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Ep 80 - How to Read Poetry for Personal Growth
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Benjamin McAvoy
Welcome back to Hardcore Literature. Your favourite book club deep dives into the greatest books ever written. Provocative poems, evocative epics and life changing literary analyses. We don't just read the great books, we live them together. We'll suck the marrow out of Shakespeare, Homer, Tolstoy and many more. We'll relish the most moving art ever committed to the page and stage from every age. Join us as and me, your host, Benjamin McAvoy on the Reading adventure of a lifetime with Hardcore Literature. Hello everybody. How are you doing today? I hope you're doing well and I hope your reading is going well. Today we are talking about poetry. And there was a time in which I did not read poetry. I did not listen to poetry. And that was a time in which. In which I was much closer to living. The condition of poetry itself. Infancy and childhood. Yes, we enjoy ballads and songs and nursery rhymes when we are little. But the kind of immersion in great poetry, the swimming in language and symbol, imagery and sound that I want to talk about today, that kind of poetry appreciation came during my formative years in which it was most starkly apparent that I was transitioning from childhood to adulthood. And we see constantly in poetry, through a proliferation of different aesthetic techniques and rhetorical devices, that poets are constantly trying to return to the golden era, which is the time of their childhood. Or perhaps it's even a primitive, primordial time. Perhaps when we read great poetry, we feel a return to our collective childhood. When we read great poetry, we are overwhelmed with a strange, uncanny sense of familiarity, a nostalgic sense that we have been here before and perhaps we have even lived before. And William Wordsworth wrote that there was a time when meadow, grove and stream, the earth and every common sight to me did seem apparelled in celestial light, the glory and the freshness of a dream. So what's he saying? Once upon a time, and that time is now gone. It is not now. There was a time where he would look out at nature, this beautiful land gifted to us. He would look and it would seem as though every meadow, grove and stream was dressed in the divine, apparelled in celestial light. But he goes on and says that it is not now as it hath been of yore. Turn wheresoe'er I may, by night or day, the things which I have seen, I now can see no more. In poetry we discern an anxiety around sight and light and seeing. In the great poems we get a sense that we have moved away over the course of our lives from the realm of light. And if we are moving away from the light, then what is the realm? We are currently we are in a realm of darkness. When Milton invokes his muse and asks to be divinely inspired, to gift him the divine inspiration, Light inward light. When we ask for light, what is that a tip off to? We do not need light. When the sun is up and we can see everything clearly, we ask for light. When times are dark, we ask for for light in order to see. And great poetry helps us to see. It helps us to see the world around us and perhaps stop taking it for granted. It helps us to see the truth as well, the truth about us, the truth about our situation. It helps us tune in to what's going on inside us and what's going on around us. But we ask for light when we find ourselves in darkness. And we erect myths, great mythological stories about heroes and villains. And we do this part because myth encodes important messaging. It encodes wisdom. And the stark imagery, the vivid visuals, ensures that wisdom endures and is passed down the ages. As Lauren Isley said, men have long memories when memories are clothed in myth. And the mythological seems to me to be largely decorative, largely embellishment. That's what great allegory does. It dresses things up. As Wallace Stevens taught us, metaph are like hermits dressed up. And we can trace every metaphor, every image, back to the first image, which is the sun. We go out into nature early in the morning and we witness the rising of the sun and are bearing witness to the sunrise assures us that we are here, we are alive, and we are living another day. And then at the end of the day, the sun goes down, darkness descends, the witching hour descends. Bad things happen at night. Bad things happen, happen in the darkness. And we have long found comfort in the rising of the sun. It's bathing the landscape in celestial light. And then as the generations pass on, we construct these stories. We construct stories about good and evil. How do we talk about good and evil? We talk about light versus dark. This is relentlessly reused symbolism, light versus dark, good versus evil, sight versus blindness. And I know for me personally, in my own darkest times and the darkest times, we're talking about darkness of the soul, inner darkness. Those dark times are made all the darker when the witching hour is upon us. And when the clock creeps ever closer and perhaps even beyond midnight, we get to a certain part of the night when the sun seems to be a distant memory and we get all of these intruding thoughts. We worry about everything. We worry about our mortality. The Mortality of those we love. We worry about meaning. What's the meaning of it all? In my own darkest times, those times in which I began to think that there was no meaning. And I began to think that not in a liberating way. Because very often thoughts that are ostensibly nihilistic can provide a comfort. Because if there is no objective meaning, then we are free to designate our meaning. And if we designate our meaning, then we have the power to make of our lives what we want them to be. I'm talking about those times in which you start to get these really dark, pernicious, insidious thoughts to be or not to be. We start to wonder whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. To die. To sleep in those dark times in which I found myself wishing that this too too sallied flesh would melt Thor and resolve itself into a Jew. When I have found myself wishing that the everlasting had not fixed his cannon gainst self slaughter, when the world seems like an unweeded garden and things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. In those darkest times, poetry has been my lifeline. Poetry has kept me going. I recite the soliloquies of the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet, and I am able to think everything through in Shakespeare's sublime meter making argument. To borrow a brilliant description from Ralph Waldo Emerson. I can think it all through. I can live vicariously. The thinking has been done for us before us by men and women who are us, and were us and will continue to be us. It's been done very, very well. And all of that thinking can be useful to us, can guide us through our own turmoil. And so I wanted to talk today about how to read poetry for powerful self growth. That's what we'll call this discussion. We might begin by wondering if that's even possible, if that's even to be desired. Should we be reading poetry for self growth? Can we indeed? This is a question that hooks onto the art for art's sake versus art as having social and moral utility Debate. Oscar Wilde, one of my personal favourite writers of all time, along with Shakespeare and Joyce. If I could meet any of my literary heroes, my favorite writers, Wilde would most certainly be one of my top choices. Wilde is absolutely fantastic. Oscar Wilde said in his preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray, which is a sublime artistic manifesto with heavy heapings of irony, beautifully wrought, satirical, really socially astute. That manifesto is most certainly worth revisiting. Every single year. Revisit it on a very regular basis and think about it. Think about it as you grow. Oscar Wilde, in that preface, told us that all art is quite useless. Now, this manifesto certainly hits on some universal truths, but we could also see it as a manifesto for the Belle Epoque and the decadent movement around the turn of the 19th century, going into the 20th century. The Fanticiecle. Whilst Wilde is one of the writers that I instinctively reach for as a defender of or a proponent for the art for art's sake argument, I do see social critiques, satirical social commentary in that manifesto, which was a response to how the first critics responded to Dorian Gray. And as you may know, it wouldn't be too long after publishing Dorian Gray that Oscar Wilde would be convicted of gross indecency and he was sent to prison. Not only was he sent to prison, and not only did he have to endure a scathing trial that was splashed all over the headlines, not only was he sent to prison, but he was sentenced to hard labor. And it would seem that this ended up breaking Oscar Wilde's beautiful soul. He wrote this manifesto around the time that Dorian Gray was being dragged through the mud as an immoral book, because Wilde wanted to say, there's no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written, and that's it. The artist, he wrote, is the creator of beautiful things. And indeed, we might wonder about the different shades, the different nuances, the different permutations of what we might call beautiful. Because indeed, if we take one of my favourite poets, Robert Browning, as an example, his poetry is quite brilliantly ugly. It's grotesque. And thinking of