
Poems of my Father #3 – The First Snowfall - BobbyVsTheDevil
https://medium.com/@russroberts/poems-of-my-father-3-797a00b44a00
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toomanybeersies
I enjoyed the article until the questions at the bottom and then I got nasty
flashbacks to high school English.

School killed any love I had for poetry for years. I thought poetry was this
thing where you spent a minute reading a page, then spent an afternoon over-
analysing it, looking for hidden meaning and writing 10 pages about it.

I think the best way to appreciate poetry is to simply read it, and that's it.
Your mind will naturally ponder on it, if it wants to.

~~~
fsloth
I agree up to a point, but disagree there is no value in analysis _at all_.

Lots of authors have intentionally inserted contextual references to their
poems which _are_ worthy to point out. Since lots of old poetry was written in
time when _everybody_ was supposed to be familiar with a certain classical
body of work the poems might need some explaining sometimes to fully be read
as the autor intended.

In our pop-culture filled context you could have a poem about a car called
Falcon and a cat called Chewie and you would go a-ha, I wonder what deeper
references are there.

But actually treating poem as an algebra problem really is taking it too far.

~~~
pattusk
> But actually treating poem as an algebra problem really is taking it too
> far.

Not really, a lot of poems (the symbolists come to mind) are actually meant to
be treated as semantic puzzles or mathematical problems. Lewis Carroll is
perhaps the most famous - and one of the greatest example of the intersection
of maths, logic and poetry.

One of the best poetical analysis I had the pleasure of reading in recent
years is a very probabilistic (rather than algebraic) reading of the French
poet Mallarme, who was himself fascinated by randomness and probabilities:

[https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/book-of-numbers-
meillass...](https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/book-of-numbers-meillassoux-
on-mallarme/)

> The Number and the Siren argues that there is a Number at the heart of the
> poem [...] and the book cycles through a lot of textual analysis, along with
> close readings of related poems (themselves encrypted with numbers)

Highly recommended read.

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imperialdrive
Hidden mental treasure all around us. Beautiful. Thank you.

