I've been trying the same and each time I failed miserably. I just don't get it and certainly can't enjoy it. Can someone recomend good poetry sutable for highly analytical mind or a book about apreciating poetry?
I would recommend 'Understanding Poetry' by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as a good introduction, it also includes a reasonable collection of poems from various poets to appreciate.
I would also suggest getting an anthology like 'The Golden Treasury' or Anthony Quiller-Couch or Robert Penn Warren (Six Centuries of British Poetry) or G B Harrison. They are available often in small pocket editions, which one can carry around with one.
I've been reading "Sleeping on the Wing" on and off recently -- I think it's meant more as an intro for older school kids but I've never read poetry outside of school and it's been an interesting overview of different poets and styles.
I am not very fond of poetry (except some specific poems), but there is one book of english poetry which I think you may enjoy: the Spoon River Anthology[0].
It's a collection of epitaphs for the cemetery of a fictional town, and each one basically tells a story. Fiddler Jones[1] and Blind Jack[2] (coincidentally, both about fiddlers) contain a few of my favourite verses in all literature.
Maybe try reading poems by poets who write mostly in plain English. For example Charles Bukowski, Philip Larkin and Stephen Dunn. I don't generally like "flowery" poetry but I do enjoy many of the poems written by these writers.
I personally am pretty into William Carlos Willams for a few reasons:
- intense dedication to imagery
- his poem Danse Russe, which to me us just about the silly things we do in privacy where no one is around
- the fact he was a doctor and churning out an insane quantity of poetry
WCW inspired me to write my own poetry mainly because of that last point. I struggle to describe software engineering in that format, sadly!
Rather like music theory, having a highly analytical mind is a boon...eventually. It's so easy to dig into the mathematical structure of it all and not deal with the actual thing. So start with the rollicking and absurd, and read it aloud!. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, for example. I have yet to meet someone that doesn't get a grin out of that. Isherwood, 'The Common Cormorant'. These are poems that beat you over the head with their structure and meter. Limericks, doggerel, songs from Shakespare plays...and pay attention to where it seems to stutter or skip, where it doesn't work. That is the beginning of training your ear, and recovering the ability to feel and enjoy the sound, making that part of the reading experience. Technical prose has trained that out of us as a matter of self defense because so much technical prose is only tolerable with your ear firmly swathed in cotton wool and stored carefully away.
When you get past the level of limericks and children's poems level, suddenly you have interpretive choices to make because the precise flow and timing of sounds can work different ways and some work better than others, and as a reader you have to bring an interpretive faculty to these works. When you get to something like John Donne's poetry, you're now deep in "every bit of timing and inflection matters."
For children's poetry to get started, Belloc's 'The Bad Child's Book of Beasts' or the Looking Glass Book of Verse are high quality collections. Then it's worth getting something like a Norton Anthology of Poetry as a way of reading very widely very quickly to find out what appeals to you right now, and explore that further.
Many people recommend the Oxford Book of English Verse. I don't, because I think Quiller-Couch had insipid taste and his editing ranges from the uninspired to the positively atrocious (what he did to John Donne's 'The Ecstasy' is horrid). I have found Garrison Keillor's 'Good Poems' to be particularly approachable, high quality collection of verse. I also suggest Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading', though you shouldn't take what he writes about Chinese as anything other than a metaphor for his topic at hand.
Spend time with Shakespeare, of course. I recommend the Oxford complete works. I do not recommend the Yale complete works. Did my wife and I have a tiff about that? Yes, we did. Was I able to demonstrate by reference to passages that I was right? Yes. Do we only have the Oxford in the house now? Yes.
Robert Frost's complete works are cheaply had and a necessity for someone studying modern poetry. Two or three poems of his are butchered in every school class, and the full range of what he worked on is generally ignored, because it can require a very finely tuned ear to hear and interpret the force that his longer, narrative poems can produce.
But really, once your ear starts to come together, dig through the Norton anthology and use it as pointers to further things to read.
Some stuff that reads weird to me is quite beautiful when spoken appropriately, my internal voice/reading speed needs to be adjusted or is not good for this. Off the top of my head the best example might be cheating but it's when Ann Dowd recites a bit of Yeats in The Leftovers.