Edmund Burke's philosophical treatise on the sublime versus the beautiful, we might wonder, well, does the artist not create sublime things? There is a difference. If we're thinking in Burkean terms, then the beautiful is delicate, soft, maybe miniscule, whereas the sublime is powerful. Some of the greatest poems of all time are about mountains and crashing, roaring, violent waves and wild animals. But we could put all of that under the umbrella of beautiful. Anything that impresses us, anything that we cherish because it delights us in and for itself, not because of what it can do, not because a poem can bring about social change, not because a poem or a short story or a novel can inspire us to be better. But I personally don't think that Wilde really fully bought into this. Despite being a disciple of Walter Pater and John Ruskin, we can see that the dandy figure and Wilde most certainly fits the criteria of a dandy has a lot to say about society, and if we have a lot to say about society, then the implicit or the unsaid, the assumption is that things could be better or we could be better. The dandy and the flaneur are social commentators. We might think that Oscar Wilde's manifesto was partly born out of a need to defend himself from the fire raining down on him from a hypocritical Victorian public. Wilde would say in his manifesto that to reveal art and conceal the artist is the artist's aim. But of course, many of us are reading Tolstoy, many of us are reading George Eliot and Victor Hugo, and we might say that we hear their voices overwhelmingly in their universes. But those three are examples of writers who come immediately to mind when one wants to think of art as having social utility and moral purpose. We hear their voices to the overwhelming extent, the same overwhelming extent, that we do not hear Shakespeare's voice. And in that preface, Oscar Wilde would say that the highest, as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Now, this is brilliant and shows that Oscar Wilde was a very, very clever man, very, very sensitive, very, very perceptive, a brilliant artist. But if one were to put forward an argument like this to those who were decidedly against not only your opinions or your ostensible opinions, but who you are, the very essence of who you are, or perhaps they're against whatever distortions have taken place in the marketplace of common opinion. They're against your Persona, and they take your Persona, they take your mask for who you really are. This argument is not going to endear one to another who is not on your side. And in the preface, Wilde said that those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. I love the qualifications that Wilde says in his most pithy maxims, the implication here being that corruption or a corrupt individual can be partly excused if they are charming. But he says, if you look at a piece of art and it's beautiful and you find an ugly meaning, well, then you're corrupt, and you don't even have the saving grace of being charming. This is a fault, he said, but those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. And we might think, well, hope for what? If art has no social or moral purpose, if art cannot help us improve, if art cannot make the world around us a better place, then what do we need of hope? Hope is tied to meaning. And if hope and meaning are connected with art, then the meaning of the art itself is not simple admiration for the thing being an exquisitely wrought piece of pottery or painting or poetry. It's not admiration just because it's beautiful. If there's hope for the individual who admires the beautiful thing, then what does that mean? If we are hopeful for someone, then there is a sense of improvement or possible improvement. But during the age of degeneration, what social commentary was Wilde making? Again, keep in mind his work was trotted out as evidence for his moral decay. And he's basically saying, well, if you find a fault in this beautiful thing, then you are corrupt without being charming. But those of us who can see the beauty in the artwork, for us there is hope. And he would write in his preface that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The 19th century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. Now that needs some explanation. So at the time he's saying those readers who dislike realism, what they're really disliking is their own reflection. Art reflects something of ourselves. It reflects something of the truth of ourselves. And what is it we say? The truth hurts. Yeah, we need to sugarcoat the truth. And we do do that with art. We dress it up, we make truths funny, witty, pretty sounding. Caliban from the Tempest, the last play that Shakespeare wrote by himself. He would write a couple more in collabor. But the Tempest was his farewell piece to the theatre. Caliban is the. The monster creature and the well read among the 19th century certainly would have known who Caliban was. He was a popular character to meditate upon, to riff upon. We get Robert Browning channeling the voice of Caliban in one of his splendid dramatic monologues. So he's saying if you don't like realistic art, that's because you're a half human, half monster creature thing looking at your own face in the mirror. And then he further, and he said that the 19th century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. So he says, nothing's going to make you happy. If you see something that's realistic in art, you don't like it because it shows you who you are. But then if you read something romantic, something that's pure fairy tale mythological, then you get angry because you don't see yourself. So you're narcissistic, but you're also delicate and sensitive to the detriment of everybody around you. So he's Having a go at the entire era and we can understand why. And he said that no artist has ethical sympathies. And ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. All art, Wilde said, is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. And brilliantly, he said, it is the spectator and not life that art really mirrors. So it shows us something of ourselves. This isn't an objective mirror of reality, but what we see could very well be what we are. And then he ends his preface by saying, all art is quite useless. What a powerful way to pithily undercut everything he's just said. There is no way that Oscar Wilde finds all art to be quite useless. And after he was imprisoned, he wrote the Ballad of Reading Jail. They took everything away from him. They tried to disgrace him. They took his assets, took his money. They left him with very little. Hard labour was quite a punishment. It was a lot worse. It was a lot harsher than simple imprisonment. And you can see pictures of what Wilde's cell was like. And he spent a couple of years in horrid conditions doing back breaking labour. And when he came out, his soul was broken and he wrote this long ballad. And we can feel the pain coming through. We can hear the pain, we can hear the lamentation. And if all art is quite useless, then it would not be able to provide us with an outlet for our misery. And yet it does. And Oscar Wilde worked and reworked this ballad after his incarceration. And we feel the injustice coming through. We feel his trauma. We feel that this is a broken soul trying to reclaim something of who they are. It was originally published anonymously in order to help Wilde make a little bit of money. And the publisher said that never since Gray's Elegy, Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Never since then had a poem been so polished and relentlessly worked over and refined. The ballad goes like I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye upon that little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky. And at every drifting cloud that went with sails of silver by dear Christ, the very prison walls suddenly seemed to reel and the sky above my head became like a cask of scorching steel. And though I was a soul in pain, my pain I could not feel. Can you imagine being in such overwhelming pain that you cannot even feel your own pain anymore? We read poetry because we. Though fortune may not have slammed us quite as viciously as Wilde had been slammed, we do connect with the sentiment and it does alleviate some of our distress, it does soothe us, it comforts us. We read poetry for kinship and companionship. Heaven knows that we need a whole lot more than we currently have. And the ballad goes on to say that each man kills the thing he loves. By each let this be heard. Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word the coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword Some kill their love when they are young and some when they are old Some strangle with the hands of lust, Some with the hands of gold the kindest use a knife because the dead so soon grow cold Some love too little, some too long Some sell and others buy Some do the deed with many tears and some without a sigh. For each man kills the thing he loves. Yet each man does not die, he does not die a death of shame on a day of dark disgrace, Nor have a noose about his neck, nor a cloth upon his face, nor drop feet foremost through the floor into an empty space. He does not sit with silent men who watch him night and day, who watch him when he tries to weep and when he tries to pray, who watch him lest him self should rob the prison of its prey. Some poets pen in order to vent, to rail, to soothe. And we are afforded that same opportunity to vent, to rail and to be soothed when we recite poetry. A poem memorized, a poem learnt by heart, is a gift that constantly comforts. Great poetry with its cadence, with its rhythm, with its imagery, when we store it inside us can be a mantra, poetry can be prayer. And poetry can be self talk, it can be visualization. And so how do we begin possessing poetry? How do we obtain these poems and store them inside us? How can we walk around in the world and instantly call up our favourite poems in times of need, in times of stress and woe, we begin with recitation. And understandably, many relative newcomers to poetry might feel a little bit apprehensive when it comes to reciting poetry, to reading it and rereading it, reading it aloud in order to learn it off by heart. They'll think, who am I to recite this poem? Maybe I'm not doing it well, maybe I'm not reading it correctly. But there's a brilliant sentiment that comes from the Hadiths. And the sentiment is the one who recites the Quran and falters therein and finds it difficult, will have a double reward. What does that mean? It means that some will recite their scripture beautifully, with beautiful voice, great timbre, dulcet tones, they'll recite the verses perfectly. But he or she who recites and trips over their words, falters, makes a mistake, stops and starts, gets it wrong, tries again. The rewards for the person doing that kind of recitation are so much greater. And the very interesting thing with recitation of the Quran is that there are many translations into English. But even Muslims who do not speak Arabic or who aren't fluent in Arabic, they will recite the verses in the original. And so we can learn a couple of things with this approach, this scriptural approach. The first thing we can learn is that we should read and recite and relish even if we do not understand, because the music of it means that it is beautiful even without conscious understanding. But sound and sense are connected. And often we can get an understanding of the sense, or we can get a sort of unconscious understanding or some kind of understanding, even if the words are beyond our comprehension. As Oscar Wilde said, art is at once both surface and symbol, and symbol is below the surface, below the level of conscious thought. So we should feel emboldened to recite even if we do not understand and enjoy the musicality of it. But that recitation is also an act of worship in and of itself. And if you think about what you're doing when you are worshipping, it's a condition of gratitude, It's a grounded condition. It's a condition of presence, being in the present moment. And so these are good approaches to bring into our appreciation of poetry. And why do we recite to the point of possessing the poetry? Well, we might ask Nelson Mandela, who was incarcerated for 27 years, another unjust imprisonment, just like that of Oscar Wilde's. He was imprisoned for his anti apartheid activism, and Nelson Mandela credited a poem for giving him the power to endure his unjust situation. The poem that Nelson Mandela would regularly recite was William Ernest Henley's Invictus. And Mandela wrote that poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok. A sjambok is a whip. So poetry cannot block a bullet and it cannot stop a whip, but it can bear witness to brutality. So again, think about inviting some light into your life. Being able to see. That's what great poetry helps us to do. It helps us see, and it helps others see. It shines a light where there is darkness. So, no, it can't stop a bullet, it can't stop a whip. But Mandela said it can bear witness to brutality, thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. This is the poem that Mandela would Recite. Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole. I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. So again, we have this idea of darkness. Yeah, we're in a darkened state. We're in a condition of nighttime that seems to be stretching on. And yet we have an invocation, a prayer to the divine. And that's why we can treat poetry as worship, particularly poetry like this. I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. This is powerful self talk. When you feel anything but unconquerable. When you feel weak, you want to start telling yourself you are strong. Because if you start telling yourself you're weak or buying into it, then you're in real trouble. Where there is no vision, the people perish. And we must have a vision for who we want to be. And so in our darkest moments, we might say, I'm thanking the universe for my unconquerable soul. You can take everything else away from me, but you will not conquer who I am at my core. And the poem Invictus goes on. In the fell clutch of circumstance, I have not winced or cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance. My head is bloody but unbowed. Yeah. So circumstance. We can choose how we're going to respond in any given moment. We can't choose our circumstances. We're thrown into this world. That is the existentialists dilemma. We're thrown into this world and we have to play catch up. And bad things happen to good people. But despite that, I have not winced nor cried aloud. And chance can bludgeon me. And my head may be bloody, but it's unbowed. I love the defiance in this poem. Beyond this place of wrath and tears looms but the horror of the shade and yet the menace of the years finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Those who have read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning may recall the part of the book where he talks about a soldier who felt as though the war was just about to end. The end of the war was coming. It was just around the corner. But when it did not come, and when the war continued to stretch on, that prisoner fell victim to tuberculosis and died. And Frankl said it seemed as though the tuberculosis had killed him, but really it was the loss of hope. Other prisoners, like Nelson Mandela, would have told themselves something very, very powerful and the language of Invictus is rather close to the sort of thing that Viktor Frankl would speak about. He spoke about the last freedom or the last liberty, where they literally could take everything away from you, absolutely everything. But there was always a part of you that was unconquerable and that gave him enough courage, enough hope and sense of purpose and meaning to persevere. And those of you who have read Hesketh Pearson's biography of Shakespeare, brilliant book. It begins with an autobiographical note and Hesketh Pearson tells us about his time during the First World War in Mesopotamia. And he really went through the wringer and it looked like he was going to die. And he ended up crediting Falstaff and Shakespeare for saving his life. Whilst he was in a hospital bed, he recited his favorite scenes from Henry iv. He called this the Falstaff cure, and it saved him. And in my darkest moments, Shakespeare has saved me, Shakespeare has saved me, the Psalms have saved me, the prose poetry of Herman Melville's Moby Dick has saved me. And Emily Bronte's poetry has saved me. Talking about using recitation as a method to store poetry in our souls so that we can carry it around and be reminded of the unconquerable nature of our soul. Speaking of using poetry as mantra and powerful self talk, Emily Bronte's no Coward Soul is Mine is a great one to learn by heart, and it's very achievable too. It's just seven stanzas and it has a very regular, reliable, familiar a B, a B rhythm. Each stanza is four lines with alternating rhymes. Remember that poetry is mnemonic in nature. That rhythm, that rhyme are like hooks in our minds and carry the message. The rhyme and the meter is the vehicle for the message. And this message in Emily Bronte's poem is a very, very good one. Emily Bronte was published under her pseudonym of Ellis Bell, along with her sisters Charlotte and Anne. The pseudonyms were Ellis Currer and Acton Bell. The story is that Charlotte Bronte discovered this poem and discovered the poetry in the writing of her little sister generally and wanted it published. And she kind of forced the situation a little bit. And Emily was very upset, but she was talked into it. She was upset because she wanted to remain anonymous. But luckily for us, they got her poetry into publication. And Charlotte would later describe her sister's solitary novelistic masterpiece, that's Wuthering Heights. And unfortunately, Emily Bronte did not live long enough to write another novel. Emily Bronte, who was a chainless soul. That's a quote from her old stoic Emily Bronte had a hard life. She suffered from anorexia her whole life and then died of tuberculosis at the age of 30. Charlotte Bronte described her Wuthering Heights, which is the kind of novel that only a poet could write. She described it as hewn out of a wild workshop. Brilliant way of describing it. And that novel is extraordinary and gifts us Cathy and Heathcliff, who seem to exist both internally in Emily and also come from her own family history. The windswept moors are brilliantly captured in that novel, captured by a writer who spent hours at a time walking across them. And her poetry, to me is inextricably bound up with this novel. I imagine Emily trudging across those moors and chanting this poem to herself. No coward soul is mine no trembler in the world's storm troubled sphere I see heaven's glories shine and faith shines equal, arming me from fear. This is powerful self talk. And she says, vain