I understand that they get hard to read: even the rhyming ones start echoing after a while. And the non-rhyming ones (Idylls of the King, anyone?) are just kind of painful to look at! Writing...well, that's another story entirely. It's hard (for me, anyways) to find a story that is better told in a poem than in prose.

Anyone else have an opinion?

~Bitter Irony

Ovid is so underappreciated. :-) Homer and Virgil steal all the glory.

Ullyses...ugh. Maybe it was literature class in junior high, but something went wrong during my developmental years to make me despise the Oddessy in all its forms. The Divine Comdey is much more entertaining: stranger, most certainly, but with far more surprising twists. [no way, WHO's in the eight circle? I so did not see that coming...:-)] And it sounds great in Italian, if one doesn't really speak Italian and just likes the sound of the language.

~Bitter Irony

Derek Walcott's Omeros, most probably, & maybe Joyce's Ulysses. I mention another later on, but it's little know, & out of print last time I checked.

Yes, I had Endymion in mind when I started this topic. I'm a Keats fan--not quite so rabid as some, but I can still recite far too much of Hyperion by heart.

You'd most probably like Shelley's Adonais, then, if you haven't read it.

I couldn't stand to read Ovid's Metamorphoses because all of the translations I could find were atrocious. Allen Mandelbaum (famed for his excellent & basically mandatory translations of the Divine Comedy & Aenied) recently translated it, & did an amazing job. Ovid isn't near the poet that Homer (or even Virgil) was, but he was good, & it's nice that there's a translation that shows it.

There are many more than these, but heck:

Lucretius's On the Nature of Things is decent, but functions mostly as a didactic work. It's most interesting for predicting the existence of atoms.

Milton is obvious, though I think Samson Agonistes is a better work than Paradist Lost or Paradise Regained.

There's stuff like Nibelungenlied, the Poetic Eddas, Beowulf, a slew of Indian epics, etc. I'll just talk about poems nineteenth century + from here.

The first true American epic, John Brown's Body, is decent. Benet was a terrible poet when he subscribed himself to both rhyme and meter, but the blank verse that constitutes most of the book is good.

Hart Crane's reply to Eliot's Waste Land, The Bridge, is easily the greatest long poem of the twentieth century. It's largely lyrical, as well.

John Berryman's Dream Songs is probably the second best long poem of the twentieth century. It has a lyrical quality to it, also (Berryman was a huge Shakespeare fanatic), & is pretty distinctive & interesting.

Pablo Neruda wrote a bunch, most (if not all) of them political. I feel he was an excellent poet when he wrote personally, but just produced propagandist pap when writing about politics. Some have worthwhile sections, however.

I would place Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet's Human Landscapes as the third greatest of the last century. It's a portrait of his country by way of the people who live there (hence the title).

Robinson Jeffers wrote far too many to name. Most of them are good, if not great.

Ezra Pound wrote the Cantos, but they're a massive, massive piece of disorganized, Anti-Semitic **. Despite it's horrendous length, it was left unfinished (how he intended to finish it is confusing, seeing as it's just a hodge-podge of random facts, people, & foreign languages). However, he also wrote Homage to Sextus Propertius & Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, which are both excellent (& far shorter: 20+ pages).

William Carlos Williams had Paterson, also unfinished. The first part of it is decent, but the rest has a bunch of letters sent to him & other boring self-referential stuff. His really good poems were all under 10 lines long, so it kind of figures.

Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems are an epic of place, like Paterson, but are far better. Olson is somewhat experimental (in other words, he has quirks for the sake of having them), but talented enough so that they don't act as a detriment.

Allen Ginsberg had a number, but Howl (standard) & Kaddish are the great ones. Witchita Vortex Sutra was him past his prime, & is mostly bad political propaganda.

Nikos Kazantzakis (known for writing Zorba the Greek & The Last Temptation of Christ) wrote an amazing sequel (& alternate end, obviously) to the Odyssey. He was, judging from this, extraordinarily talented, but I haven't been able to track down any other poetry by him. Sadly, it's amazingly rare; I could only find a copy (1958 hardcover) at a used bookstore by extreme chance.

Archibald MacLeish wrote Conquistador & won a Pulitzer Prize for it. It's pretty able. The title sums up the subject, really.

John G. Neihardt's Cycle of the West, about settling & living in the Old West, is above-average.

I haven't read James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover, A.R. Amoon's Garbage & Sphere, or Louis Zukofsky's A.

& yeah. Long.

I can't speak for reading other people's work, but i can say that I have written something in rhyme and meter, read it, and been sure that I could not have written it as well without said rhyme and meter. Of course, that may be due to bad prose more than good Seussing...

1. Forums are not to be used to post stories.
2. All discussions, language and content, must be suitable for teens.
3. The owner/moderator(s) of this forum is solely responsible for content posted within this area.
4. All forum abuse must be reported to the moderator(s).

1. Forum admin/moderator
2. Fanatic (on site for more than 2 years)
3. Fan (on site for more than a year)
4. Regular (on site for more than 6 months)
5. Camper (on site for more than a month)
6. Apprentice (on site for more than a week)
7. Newbie (on site for less than a week)