Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–369 of 369 posts

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#361

Post by throwaway000002 »

L'infinito - Giacomo Leopardi

http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mdt26/poems/leopardi1.html

  Always dear to me was this lonely hill,
  And this hedge, which from me so great a part
  Of the farthest horizon excludes the gaze.
  But as I sit and watch, I invent in my mind
  endless spaces beyond, and superhuman
  silences, and profoundest quiet;
  wherefore my heart
  almost loses itself in fear. And as I hear the wind
  rustle through these plants, I compare
  that infinite silence to this voice:
  and I recall to mind eternity,
  And the dead seasons, and the one present
  And alive, and the sound of it. So in this
  Immensity my thinking drowns:
  And to shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#362

Post by schoen »

wishinghand wrote: post #351
schoen wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot more metaphorical and more fanciful but there's "Evolution" by Langdon Smith: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/int/evolution.html When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you eve…

How do I format text like that on HN? Use tags?

Two spaces in front of each line should work.

  One space is not enough,
  Yet two suffice.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#363

Post by eflowers »

javajosh wrote: post #165
calebm wrote: post #132

"Passion not spent" What's my great fear? I'll tell you; come near... To lay down in death with so much left. Passion not spent - Oh cowardly regret! For fear of others? The thousand deaths. I'm afraid to die With no twinkle in my eye - To pass meagerly by Yet hidden inside. To walk through life Not truly alive, And to pass in the night With an unfelt "goodbye".

That's fantastic. Who wrote it?

he did

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#364

Post by vacri »

acqq wrote: post #291
vacri wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

acqq may be cherry-picking and bashing islam, but you were proselytising - you weren't just talking about the poetic quality. Your video boils down to "it is because it is". It relies on the faulty assumption that a human or collection of humans can't possibly write something that's very beautiful. It's not even an internally consistent argument - somehow humans are able to analyse and critique the poetry in the kora…

To paraphrase the famous cartoon: if you locked people in a box for a thousand years with 500 still frames of Joe Biden eating a sandwich, by the end they'd be adamant that the pictureas are the prettiest thing ever produced on Earth.

I couldn't resist - if you look in the comments to that video, you'll see me listing eight rhetorical devices against Eminem's quoted word "Yo", using the same qualifying standards that the bloke in the video uses (re-using several of the vlogger's own selections).

The video makes a big song and dance about there being so many rhetorical devices, but there's so much padding in that list. The vlogger than quotes a verse from Eminem's Lose Yourself, and states that it only has one rhetorical device - assonance. But you simply can't get assonance without "word choice" and "word arrangement", which the vlogger previously gave as props to his koran verse. It's a pretty cut-and-dried case of stacking the deck.

Anyway, if you're interested, check out the comments to the video to see how I found (at least) eight rhetorical devices in the two-letter word "Yo" that starts the verse. Density of rhetorical devices is the key point of the video; according to the vlogger, such high density either indicates the divinity of the author, or disproves the koran as the word of god.

Despite the lack of logic in the vlogger's arguments, he does have fantastic oration and sounds beautifully melodic as he speaks. I enjoyed the video just for the sound of his talking.

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#365

Post by zem »

peri wrote: post #272
sp332 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the tune?

I wish I had a better answer than "I make one up as needed", but I have more of a filking ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filk_music ) background than any actual musical training.

nice to see another filker on here :)

Re: Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

#366

Post by jfaucett »

xcrunner529 wrote: post #338
jfaucett wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I want to do to you , what the spring does to the cherry trees." I've never seen that in english, so I looked it up ( http://albalearning.com/audiolibros/neruda/poema14-sp-en.htm... ) I guess it goes without saying, but english really doesn't do him justice, rhyming trees with kisses is pretty poor compared to cerizos and besos which is perfect rhyme. But I suppose poetry is about the most difficult thing to transla…

I would like to become more "cultured" and just aware of more words, forming sentences, communicating, and have more to call on for expressing my feelings. What is the best way to get into poetry more? Read a couple a day or something? I would actually really like to read Shakespeare, but most seem to be of the mind that you really need a class or something to really get the translation.

well, if you want to get into the older stuff like shakespeare I would suggest just diving in. At first, just lookup the words you dont know and after maybe one play you should have already learned enough to understand his style and language and "get" his works on their face value.

as far as literary references go - aka john milton - (basically the only reason you'd need a class), I really think you'd just have to read/know most of the greek/roman classics and the bible to be able to get most of them. But no worries, if you enjoy reading the classics are a blast, the hebrew old testament is packed with pretty cool stories (the mad king Nebuchadnezzer) and it doesn't get much better than the iliad and odyssey.

Post reply on HN