are the thousand creeds that move men's hearts. Unutterably vain, worthless as withered weeds or idlest froth amid the boundless main. But her faith comforts her and she looks around the landscape and sees the essence of infinity. She feels wide embracing love and says to God, thy spirit animates eternal years, pervades and broods above changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears. Though earth and man were gone, and suns and universes ceased to be, and Thou were left alone, every existence would exist in thee. There is not room for death nor atom that his might could render void. Thou, Thou art being and breath, and what that thou art may never be destroyed. I remember one of the first poems that really touched me or impressed upon me the power that poetry has to give voice to the sorts of emotions that we don't typically have the courage to give voice in society. Or perhaps we feel as though we shouldn't. We need to dress everything up in decorum, in polite society. And there's. There's a real reason for that. We can't just go around lamenting and wailing and venting. But sometimes we need to, sometimes we need to. And a poem gives us the space to do that. The first poem, or one of the first poems, because there were a few that really impressed me with his power. But it wasn't until many years later, after I first read it, that it would really impress me. One of the first poems was Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night. The story goes that Dylan Thomas composed this villanelle whilst in the hospital whilst his father was dying. And this is what he wanted to say to his father, we think he didn't actually say this to his father, but in this space, in this poem that he created, he was able to say it. And in our reading of it, we are able to in a very healthy way, because poetry is a very healthy outlet. Plug into that expression. He wanted to say to his father as he was dying, do not go gentle into that good night. It sends a chill through me. He's saying, you're dying, but do not go gentle. That's an imperative, an instruction. He's saying, I know you're gonna die, but I don't want you to go down without a fight. And this may not be fair on the part of us because we are assuming Persona when we read a poem, we are somebody, yeah, we're either being spoken to or we are the ones doing the speaking through the poet's voice. And here we are, the child imploring our parent to not go into that good night Gently. Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. He says, you my father there on the sad height Curse, Bless me now with your fierce tears. I pray, do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And once again we see light. Yeah, light continues to be the ultimate obsession, the ultimate preoccupation in almost every great poem. We know that light is good and poetry itself is a light. Now, of course, whilst Dylan Thomas is imploring his father not to go gentle into that good night, we see that a poem by Philip Larkin takes a more comedic tone to convey a sense of emotional indebtedness to our caregivers, to our fathers and our mothers. And Larkin. Larkin writes, and fair warning, I have to swear immediately because there's a swear word in this poem. Larkin writes, they fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had and add some extra just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn by fools in old style hats and coats who half the time were soppy, stern and half at one another's throats. Man, hands on misery to man it deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can and don't have any kids yourself. And that might be a bit more comedic than Thomas's poem, but they're kind of. They're kind of dealing with the same topic. In Dylan Thomas, we hear that Pain of losing a parent. We get the emotional power come through. And with Philip Larkin, we get something a bit more cognitive. We get a thinking through in comedic terms. I'm all messed up because of my parents, but let's cut them some slack, let's give them a break, because it all gets passed down through the generations. We don't realize how we ourselves were parented, what our parents were like to us, until this is what parents tell me. We have kids ourselves, and then we say, I see my father or I see my mother, and I understand why they did what they did. And we're really careful and cautious not to mess them up the way we felt like we might have been messed up. And the loss of a parent is one of the most difficult things that we will experience. We will go through, and everybody will go through it. Everybody will lose someone they love, someone close to them, unless we beat them to it. Death is a fact of life. We must make our peace with it. And the Stoics tried to help us, tried to teach us, tried to prepare us and help us live and die well. But I think one of the reasons why losing a parent in particular is so painful is because then the reality of needing to assume the role oneself becomes all the more apparent. This doesn't necessarily mean we actually have kids, but we must now parent ourselves. The child is the father of the man. That line is from the very same Wordsworth poem that we opened with. The loss of a parent is all the more devastating for the fact that we must now reconcile, we are forced to reconcile that we are either parentless without our parents, or we ourselves must parent ourselves. And I think part of the gift of poetry, part of the wonderful thing about assimilating these lines of poetry, learning to appreciate poetry, one of the gifts is that we can learn to better parent ourselves. Because, cliche and New age sounding though it might be, it is a truth that within us we have both child and parent. And we're always navigating and consciously or unconsciously thinking about how best to govern ourselves, how best to parent ourselves. We ask ourselves, well, what kind of ruler do we want to be? I am the master of my fate. It's that line from Invictus. I am the captain of my soul. Soul. It's quite a heavy responsibility to be master of your fate. And bear in mind that Nelson Mandela recited this when fate really flexed its unfair powers upon him in the fell clutch of circumstance in a prison cell. Yet despite those narrow, claustrophobic surroundings, those harsh conditions, he said to himself, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. It's a huge responsibility to be the captain of one's soul. And as we read through great poetry, we are navigating a sea of troubles. We're learning how to live. We're learning how to love, love others and love ourselves. And part of that with poetry, like with any great imaginative literature, part of that blessing arises from vicarious learning. When we read a poem, we should try to see absolutely everything the poet wants us to see. Feel everything, hear everything, Clear everything else away for the time being. Push those worries about tomorrow and the past out of your mind and connect with the here and now. Flex those imaginative powers and experience the poem as fully as you can. Bring yourself fully to it. Whilst poetry can be seen as a vent, an emotional venture, there is some poetry that will hit really close to home, and it will be painful to recite it. It's painful to read Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night for many people who've been through the exact same experience. But studies have shown that there is great utility in replaying either the events that led to one's trauma or similar events and vicariously experiencing it, because you get to think through everything, you get to assimilate it, and you get to learn to deal with it. The cave we fear to enter holds the treasure we seek. That's Joseph Campbell. If we do not look the monster in the face, it grows in size. If we turn our backs on it, it looms larger behind us. But if we look it right in the face, we become masters of our fate. You become the captain of your soul. And there is a conversational element when it comes to poetry. Now, I think when we're wrestling with any great imaginative literature, we want it conversational. We're talking to ourselves. We're also talking to the author across time, across boundaries and barriers. It doesn't matter if they speak a different language. It doesn't matter if they're from a completely different social climate. We are learning to speak to them, and therefore learning to speak to not only all kinds of people who we encounter in our lives, but ourselves as we change, because we are not the same from day to day or year to year. And it's important to think of poetry as a conversation, not only because we are reciting it aloud and giving voice to it, but because that is where knowledge is to be found, not just in conversation, but in difficult conversation that pushes our boundaries or forces us out of our comfort zone. Vygotsky who did a lot to further our understanding about child psychology and developmental psychology, found that knowledge is built through interaction and insights arise from feedback. Getting feedback from Vygotsky. We get this idea of the zone of proximal development. We have a comfort zone, but we don't want to be in that zone. We want to be just beyond it. We just want to be pushing our comfort zone a little bit because that is where growth happens. So yes, growth is painful because it has to be. And pivoting into the pain can often lead to growth. And so how do we develop that? How do we push our comfort zone with poetry? Well, we read it alone. Then