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2012-10-30 01:54 3100897 Anonymous (530032_499524310059110_793217693_n.jpg 500x382 32kB)
>so much depends >upon >a red wheel >barrow >glazed with rain >water >beside the white >chickens. Why is this considered a great poem?

1 min later 3100902 Anonymous
>>3100897 It's considered a great poem because you have to ask that question.

5 min later 3100908 Anonymous (clock.gif 359x344 4kB)
>>3100897 PLEB ALERT PLEB ALERT WEEEOOOO WEEEOOOO WEEEOOOO

10 min later 3100920 Anonymous
Think about the importance of your question and you will have the answer

11 min later 3100924 Anonymous
The imagism movement is the easy answer, I supppose.

13 min later 3100928 Anonymous
>>3100897 Because it uses like 15 words to paint a fucking vivid picture that is so much more beyond the words used. Most people see an entire farm with wheat, a wooden fence, a barn, etc. Sage for plebe

24 min later 3100949 Anonymous
>>3100928 No it doesn't it just describes a wet red wheelbarrow next to some white chickens

29 min later 3100957 Anonymous
>>3100949 Nigga you forgot the rain, rain be blue, now nigga you put red white and blue together and what do you get? You get fucking America's flag is what. Also nigga what the fuck do all those words have in common? That's right nigga they be all rural and shit, so what my nigga is saying is that us niggas in america depend upon farmers n'shit

35 min later 3100969 Anonymous
>>3100957 Oh I see. Thanks for explaining I think I understand the poem now.

36 min later 3100970 Anonymous
William Carlos Williams is my number one poetry nigga I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold

41 min later 3100988 Anonymous
>>3100908 >>3100928 Bad posts. They are elitist and completely nonconstructive, and usually a complete waste of every reader's time. They are not interesting or appealing in any way. These form the cancer which is killing /lit/ >>3100957 >>3100970 Good posts. They are thoughtful and intuitive and seek to help other posters.

45 min later 3101000 Anonymous
>>3100897 it's a great poem because it has a serious economy of words and shows that even without plot, metaphor, character, etc., you can still have a poem

52 min later 3101017 Anonymous
So what I'm getting from this thread is that it's a great poem because some objects are often found in close proximity to other objects and if humans and/or literary analysts spend enough time sitting around they'll notice they formed mental connections between these things. Why is this news to anyone? And what percentage of humanity has to have mental associations between starbucks and hipsters before I can create a masterwork by mentioning espressos and thick rimmed glasses?

53 min later 3101020 Anonymous
>>3101017 Or was the poem the first to do this kind of thing and appreciated for historical context?

54 min later 3101024 Anonymous
>>3101017 >it's a great poem because some objects are often found in close proximity to other objects and if humans and/or literary analysts spend enough time sitting around they'll notice they formed mental connections between these things. lol you're looking too deep into it the curtains are just blue amirite?

55 min later 3101025 Anonymous
>>3101017 I seem to be getting a mental association between you and being closed off to any explanation of this poem. Maybe Imagism isn't for you.

1 hours later 3101037 Anonymous
Maybe it's like East Asian poetry, where the point isn't rhyme or rhythm, but writing the words nicely? You know, shit like >Eagle flies >in the sky >mountain sits >as it poops >flowers grow >in the dark

1 hours later 3101039 Anonymous
>>3101037 Why is the east asian version of everything always so shitty? Like East Asian philosophy.

1 hours later 3101040 Anonymous
>>3101037 wow so deep the eagle is a metaphor for america

1 hours later 3101043 Anonymous
>>3101037 really if this was old people would praise it as a masterpiece

1 hours later 3101051 Anonymous
>>3101017 I don't think you have to construct any sort of complex association system to find the meaning in this poem. Let's just take it for what it does: to attribute huge importance to such a mundane scene. The poem expounds the profoundly arbitrary notions of importance and meaning that humans create. I like to imagine the protagonist as the son of a simple farmer, whose whole world consists on a red wheel barrow by some white chickens (much of the purely aesthetic beauty of the poem comes form this colour contrast). Then again, that's just me imagining things. The context does not really matter here, tough. It can be a little country boy or the OP worried about the meaning of a poem (or lack thereof) . The point is that it explores our little solipsistic views of the world.

1 hours later 3101053 Anonymous
>>3101037 Here is a poem by Mao. >Eagles >High >Cleaving >Space Translated literally, >Eagles high up, cleaving the space 鹰击长空, Simplified. 鷹擊長空, Traditional. Yīng jī chángkōng, Pinyin. Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean, the characters are pretty, and I'm sure that second one in traditional takes a lot of skill to make, but...It's not the same kind of thing as Western poetry.

1 hours later 3101063 Anonymous
>>3101053 Obviously you're missing something, you don't speak the language.

