This poetry stuff is a lot more complicated than I expected. Should I have paid attention in class?

Question

If not for the likes of Todd and Cinnamon, I might have never known who Adelaide Crapsey was...

Answer 1

Yes, honey, you should have paid more attention in class, but I know it's hard when you have a hot teacher and her butt wiggles when she writes on the board. (hehe ... didja catch the pun?)

Answer 2

Unfortunately the answer is Yes. But as is the case for a lot of people, you don't realize that until its test time or even later when you need the information for something relevant to your life. So that's why i still keep my books and notes from school and go back through them when i need to. Learning never stops, just make sure you have the basics and then build on them whichever subject you are working on. Hope this helped and enjoy the poetry, heck thats what the authors intended us to do :-)

Answer 3

no, definitely not, true poetry is not calculus or geometry, it is something both unlearnable and impossible to constrain with rules. Imposing scholarly rules on it is like caging a butterfly, possible, but ultimately unrewarding and self-defeating. Best poetry can not be defined with rules, it always breaks the bonds of any rules imposed on it. When constrained with rules it simply morphs from a winged Pegasus into Lipizzaner. A sad transformation indeed.

Defining divides
Lao Tzu

Answer 4

I wish I had learned any of this in class. Learning about poetry has been mostly an adult activity. Outside of one really good lecture on Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" that I remember.

Speaking of Crapsey (really unfortunate last name) here's one of her's that I enjoy:

The Lonely Death

IN the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In waters of ice; myself
Will shiver, and shrive myself,
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them aflame
In the grey of the dawn; and myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin.

Adelaide Crapsey

Answer 5

No! It's the 21st century! We're living in a post modern world = everything goes as long as you can motivate why!

Answer 6

in fact, there is poetry in your question, the way it is put across! a little more effort, and you will catch up, you will do well!