we read it aloud to ourselves. Then we read it to another aloud. Then we muse upon it. If there's a particular line that strikes you, that resonates with you, write it down in your journal and write around it. Note the response and note how your thoughts change over time. When you possess a poem in your soul, you get to carry it around and you get to constantly refer back to it, and you get to use it as a yardstick for your own self growth. None of this is particularly easy. Now, it might be joyful and it's definitely rewarding, but it's not an easy thing to do. It's just difficult enough to force that growth that we're after. Now. Poetry appreciation is difficult, or it can be difficult, especially if we haven't done a lot of it, if we're still getting used to it as an activity. One entrance that I like when it comes to poetry, and this is an entrance I'm constantly taking, even today, if I encounter a work that I do not immediately understand, I use sound as an entrance. Meter and sound. Sound will lead to sense, meter leads to meaning. And Ezra Pound told us that literature is simply language charged with meaning. And great literature is language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. And Pound would tell us that there are three ways to charge language with meaning. Phanopoeia and logopoeia. Melopoeia means musicality. And Pound thought that the ancient Greeks were best when it came to this poetic domain. Phanopoeia means visuals, the throwing or the projecting of an image on the mind's eye. And Pound thought that the Eastern languages that use pictographs, like kanji were best at this. And then we have logopoeia, which is like figurative language. In my opinion, this is where English excelled. When you encounter a poem, try and peg it and see which domain it fits within. Primarily is the pleasure it gifts us. Primarily musical or visual or figurative, does it use interesting metaphors? Now, in a recent episode of Coffee With Hardcore Literature, our Q and A show, I gave some poetry assignments and I recommended four poems. One of those poems was Alfred Lord Tennyson's the Eagle. And I gave a specific assignment for each poem. For the Eagle, specifically, because it's a very short poem, the assignment was to learn it by heart. Now, a great way to learn this one by heart is to really focus on the sounds, the alliteration, the repetition of consonant sounds. Let's read that poem briefly together, and as you listen, latch onto the words, see everything in your mind's eye, and when you come to recite it yourself, roll the words around in your mouth, like wine tasting or whiskey tasting, or maybe popping a nice piece of dark chocolate with complex flavors, multiple flavours in your mouth. Roll the words around and maybe you might want to ponder why the poet chose one word over another. What different words could you substitute in? And what would the connotation be if you swapped them in and out? Here's the eagle from Alfred Lord Tennyson. He clasps the crack with crooked hands close to the sun in lonely lands ringed with the azure world he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls. He watches from his mountain walls, and like a thunderbolt he falls. Now, this is a very fine poetic vintage from 1851. Alfred Lord Tennyson was poor poet laureate. If you like Tennyson, then he has a lot of great poetry to get through. Ulysses is a great one. That's a dramatic monologue that, if you're feeling confident, is well worth committing to memory. His Tithonus is brilliant as well. The woods decay. The woods decay and fall. And we have his Mariana, which is like a perfect ballad. Or one could choose any number of brilliant passages from his In Memoriam, a long, haunting work, like much of his work, is inspired by his relationship with Arthur Hallam, his dear, dear friend who encouraged his poetry writing, who unfortunately passed away at a very young age. Tennyson was said to have known the weight and length of every English word, except perhaps for scissors. And it's interesting to think about weight because English verse accentual syllabic, whereas French, say, is just accentual. That means in English we alternate from unstressed to stressed syllables or vice versa, from positions of stress to no stress or less stress. Whereas in the prosody of classical Greek, it is all about duration, long versus short. And so Tennyson really did an extraordinary job rendering classical duration, or as close to it as possible, and conveying the effect of it in the English breath. But there's a lot of cool things going on in the eagle. We hear that alliteration clasps the crag with crooked hands. K, K, K. This is known as vila alliteration. That's where you repeat a K sound. K, K. We see that the eagle is like a personification for the poet himself. It's like a metaphor, isn't it? Yes, we see this sublime creature all alone in the heights of nature. But perhaps that eagle is a stand in for us. Perhaps we feel like an outsider surveying the wrinkled sea beneath us. What a beautiful image. With every line you want to commit the sounds, but you also want to work on committing very definite, strong imagery to your mind. And I think that's a very easy image to remember. A wrinkle sea, that's the delight of poetry. A sea described as wrinkled. You can see it all, can't you? You can see the waves, the billowing waves from that great height. And like a thunderbolt the eagle falls. Like that's a simile. He's like a thunderbolt. He's not a thunderbolt itself, but he's like a thunderbolt. A good experiment for this very short poem in particular is to recite it focusing only on the visuals. Then recite it focusing on the sound. And that means try to push the visuals out of your mind. Try to push the meaning out of your mind and focus only on the sound and play around with it and see which one is more effective when it comes to latching on and creating hooks in your mind. If you really want to take this experiment to the next level, then I recommend you rifling through some of Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry, which is very, very challenging if you feel the obligation to untangle the meaning immediately. But it's a pure delight. It's great joy reciting his poetry if you're focusing only on sound, not sense. I recommend checking out His Pied Beauty, which is a curtal sonnet, a form invented by Hopkins. And that poetic vintage comes from 1877. But we might say that it continued to mature in that it was not published until 1918, almost 30 years after the death of this devotional poet, this Jesuit priest, because he was discovered largely posthumously, very much like Emily Dickinson. And his work would go on to be incredibly influential, exert a huge influence upon the modernist poets. Gerard Manley Hopkins is both reminiscent of the Romantic poets and the devotional poets that came before him, but he's also incredibly forward looking too. When we say Gerard Manley Hopkins, we think sprung rhythm, which was his unique way of writing verse, as opposed to standard English metrical practices. And it's beyond the scope of this discussion here to explain it, but he goes into great detail, depth in his own personal writings and much of his poetry has diacritic marks pointing out where to put the stress. So a lot of the sense comes from the sound. The sound is very, very important. But essentially sprung rhythm is about compression. Yeah. And great poetry is compressed a lot of the time. I'll never forget one of my most influential English teachers trying to convey the power of different forms of imaginative literature. He drew on the board a picture of a tree and he drew these oranges coming off the tree and he said that the tree was like a novel, the oranges themselves were like short stories. But the juice from the oranges, that's poetry. It's compressed, it's forced. There shouldn't be a stray or extraneous word in a great poem. Here's Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Glory be to God for dappled things for skies of coupled colour as a brinded cow for rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim fresh fire, coal chestnut falls, finches, wings, landscape plotted and pieced, Fold, fallow and plough, and all trades their gear and tackle and trim all things counter, original, spare, strange, whatever is fickle, freckled, who knows how with swift, slow, sweet, sour, a dazzle, dim he farthers forth whose beauty is past change, praise him. So when you go through your poems with an aim to commit them to memory, take heed of Ted Hughes's advice and try to find a single start visual that's incredibly embellished, colorful, vivid for each and every line. And so the lines themselves are connected by the images. So you want to hook them up, link them up. And indeed, there are many great poems from Ted Hughes himself that you could practice this technique on. I highly recommend his Thought Fox. That's a fun one to search out, but it's very important when you're trying to memorise everything, to make efforts to see everything as vividly as you can. And sports psychologists have long known and advised the world's top performing athletes to do exactly this. There are brain warm ups that emphasize seeing things. I like to start my day by making a list of concrete nouns through the Alphabet. A, B, C, D. I try to see something for every letter. Not only do I try to see it, but I feel it. I try to smell it. Perhaps we even try to taste it. And whilst I'm going about my morning routine, whilst