1 hours later 3101066 Anonymous
>>3100897 Can someone please explain to me why poems have to have one 2deep4u meaning, and can't just mean different things to different people. Isn't that what makes them unique and useful? Why limit a work to one meaning? Maybe the reason people think different things about different poems is because it's their subconscious trying to improve them by offering an original meaning of the work, hell I don't know. And why do we have to classify different meanings as "pleb" or sophisticated? I could sit and ruminate on this poem for years and come up with a list as long as a grocery receipt going deeper and deeper with symbolism/metaphors etc. Does this make me better than someone else, who doesn't waste their life thinking about a singular work, only to mentally masturbate to my brilliance? /rant

1 hours later 3101068 Anonymous
>>3101025 I just don't understand why economy is supposed to be a virtue here. To the extent it demonstrates that people have some kind of non-inherent causation in their thought patterns it's taking a well known psychological/philosophical idea that's been around for a while. And maybe this has changed with time but it really isn't clear at all to me that this poem is more evocative of a certain situation than any other combination of words all related to some other well-known situation. I guess the second part came across as sarcastic but it's a real question. What does the arrangement of words/word choice/etc specific to this poem contribute beyond what a list of objects would have?

1 hours later 3101069 Anonymous
>>3101053 It's because it's so short. It's just a photographic image. And for that, it's ok.

1 hours later 3101076 Anonymous
>143 posts and 18 image replies omitted. Click here to view.

1 hours later 3101081 Anonymous
>>3101053 独立寒秋,湘江北去,橘子洲头。 看万山红遍,层林尽染; 漫江碧透,百舸争流。 鹰击长空,鱼翔浅底, 万类霜天竞自由。 怅寥廓,问苍茫大地,谁主沉浮? 携来百侣曾游, 忆往昔峥嵘岁月稠。 恰同学少年,风华正茂; 书生意气,挥斥方遒。 指点江山,激扬文字, 粪土当年万户侯。 曾记否,到中流击水,浪遏飞舟! mao was OP at proses

1 hours later 3101089 Anonymous
>>3101066 I don't think any meaning is inherently 'pleb' or stupid except for that terrible 'it was all just a dream' thing that people move onto after 'blue curtains'. Even that can work, but the way most people apply it ends up with it never being supported by the text, gutting and forgetting half of the work, and eschewing what the author wanted to do in writing.

1 hours later 3101103 Anonymous
>>3101051 That makes more sense to me. Really I'm just having trouble seeing why this poem would be particularly good at implying a more detailed physical situation (as opposed to some comparable "non-poetic" description) like some posts seem to be implying.

1 hours later 3101109 Anonymous
>>3101076 Oh god they're discussing poetry, what shall we do?

1 hours later 3101117 Anonymous (1270233109225.jpg 367x451 21kB)
>tfw /lit/ is unabashedly the cartoon parody of a new york art critic who says a dead pidgin on a blank canvas "speaks to them"

1 hours later 3101124 Anonymous
>>3101117 How do the autists keep sneaking in? Who's on watch tonight?

1 hours later 3101126 Anonymous
>>3100957 THE CURTAIN IS JUST BLUE

1 hours later 3101132 Anonymous
>>3101126 What is blue?

1 hours later 3101137 Anonymous
>>3101117 >a dead pidgin

1 hours later 3101143 Anonymous (Georg_Hegel.png 391x460 126kB)
>>3101132 COLORS ARE A SOCIAL CONSTRUCT YOUR SENSES ARE LYING.. ABSOLUTE IDEALISM IS THE ONLY TRUE WAY TO ENLIGHTENMENT

1 hours later 3101144 Anonymous
My professor wrote about this poem on a lecture slide in a Modernism course I took last year. I wrote down what he said. >This is the opposite to Eliot: no allusions, no fragments (it is itself a fragment), no cultural/literary traditions, no despair, no prophecy…no city, no ‘phantasmagorical’ crowds. It symbolises nothing: it is what it is (although there may be some sentimentality tied up in this essentially folksy, American, pre-modernist modernist image…).

1 hours later 3101147 Anonymous
>>3101117 I agree, Creole and Swahili are overrated.

1 hours later 3101148 Anonymous
>>3101143 we rely on language when we can't trust our senses. what do we do when language fails us?

1 hours later 3101150 Anonymous
>>3101132 >>3101148 WE NAVIGATE THE WORLD THROUGH THE POWER OF LOVE. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVmbhYKDKfU

1 hours later 3101153 Anonymous (Untitled98.jpg 629x500 56kB)
>>3101150

1 hours later 3101158 Anonymous
>>3101153 >our generation sux we r the WORST upvote if ur listening to this in 2012 :))))

