Thread 24829854

>only three important poets from the US
>two of them wanted to be European and lived in Europe for most of their lives
What causes this? I feel like the US has more or less held its own in prose, but our poetic tradition is legitimately terrible compared to the UK's.

>>24829854 (OP)
Who is the third? Stevens and Jeffers are already two people, in any case.

>>24829863
Whitman.
>Stevens and Jeffers
Not important (that doesn't mean they're bad).

>>24829869
As a euro I far prefer either one of them to Whitman. Whitman is supposed to be the Great American Poet but aside from a nice phrase or two here and there I never could find him impressive either stylistically or philosophically. I especially prefer the way Jeffers thinks about nature to the way Whitman does.

>>24829854 (OP)
Im not American but I assume your three are Eliot, Pound and Emily Dickinson?

the US was still a relatively new and underdeveloped country at that time

>>24829854 (OP)
Trying to guess who you think is the one important USA poet who stayed in the USA. Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Wallace Stevens are all on the first team. My guess is you mean WW.

>>24829877
>>24829881
Eliot, Pound, and Whitman.
>Dickinson
I don't care for her but she probably is important. I guess that makes four. Still not enough.

>>24829878
And? Its people were Anglophones, of a rough sort to be sure, but nevertheless inheritors of a serious literary tradition. It's not like they were Polynesians.

>>24829854 (OP)
your nation began in the 17th c. when puritans landed circa 1620. by that time the Troubadours, the Tre Corone, and le Grand Siècle (Molière, Racine, Corneille) had already happened/was happening in Europe. it's a whole different ballpark. I wouldn't dwell on it. you had the golden age of Hollywood, at least.. that counts for something

>>24829893
There's not a whole lot that americans had to do with hollywood, though.

>>24829863
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost

>>24829889
>I don't care for her but she probably is important.
It all depends how you measure "importance". In terms of influence she probably isn't that impressive. She just did her thing; no-one is trying to follow her. But she did her thing really well. Her poems are definitely going to last. (In fact, being so much *sui generis* actually makes it MORE likely she will last. No-one else is ever going to do what she did, better. She's got her own little niche.)

Amerika, du hast es besser.

>>24829854 (OP)
>Whitman
>Dickinson
>Eliot
>Pound
>Williams
>Stevens
>Longfellow
>Poe
>St Vincent Millay

>>24829904
I like Frost, but I think he's ultimately a minor poet. He does have several very good poems, which is more than can be said for most poets.

>>24829909
I think she's important in her uniqueness, yes.

Why did the confessional style overtake the modernist one? Imagine thinking your daddy issues or undying lust for gay sex is worth writing about in a post-romantic age. Poets should be like Flaubert's ideal authors, present everywhere, visible nowhere.

>>24829889
>>24829893
I will probably be the first to say this but most European cinema sucks aside from Germany

>>24829929
Frater Asemlen writes on this topic here:
https://warosu.org/lit/thread/21962047#p21966125

>>24829854 (OP)
>no mentions of melville
this board is full of pseuds...

>>24829974
>anon just discovered that Clarel exists last week, spreads it like a gospel that he knew since the day he was born
You're so cool.

>>24829980
>anon writes a fanfiction about me

>>24829953
Woah, I had no idea that this board was ever visited by someone who can actually write something interesting

>>24829953
>>24830067
Frater Ansemlen was an autistic midwit that talking arrogantly about things he didn't understand. If you don't know anything about poetry you might confuse his endless rambling with expertise. That linked series of posts is the most ridiculously shallow, to the point of being borderline false at times, pop-history of poetry I've ever had the displeasure of reading.

Call me crazy but I think the United States' particular history stunts it in poetry. It has no tradition of monarchy and aristocracy and it's a thoroughly low-church Protestant nation; it hates Catholics, the Orthodox are nowhere in sight, and even the Anglicans never truly fit in here. Poetry is a high art, especially the great epic modes. America has never been a "high" nation, not in its soul.

Even guys like Milton, over in Europe, never truly escape the long shadow of Europe's history of the nobility and the Church.

>>24830290
>Even guys like Milton, over in Europe, never truly escape the long shadow of Europe's history of the nobility and the Church.
Wow, crazy how Catholics just attribute everything good in Western Civilisation to Catholicism if they want to.

>>24830270
This. It's embarrassing someone even brings him up, I'd pleasantly forgotten that fart of a poster.

i was on some blog somewhere and some guy said there are two types of poets, outsiders and insiders. outsiders leave the country and insiders stay in the country, like Whitman and Dickenson

Anyways, from free verse to imagism to confessional poetry, to the beats, america was the last country actually innovating in poetry at all before it died and basically became nothing but identity politics and hubris for fat white cat ladies

fuck, america invented slam poetry as cringe as that is

>>24830313
>america was the last country actually innovating in poetry
English poets have been absolutely essential to the Imagism and modern English poetry in general. You should also probably know a thing or two about French or German poetry before shooting your mouth of with assumptions.

>>24830326
engerland just copied everything america did when america became the number one country in the world

>>24830332
Yeats and Hulme weren't copying America.