I'm showering, whilst I'm getting ready. I'll do the same thing with the poems I've committed to memory. And when I recite them to myself, I see everything as powerfully as I can. This has a very real knock on tangible effect and improved one's visual spatial abilities. Another great technique for memorizing things. And if you're interested in this, we can talk about this in depth another time. But another great technique is that of the memory palace. And this was a technique that I used during my finals, during exams for my last year of university. Now, lawyers and medics are both high up there when it comes to the amount of things you need to memorize. If you're a lawyer, you need to memorize all of these different cases and the dates involved and the facts of the cases. After lawyers and medics, however, literature students, and indeed history students have an incredible amount that needs to be memorized as well. And I personally found storing everything I wanted to remember in a location in my mind to be really, really powerful. The idea of the memory palace comes from the poet Simonides, who was given the task of chanting a lyric poem at a banquet. Now he stepped outside and the roof fell in, killing everybody in the banquet hall to the point where one could not identify the bodies. But Simonides was able to identify them because he had memorized where each person was sitting. Identity was linked to location. He married idea and image together with space. The spatial and the story of Simonides comes to us from Cicero. And the play by play. The how to, when it comes to constructing a memory palace was given to us by Quintilian. These writers were talking about oration. Yeah. So memorization was a means to an end. Yeah, the end was performance. And that's something that's worth keeping in mind too, when we're reciting, when we're learning. Maybe you find it useful when trying to commit the soliloquies of Shakespeare to memory, to envision yourself as an Elizabethan or Jacobean actor. And opening night is not too far away. You need to commit them, these lines to memory for performance. The memory palace is an oration technique. But essentially you take the things you want to remember and you store them in a physical location in your mind. And it works very, very well. If the location is a real location that you are very familiar with. It can be a room in your house, it can be your entire house, it can be your route to work or school, but along the route or in the room you hang the things vividly in your mind that you want to remember in a sequence, the sequence in which you want to recall these items. Now, again, we can elaborate upon this another time. And if you would like to do any in depth walkthrough using this technique with a poem, then do let us know. But the really extraordinary thing about memorization and these memory techniques, these techniques can help us achieve some really lofty things. Now, I'm a huge proponent of minimal effective dose. I love the one page rule where you have a book you want to get through. Maybe you're tired at the end of the day, but if you make it easy to read that book, so you put it on your bedside. And if you tell yourself it's a win if you read one page, that's very, very easy to hit, even when you're not in the mood. Because we can always read one page, but that one page we hit, that, we have that success, that achievable win. And then we find that actually now we're in the swing of things. I kind of want to see what happens next. I'm enjoying it. I can do another page. One page turns into 5 pages, 10 pages, 20 pages, but it doesn't matter if we do not read beyond that one page. And so it's an easy, an easy goal. I'm all for that, and I'm all for easy goals and achievable goals when it comes to poetry. So let's memorize Alfred Lord Tennyson's the Eagle. It's only two stanzas. Each stanza is three lines. That means it's six lines. It's a poem with strong imagery and beautiful musicality. So it's not that hard to memorize to remember. But despite all of that, I'm also a huge believer in lofty goals because lofty goals are exciting. And just because something is lofty does not mean it is beyond the realms of possibility. So what's an example of a lofty goal when it comes to poetry recitation? Well, I can give you my lofty goals. One of my goals that I would love to achieve with storing poetry inside of me is to memorize the entirety of Paradise Lost book by book. I would also very much like to store all of my favourite soliloquies from Shakespeare inside me as well. Have a little think about what your lofty goal would be when it comes to poetry or literature generally. What really impressive thing would you like to achieve? Now, why do we memorize poetry? Keeping in mind Nietzsche's idea that he who has A why to live for can bear almost any how. The how the mechanics of poetry memorization become easy when we have a strong why. Well, for me, one of the reasons is the very same reason why I learnt to drink or even prefer black coffee. This was something I learnt from my father growing up. It wasn't always certain that they could have luxuries like sugar and milk. And so he taught himself when he started to drink coffee to appreciate black coffee. It's a mindset thing. It's like saying, well, in an emergency, I'm okay with the bare minimum, I'm okay. I don't need sugar, I don't need milk, I don't need anything fancy. Just give me straight black coffee that tastes like mud. And so I learned to do the same thing. But it's. There's a similar thing going on with memorizing. We're seeing a real issue these days with our imagination being decayed and our inability to appreciate the real world and to be grateful for the real why. Well, one of the reasons is we're inundated with the visual. We're seeing a problem with men in particular who are so overly exposed to pornographic material that they can no longer be aroused without it. Their imagination has decayed. And the real world, the appreciation for the real, has also decayed as well. Our minds are a great gift. Our minds and our bodies and they're intertwined and we mustn't take them for granted. One of the most frightening things to contemplate for me personally is the prospect of cognitive decline. And so if we cannot summon great stories, great poetry, great wisdom and life advice unless we have the book in front of us, then we are beholden to the book. We are beholden to particularities, things that could very easily be taken away from us. But if we think about that idea of our unconquerable soul, well, what we want to do is we want to store those things that are most special and nourishing to us in our soul. So that last liberty cannot be taken away from us. And that liberty is swollen to a great size. We often talk about the desert island books. Yeah, desert island books, Desert island discs. The perennial question, if you were washed up on a desert island, what books would you like to wash up with you? Now imagine if you were washed up on a desert island and no books washed up with you. Imagine if you were bed bound like Hesketh Pearson Ill during the First World War. Then what can we do? What if, like Cervantes, we were thrown in the slammer, Thrown in prison, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were born because Cervantes needed friends to keep him company while confined. Reading is living. And when we say live the great books, yes, we are of course referring to the vicarious experience when we have the book actually in front of us and we're seeing everything. But we're also reading when we're out and about, when we keep these characters and what they represent and what they can give us in our minds, when we're out in the world, when we're dealing with difficulty, when we're dealing with other people and trying to understand them. We are raised reading even when we don't have a book in front of us. Now, what enviable library can you create in your soul? Yeah, we've spoken before about the bookshelves in our souls. We can read at any time, in any place, at a moment's notice by taking down a volume from the bookshelf in our soul. And so, as we memorize, we are weaving the poetry, the great literature that moves us into the very fabric of our souls. Now, let's talk a little bit more about difficulty, because it is difficult to learn to assimilate poetry. But let's talk technicalities, because one of those difficulties is just practical. Yeah, practicalities of poetry. Recitation, habit, creation. We have a lot of things vying for our attention today, now more than ever before. So if we want to expand the bookshelf in our soul, we need to swap things out and swap in poetry, swap out those habits that no longer serve us, and swap in in poetry. Joseph Campbell told us that technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being. And today we're straying quite far away from our intuition. And poetry helps us reconnect. The digital world has given us many great things. If one carefully curates their digital world, sculpts and solicits to their aid beneficial things like poetry readings, great ebooks from Gutenberg, lectures, podcasts, then the digital can most certainly be our friend. It's extraordinary that we have more firepower in the palm of our hands and our pockets than the computers that launched the first space shuttle. And what do we sometimes or frequently use all this power, Fire. We use it to doom scroll whilst enduring our morning movements. And so the digital can be our