Poets

Pound is a lot like Whitman, they both seem to flutter from one topic to the next in a poem. Pound does it in a different way than Whitman and I like it a lot better. I really like “The Pact” by Pound. I like it because it encompasses the way I feel about Whitman to an extent even if I’m not quite up to Pound’s standards. “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” is another good poem but I’m not sure how much of it is Pounds words and how much of it is a translation, but it is an interesting poem. It seems that I like a lot of Pound’s shorter pieces. It would be interesting to read “The Cantos” after studying mythology but it is an interesting poem. Overall I like Pound a lot better than I Whitman.

I love the way William Carlos Williams uses words. When I read some of the things he writes it feels like he uses words like a surgeon would use a scalpel. I think my favorite of his is “Sympathetic Portrait of a Child”. The image of a child trying to hide herself in sunlight is one that is interesting, I always think of her trying to hide her true nature or her trying to hide from something that she has seen but can’t because there isn’t a way to hide in the sunlight, only to chase it away with the sunlight.

H.D. is an interesting poet. It’s interesting that he caught what would be obvious if he was alive at the time but ignored now. H.D. captured the love hate relationship people have for anyone or anything that is really beautiful in “Helen”. There are so many things that make me very grateful to be who I am. It is a part of human nature, which we try to ignore, that makes it impossible for us to like someone who makes us want them without them even trying. The beautiful have both the benefits of being beautiful and the hardships. There is hate for things that are beautiful because they are beautiful, a lot of abuse happens because of that. The mother who drowns her daughter because the daughter was raped by the father and the mother got jealous that the husband would like the daughter more than her. There are other poems by H.D. that I really like but I keep coming back to “Helen” because it strips everything down to human nature and specific things that we like to pretend isn’t in everyone. Envy, hate, love, and how it is all intertwined.

T.S. Eliot is someone that I want time to read. I read his poem but didn’t have a chance to let it sing in as much as it necessarily should. His work is interesting and I do like some of the way he uses words but I’m not a big fan of the poems as a whole. I’m not sure why though which is why I want time to read him.