[Laurie]

Hmmm...poems by William Blake my favourites are probably The Tiger and The Immortal and I like most poems by Robert Browning The Laboratory and My Last Duchess are two of my favourites
We did those for English. I liked them but when you have to do poems in school i dont enjoy them so much - i prefer to be able to interpret them on my own and in my own way first, rather than being told what they mean

[Rhiannon]

I didn't like being taught poetry until this year when I got to university. I think in high school it felt too much like they were telling us what the poetry was supposed to mean (in a very simple, non-detailed way) and now the professor tries to let us figure it out for ourselves or shows us what it's all about. I like that method much better; I actually enjoy poetry now.

As for favourites, hmm, Blake, I appreciate Shakespeare's poetry now a lot more than I did in high school, I really like "My Last Duchess", and some Yeats stuff, and Ozymandias (for some reason the first time I read that I thought it was about a ship wreck in the desert...), I like Dylan Thomas' "Rage Against the Dying of the Light", and Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" and then Raleigh's reply (had to write an essay on Marlowe's version last term), and ballads! We took Sir Patrick Spens and the Demon Lover and I read Lord Randal and Tam Lin, I love ballads. We took some Gerard Manley Hopkins stuff in school, who I had never heard of before in my life, but I quite like what I read of his. And I really like Robert Frost's "Design." I'm beginning to appreciate T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" though it made no sense to me at all when I first read it and I like some of Wilfred Owen's stuff.

Yikes, I never realized my poetry course had introduced me to so much stuff. I suppose that was the general idea though.

[alison]

I disapprove (as a poet) of how poetry is mostly taught in schools. I remember giving a talk to some Years 12s in Alice Springs who were studying Emily Dickinson and nearly causing a riot when I told them that reading a poem as a comprehension exercise ("what is the poet trying to say?") was entirely the wrong way of going about it. They all jumped up and said, See? I told you so! They had an excellent teacher, who just smiled and said, I know, but you have to pass these exams...

Poetry should be read for pleasure and no other reason. Hard to do that in a school context.

[tchang]

Funny, most of the poems I know I learned in high school or before.... I don't remember at all what the teachers said about them, but I remember the poems themselves. I actually really liked learning poems in a classroom context. I find that it's easy sometimes to be lazy when I read a poem on my own, and just think, "oh I like it," without really thinking about why I like it. I guess reading a poem in a scholastic context makes me a more rigorous reader. I also like finding out what someone else thinks about a poem (even if the person is a teacher :-) It's strange how the same poem strikes different people in different ways. Finding out how someone else feels about the poem makes the poem richer to me.

I remember sending Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet to a friend after we had a long talk about painful breakups. (The sonnet can be found here:
http://www.poemofquotes.com/elizabethbarrettbrowning/ifthoumustloveme.php.) He was particularly struck by the line, "For these things in themselves, Beloved, may / Be changed, or change for thee," and listening to him talk about what that line meant to him in the context of his experiences made me feel so much closer to the poem. The other "poem" that I sent to him was actually the lyric for one of Indigo Girls' songs, called "Ghost," which can be found here: http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Indigo-Girls/Ghost.html. My favorite lines: "and i know now how it feels/to be weakened like achilles/with you always at my heels." (Unfortunately the lyrics loses something when you read it without the music.)

I guess the only thing that can be bad about learning in a classroom setting is that it can sometimes be too results-driven. So here is yet another poem that I like that speaks to me about that:
http://www.warriorofthelight.com/engl/edi51_itaca.shtml

[alison]

Ah! Cavafy! I love his work (and that is a lovely poem).

If you're lucky enough to have a wonderful teacher, poetry can be a door opening. But on the whole, I think it ought to be banned being taught until people are 21 ;) - unless the teacher can show good reason why they should teach it. Teaching poetry puts more people off than turns them on. I was taught by someone who hated poetry, and you knew he did. I did not confess in that class, ever, that I read poetry at home.

Nevertheless, like all art, poetry does require patience and attention; and obviously the more you know about it, the more you get out of it. But there are other ways of discovering these things than in school, and often school is the least satisfactory

[Hereford Eye]

You taught me – as I should have learned so long ago – that you do not pick up a book of poetry as you do a novel and expect to plow from beginning to end and make sense of it all. Three times now I have plowed through and three times I have finished wrapped in the terrible knowledge there was so much I did not understand. So much to learn and too much in a hurry to learn it well.
The poems of pregnancy, birth, and the aftermath are the first I have encountered and I marveled at the honesty; for the moment in time you took me there, I envied the experience. Immediately afterwards, I returned to a semblance of sanity.
Still, in your poetry, even though you can revel in the wonder of it all, I find myself coming away with an overall feeling of…suspicion? That life may appear to be good but under it all there is so much pain that the best we can do is hope to paint over the smudges. Our daughter once decorated her bedroom wall with graffiti done in sparkling paint. When it came time to move, to sell that house, trying to cover that blemish was near impossible. I finish your books and have that feeling.
Perhaps, you say it best in Howl: “and so I learnt the first lie before I could count or reason I learnt the first lie you are a woman and smile in your pain.”
I thank you for the poetry, especially the Requiem and The Mouse and the Sonnets and I promise to take all your poems one at a time and understand them better.

[Alassë]

To me all the poetry throughout the books seems very important with quite a few hidden meanings (look closely). I have quite a few ideas on some of the poems but i want to see what everyone else thinks so here's a place to do it.

I had an idea which i have posted on the question and answers section if anyone wants to see it.

So here you go, get stuck in! :D

[Celebriän]

not really a hidden meaning (or maybe there is!) but does anyone know who Mercan Goldhand is? The poetry that i found him in is the part at the beginning of Innail..... oh yeah and who are the singers of Maldan? Arestor? Ulnar?

oh dear too many questions...... :( :confused:

[soon2b_author]

I agree with you Alassë, in that the poetry has hidden meanings. I think I'll check. I also think that the poetry realy helps to set the scene and also makes everything seem more realistic, as if it realy is an old legend

[soon2b_author]

The poems at the begining of each part of "The Gift" all relate very closely to the narriative and what is to happen, like phrophicies. If you read them carelfully you see that they tell a story within themselves, but put in context with the whole book they give the reader an idea of where the story is heading and also give substance to the history of Bards.

Anyone agree?