friend if we use it wisely, if we use it as a tool in conjunction with our intuition. But it can also be quite damaging. A lot of people are experiencing body issues at this moment in time, a lot of people are feeling inadequate and insecure and anxious and depressed. And I think that part of the reason is because the digital realm can often be quite comparative. We go on these social media media sites and we scroll and we think that the world is burning down around us. And we also think that everybody else has it easier than us because people put out these really polished, highly varnished, unreal images of who they wish either themselves to be or who they wish others to perceive them as is out of line with reality. And so what do we need to do? We need to reconnect with our intuition. Spend time in nature. Spend time. Time with analog. That means paper. Yeah, spend time with paper and pen, writing and reading, and then go really analog and go out into the wide world, go out into solitude and nature, go into the woods with the poems that you've learned by heart and with your unconquerable soul. And so what you want to do as you're expanding your poetic appreciation is firstly, scaffold your reading of poetry onto your other pre established reading habits. For example, at the Hardcore Literature Book Club, which is at patreon.com hardcoreliterature, we have successfully solidified the habit of reading big books, big works of fiction, of regularly engaging with difficult works of literature. Big chunky novels. We have read thousand plus page sagas like War and Peace and the Tale of Genji. We have wrestled with theologically challenging novels like the Brothers Karamazov and aesthetically experimental novels like Ulysses and Gravity's Rainbow. And as part of that communal reading experience, we have found together that these big books are actually quite easy. They're immersive. It's easy to get lost in them, it's easy to want to read them. Think about that. Think about how impressive it is that War and Peace is a work that you cannot put down, that you don't want to put down now, because that reading habit is firmly established and easy, or relatively easy, because the television and social media is still clamoring for our attention, of course, because that's easy. Scaffold your poetry onto that habit as a starter. That means before you go into your reading, give yourself the task of reading one poem or reading a little bit of poetry for a few minutes. Another thing you can do is twin your poetry read reading with walking. Treat your poets as walking companions who you dialogue with. And indeed, there is no short supply of poems that deal with the topic of walking in nature. And many poems that I have by heart help me, regardless of the season. Tune into the beauty, the grandeur around me. One poem I have by a heart by virtue of teaching this. When I was teaching English as a second language, I used this poem for advanced students who specifically wanted to work on their pronunciation and so they would shadow my readings. I have this poem by Robert Frost by heart, and I like to summon it when I walk in nature. Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, Though he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods for up with snow the woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep. And here's another one to take into nature with you. This is Rudyard Kipling's the Way through the Woods. They shut the road through the woods 70 years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again. And now you would never know there was once a road through the woods before they planted the trees. Yet if you enter the woods of a summer evening, late when the night air cools on the trout ringed pools where the otter whistles his mate, they fear not men in the woods because they see so few. You will hear the beat of a horse's feet and the swish of a skirt in the dew, Steadily cantering through the misty solitudes as though they perfectly knew the old lost road through the woods. But there is no road through the woods. And here's another one. I'm not gonna go all day. But I definitely could. We could quote Seamus Heaney, we could quote Hardy, we could quote Yates. But here is John. I am yet what I am none cares or knows. My friends forsake me like a memory lost. I am the self consumer of my woes. They rise and vanish in oblivious host like shades in love and death's oblivion lost and yet I am and live with shadows tossed. I long for scenes where man has never trod. A place where woman never smiled or wept. There to abide with my Creator God and sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept. Untroubling and untroubled where I lie, the grass below, above the vaulted sky. Now, as you foray into poetry and swim in language, you will of course continue to confront difficulty. It's important to understand that immersion means making one's peace with nothing. Understanding. And those who have studied language learning know that obtaining fluency isn't a linear process. And it's also not contingent upon knowing absolutely everything. With language learning, context is key. Immersion is key, and we learn by osmosis. If we read Shakespeare and we look down at the annotations and we look up every single word. We are only going to cramp ourselves. It is much better to give ourselves a little ration. And we are only allowed to look up one word per page if we like, not every word. They did a study with readers where they presented them with Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange, which is very, very difficult to read because it's written in Burgess own sort of slang. And they gave them a test after reading and they did not let them look anything up. And they found that the readers understood and they understood by context. And we understand poetry like imaginative literature from context. And so we must contextualize. And that means narrate, read aloud, listen to narrations, perform, watch performances. Discussing and endeavoring to explicate and anti analyze will help us to acquire the poem. Learning to appreciate poetry like self improvement is not a linear process. And so we do not want to think of structuring our poetic appreciation by virtue of what we can learn, like learning grammar. How the schools teach grammar is incorrect because we do not acquire in a linear fashion. Some really complex grammatical constructions come to us quite intuitively before seemingly simple ones ones. What we want to do is, as Isaac Asimov would phrase it in talking about his reading, we want to structure intensities of happiness, go with our bliss and our joy. And so it's important to give ourselves challenges and prescriptions and fun within a scope. So we designate a loose structure in which we read in order to encounter serendipity. And we must be at play. Yes, we are working. But if work is love made visible, as Khalil Gibran would say, then we are ultimately playing. And I think of Ted Gioia, who is a fantastic jazz critic. And in endeavoring to understand the influence that Louis Armstrong had upon jazz, he rationed his musical appreciation and he did not allow himself for many, many weeks to listen to any anything post Louis Armstrong. No Louis Armstrong just listen to everything that came before Armstrong. And then he could really see the great musicians influence when he broke that barrier. That's a fun experiment. It's one that we can use for poetry too. We could give ourselves the game of reading only that which came before Shakespeare or only that which came before Wordsworth for many weeks, even months at a time, and then break the flood barriers. That's one example of how we might want to approach poetry. Another thing to keep in mind if you're finding poetry difficult is this idea. I've seen this spoken about in context of watching things and I Can't quite remember where I saw this, but there's this concept of if you're watching, it's for you. Well, I believe the same thing in regards to great literature too. If you're reading, it's for you. But I don't understand. Understand, doesn't matter. If you're reading, it's for you. But I don't understand Shakespeare. Doesn't matter. If you're reading Shakespeare, it's for you. It works both ways. It works with content that makes us feel fear and dread and anxiety like the news. If we're watching, well, it's for us. It's tailored for us. If we're not, then it's not. We are the masters of our fate. We are the captains of our soul. We choose what we put in. And poetry is a great technique, template four powerful self growth. Because how we do anything is how we do everything. And if we think of poetry as being like the juice squeezed out of the orange, and what we are doing is we are appreciating the highest potential form or mode of literature, which is the highest thoughts. If you do not know how to read, for example, then how can you write? And if you can't write, then you can't think. Because we do not know what we think about something until we write about it or talk about it. But if we can't write well, then we cannot think well. And so it all starts with our reading. Reading well teaches us how to think well. It follows that the higher the quality of our reading, the higher the quality, the more refined our thinking becomes and therefore our speaking, our persuading, our communicating, our teaching and our loving. And so my imploration is this. Let us read the highest quality literature and think the best thoughts and say the