irrevocable changes in society. I have heard some commentators note how Nolan's Odyssey is overall 'conservative' in its outlook, that it forwards too much a 'great man' theory of history, but I think this criticism is grossly misguided, since overall where Nolan's Odyssey is 'conservative' is where it faithfully adapts the narrative---where it delivers a millennia-old vision of history, one that predates the divide between conservatives and liberals or especially Carlyle's 19th century notions on 'Great Men'. Thematically, Nolan's Odyssey is only as 'conservative' as one wishes it to read it as 'conservative', its anti-Homeric regressiveness on women aside; one can just as well read its emphasis on Xenia as the emphasis on shared humanity from which all liberal and socialist ethics is ideally derived.

So....yeah. It's a great movie. I think my favorite Nolan movie is still Dunkirk, since that's a story where Nolan's biases against women and towards conservative politics are overcome by the subject matter---the systemic biases behind few women being involved in the Dunkirk evacuation is not one that needs to be interrogated by any adaptation of that story, while the adaptation itself ended up being far more collectivist and egalitarian than Nolan's tendencies might suggest---but my love for seeing Greek myths be treated with respect pushes this adaptation to a comfortable number two, or maybe number three next to The Dark Knight (a movie that is conservative to the point of being ur-fascist, sure, but damn if the spectacle don't impress).

Now, why I put this review in "Poetry Discussion" rather than "Movies, Music, and Media" is because I don't want to talk about Nolan's Odyssey alone, I want to talk about epics---rather, epic poetry, just to exclude things we conventionally describe as epic but are much closer to other genres, for instance movies.

An old, now-closed thread by Quix once asked the question, "What makes an epic poem"? To which this not-quite-dedicated scholar is wont to respond with this diagram of Northrop Frye's theory of genres, courtesy of Robert D. Denham: https://imgur.com/a/aYkcncw

In fact, Frye uses the terms 'epos' and 'epic' separately, with epics referring to particular works that are in genre more typically epos but also inclusive of such prose works as Finnegans Wake. 'Epic' he ties to his notion of 'encyclopaedic forms', which he defines as "presenting an anagogic form of symbolism, such as sacred scripture, or its analogue in other modes"---"modes" Frye generally defines as "a conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature", which in short we could say is the difference between, say, Dickens and Kafka, or between Scripture and the Commedia; "anagogic form of symbolism", even Frye struggles to describe in less than religious terms, so let's have it be the visionary sensibility shared by, say, Homer, Milton, Blake, and Joyce.

'Epics', then, he ties to cyclical structures of creation to apocalypse, law to kingdom, or birth to death, and he further classifies epics into epics of return, epics of wrath, analogical epics (as in, analogical to some process within the aforementioned cyclical structures), and contrast epics (as in, contrasting one cyclical structure with another). The examples he furnishes are numerous, and thus instructive. Epics of return include the Eddas, the Muspilli, the last book of the Mahabharata, and the Odyssey. Epics of wrath include the Iliad. Analogical epics include the Hercules legends, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Holy Scripture, the Commedia, the Faerie Queene, legends of the Holy Grail, the Aeneid, Milton, Blake, and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Contrast epics include Ovid, Hesiod, Boethius, and Langland's Piers Plowman. Lastly, there is the distinction he adapts from Milton between the brief epic and the diffuse epic, with the brief epic being a less encyclopaedic epic, or perhaps a more thematically concentrated lyric: his examples here are the Book of Job, Beowulf, Spenser's Epithalamion, Lycidas, Michael's prophecy in Paradise Lost, and The Waste Land.

I'd say Frye gets to what we generally think of as epics, which is to say we generally think of epics as two different kinds of work. There's epics per Frye's definition of 'epos', with an emphasis I think on rhythm and radical of presentation, and there's epics per Frye's definition of 'epic', flexibly allowing for a good deal of prose and lyric poetry, but also thoroughly excluding, say, the less universalizing works of Jane Austen or Sappho.

I don't know how useful this all is for the general reader, except maybe that it helps set up expectations. The epic-as-'epos' is usually gonna read more even-handed and monotonous than a dramatic or lyric poem; the epic-as-'epic' is gonna feel more expansive in scope than your average novel or anthology. As such, the general reader is advised to have copious cups of coffee or tea ready when reading epics-as-'epos'; reading epics-as-'epic', and it seems enjoyment of such works is really a matter of taste, just as one could prefer Mozart over Wagner when listening to operas, albeit I agree with Frye that certain epics-as-'epic', especially the Bible and Homer, should be required reading for anyone serious about anything related to (Western) literature.

As for the writer, herein lies my dilemma. I'm setting myself up for failure by desiring to write an epic, but my first dilemma is whether it's gonna be an epic in the second sense alone, or if it's gonna be an epic in both senses. As someone whose main experience writing creatively is by writing lyrics, it's gonna be much easier for me to write an epic in the first sense rather than to write prose, but won't that sound terribly outdated, sinking the project just as I embark on it? Indeed, what use do we still have for a genre that's meant mainly to be recited or read aloud for a long period of time, and with a consistent metrical rhythm---we still have plays or at least films, we still have novels or at least comics, we still have anthologies or at least pop records, but where has gone the epic? And, in this age of nuclear disaster and climate catastrophe, how should one anticipate its return?

(It's been ages since I read Frye's The Anatomy of Criticism, so for this discussion, I've mainly relied on this dissertation: https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/cri...eface.html )

Why post?

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 01:06:38 +0000

Claude offers better critique on the surface than any human writer has time for
It can’t really help you improve a poem, though. Its own poems are worthless.
I put Matsun’s poem about the crow through Claude and this is what I got:

The qualities that make “Intersection” timeless — stripped-down, universal images; no cultural anchors; elemental diction — are the same qualities that make it harder to tell apart from other poems doing the same thing. Crows as omens, watching windows, grief coded through waiting — this is well-trodden territory in contemporary poetry about loss and anticipation. A reader who’s spent time in journals or workshops has seen this move before: nature image as vessel for unspeakable feeling, short unrhymed tercets, an ending that widens the aperture to something cosmic. None of that makes the poem bad, but it does mean its voice is less distinctive than its craft.

Which is more than what most humans will be able to or have time to articulate

So does it make poetry fora such as this one worthless? Or useful only because as humans we want other humans to read our poems? Why? I can understand Rowens trying to impress women, but what of those who are already women? Or men who aren’t after that particular angle?
What does this site offer but familiarity?