1 hours later 3101173 Anonymous
It romanticizes without waxing eloquent. Consider the structure: so much depends >immediately there is a narrative constructed: there is a dependence, and it's qualified: so much upon >Why the use of "upon" and not "on" for simplicity's sake? The upon is signifying that it is not merely dependence, not only subsistence, it is life and not merely survival a red wheel barrow >enjambment is a pause and a break and the essential point is the wheel: primitive even in the modern, our reliance on such a basic thing glazed with rain water >notice also that this has been 4/2 3/2 4/2 meter, not just short but dramatically truncated, as if cut off, the poem is consistently alluding to "so much" by the lack of presence of "so much" and the muchness not being defined >here again we see this enjambment, rain and water are separated, and again it is primitive, rain a primal force and the water is the glaze >also bear in mind how much action has been related: people live and die by this wheelbarrow working or not working, it is raining and the wheelbarrow is at rest, not being used, it is silent and still and hence glazed beside the white chickens >summation of scene and the chickens complete the rural setting; two purposes in one for something as simple as chickens >the imagery in this poem is consistent, clear, and tells a story, albeit an ambiguous story, while also being not a story but only a piece, a phonetic photograph The linguistic associations of this poem are often touted, as well, although to be frank that's not something I study or know too much about. I don't much like Williams, but when you really weigh in on the concept of "economical", the most use from the least currency, then you have to admit WCW excelled at that.

1 hours later 3101178 Anonymous (flower02.jpg 1200x804 88kB)
>My hand grazes >upon >A shriveled crusty >penis >as blood drains >flaccid >and then smells >a finger God I'm so deep I use Onion websites. :/

2 hours later 3101182 Anonymous
>>3101173 the curtains are just blue

2 hours later 3101186 Anonymous
>>3101182 The enemy's gate is down.

2 hours later 3101188 Anonymous
>>3101182 "The man who calls a spade a spade should keep to shovels to earn his keep."

2 hours later 3101189 Anonymous (GAT DAYUM.gif 514x104 86kB)
>>3101182 < pic related dude above was responding to got bodybagged i don't think that poem is good because it doesn't give enough to let you extrapolate on what it doesn't give

2 hours later 3101199 Anonymous (1280709614326.jpg 400x736 42kB)
>>3101189

2 hours later 3101203 Anonymous
>>3101199 what? i'm not that guy also responded after two other people did was saying dude i was quoting bodybagged the deconstructing fella

2 hours later 3101213 Anonymous
>>3101203 And I'm saying you're retarded and so's he. And that wasn't deconstruction.

2 hours later 3101220 Anonymous (it's called a dradel.gif 286x204 856kB)
>>3101213 protect this dick prescriptivist loser *pop*

2 hours later 3101227 Anonymous (1279501201614.png 616x1024 424kB)
>>3101220 Stick to digging ditches and leave thinking to thinkers.

2 hours later 3101232 Anonymous (1350379093471.png 250x331 37kB)
>>3101227 dam those 4chan trolls YOU GOT ME AGAIN lol

2 hours later 3101237 Anonymous
>>3101227 awful dichotmization, ridiculously inane and unrelated may-may picture posting and an inability to realize the horrible flaws present in your own line of reasoning leave fucking /lit/ if you can't stop shitposting

2 hours later 3101241 Anonymous (1350191740031.gif 290x260 1726kB)
>>3101232

2 hours later 3101245 Anonymous
>>3101237 I'm not the one whose entire argument rests on the proposition "it is what it is," as if literature contains no abstraction.

2 hours later 3101246 Anonymous
The question is if this wasn't written by a famous poet would anyone care?

2 hours later 3101261 Anonymous
>>3101246 Crazy idea here, but maybe he's a famous poet because people read poems like this and cared, and your entire reasoning is bass-ackwards?

2 hours later 3101263 Anonymous (BIG TER-RRRRAAAAA-AAAANCE!.gif 320x180 739kB)
>>3101245 dead @ placing words into my post i said the nigga got bodied do you know what bodied means? no, you don't, because u can't in2 vernacular enjoy ur prescribed bubble of constrained "abstraction" u fairy faggot fucc lol get gigaburned

2 hours later 3101264 Anonymous (this is a shit.png 522x374 23kB)
>>3101261 >bass-ackwards

2 hours later 3101266 Anonymous
>>3101261 pretty sure this is never the case in academia where poets like this fly or flounder u gotta succ some big dicc 2 get wit da big fish u feel me shun

2 hours later 3101279 Anonymous
>>3101266 >poets like this fly or flounder Yeah, and this one flew, so the idea that "we read it because it's famous," is still inane. It's famous because it got read. It took flight, we don't read it because it's a famous poet, it's a famous poem because it was and still is read. That "we only read it because it's a famous poem" is completely contradictory to what fame means and implies. If it hadn't been widely read, it wouldn't be famous now.

2 hours later 3101323 Anonymous
>>3101279 first of all i said poet not poem stop trying to ascribe shit i didn't say to what i did second i'm that dude fuckface that earns a dose of big bird dicc *big bird diccs* hope u enjoyed faggot 3rd you missed the point, the poem got famous because he sucked dick and not because of its own merits which is the reason why its widely read now, no shit it got famous b/c it got read but he got famous b/c he sucked academic dicc

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