best things. And if how we do anything is how we do everything, poetry is a great model for slow reading and re reading and introspection. Now, recently I did a little experiment where I tried to see if I could possibly get any value from speed reading. Now, I do have different gears and I think of a gear shift in a manual car. Different gears. When it comes to reading speed. If I'm reading for information and I'm searching for something specific and I know what I want, I can read very, very quickly. And it's not quite reading, it's skimming and it's looking for keywords and then alighting upon the thing that I'm looking for and spending more time there. And when you read a reference book or you read some nonfiction, you're not reading A to B all of the time. You're flipping. Yeah, you don't need to read absolutely everything. But I tried to see if I could get any nourishment from doing speed reading, and I used a speed reading device. And indeed, my own reading speed can get up to quite rapid speeds and still retain comprehension. Could I speed read Thomas Hardy and get something out of it? Now? This little experiment threw me back to my first year of universe, when I needed to read lots of Thomas Hardy for an essay. So I took three of his novels to the Bodleian Library and I tried to read them all in the space of a few hours. I left the library reeling, dizzy, confused, and with no idea about what I had just read. And many years on, just recently, in fact, I tried it again to see if anything had changed. And guess what? Even with my knowledge of Hardy, even having read him relentless, relentlessly and known the stories, it didn't serve me at all. It wasn't enjoyable. I didn't get anything out of it. I didn't remember what I had read. And even though I knew the characters and the events, it was incredibly difficult to really appreciate what Thomas Hardy was gifting me. And then I slowed down. I paired my reading with an exquisite audio, and I would even pause the audio to open up a space to spend more time thinking, thinking and seeing everything and really living in the world. And I am completely resolved now. You cannot speed read the great books. Yes, you can skim and you can speed read, looking for information and a lot of peripheral and secondary reading, that's the mode you want to use. But with the great books, the ones that you want to store inside of you, there is no hack that involves reading speed to assimilate them. True speed reading, or true, true possession of great works of literature in a swift way happens slowly. You must go slow to go fast. If you go fast, you are cheating yourself. You're not engaging with the books in a meaningful way. And now, this is not to say that if you read fast that you're not engaging with books, because we do have different reading speeds. Some people do have a photographic memory. I have members of my family genetically, some members have a photographic memory, and it seems to be passed down where they can literally look at a page and it's like a photograph has been taken. Some people can read very, very fast as well. So we're talking about reading with comprehension. And a lot of speed reading teaches one to simply whiz through the pages without comprehension or with a comprehension that is essentially Bare minimum, if one is going to try to read two or three hundred classics in a year, one thing's surely over the course of a lifetime, there won't even be that many books that actually resonate with us. We're not gonn 300 books that resonate with us. We're lucky if we have a few dozen. But trying to read hundreds and hundreds of books throughout a year, trying to read a book every day, every other day, I don't know what we're gonna get out of that. And as a teacher might say to a student who they've caught copying off another student, the only one that they are cheating is themselves. And poetry gives us a brilliant opportunity to spend inordinate amounts of time with language, with imagery, with music. Now, let's end today with some practical reading assignments. We are making the poetic practical. So here are some immediately implementable action steps for you. The first assignment is get yourself a journal, a bullet journal or a journal that you can use as a commonplace book this week. And print out by hand a poem, a poem that you want to memorise. Just write it out long form by hand, and then don't do anything else with this. Write out that poem. Leave it. Leave it for weeks now. Slightly more difficult. The next assignment is this. Think about the insights that might arise from that poem. You do not need to consult it, you do not need to reread it, you do not need to recite it. But have some time thinking about why you wanted to commit that poem to ink on your particularly. And when you're writing on the page, what you're actually doing symbolically is impressing it into your soul. What you're going to do is glean a single insight from that poem. Doesn't have to be related to the poem overtly, just something that sparked an insight. And try to work it into your conversations. You do not need to talk about poetry with another person, but try and get that insight sparked by poetry into a conversation or see if it can come about organically. And another assignment is to hunt out a recording of another poem that you want to store inside you, that you want to store on the bookshelf in your soul. Hunt out a reading and listen to it. If you compare it with walking in nature, then do that. And where do you find your poems? Well, first, it's very good to have some trusty anthology apologies on hand at the hardcore literature book club@patreon.com hardcoreliterature I have been recommending great poems all year and we've made a bit of a game with it because I will recommend three poetic masterpieces at a time and there is always a link running through it. There is typically a thematic link, a stylistic link, or a philosophical link, and I have been asking readers to identify the link and then I reveal it once we've had a little discussion about it. It's been good fun. I've been recommending great poems all year and sharing my reflections on them, and readers have been sharing theirs too and it's been a fantastic conversation. And this year we've read poems from Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Christina Rossetti, Keith Sanchelli and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coleridge, Hart Crane, Philip Larkin and many, many more. And I have been drawing the poems from one tremendous anthology. It's a massive anthology and it's absolutely amazing. It is such a treasure trove. It is the Norton Anthology of Poetry and it really is the best anthology you can get your hands on. I'm also personally a huge fan of the anthology of the best poems in the English language and edited by Harold Bloom because his commentaries prefacing the poems are very illuminating and interesting. But I also encourage you to go to second hand bookstores or first hand bookstores, but I personally adore second hand bookstores. I love vintage shops. You really find some exciting gems there. Go to second hand bookstores and rifle the shelves and see what poetic tradition treasures you can find and allow Serendipity to bless you. One of the anthologies that I personally really treasure is an old dusty volume from the 19th century that you couldn't buy new anymore, but I absolutely adore that one and I return to that liberally. And I encourage you to find your own. Go to a bookstore, explore the poetry aisle and just pick books up in a spirit of play. And if you want a publishing house to direct your first then I recommend Everyman's Library. They do a Pocket Poets series that is phenomenal. It is very beautifully curated and you can find some great collections of single poets there. And then another action step for you. Come and share your favorite lines and your favourite poems with me and the lovely community at the Heart Hardcore Literature Book Club and read what other lovers of literature have to say about the poems they are enjoying. You can do this by navigating over to patreon.com hardcore literature. We have an extensive back catalogue of bookish lectures not only on the greatest novels, short stories and plays ever written, but on the greatest poems too. It's a really fantastic place to learn about poetry, to become a connoisseur, to become an expert on poetry. And at time of recording, we are forging through Dante's Inferno together. We are also reading the complete works of Shakespeare together. And we will very soon have a new exclusive special lecture on the sonnets coming out. And we have a lecture series for Milton's Paradise Lost. That's one of my personal favourites. We have a lecture series on Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and his poetry. That's another personal favourite of mine and many, many more. And excitingly, at time of recording, we will soon also have the formal announcement for next year's reading schedule and I'm absolutely bursting to share what's going to be on our reading plan with you. So come and join the reading adventure with us. Us. And I'm going to leave it there for today. Let us know how you get on with your appreciation of poetry. Let us know what you're reading and what emotions and thoughts the poems that most impressed you stir up in you. Thank you very much for listening today. Thank you so much for being here and thank you for reading along. Have a lovely day and happy reading. Bye bye for now.