How old were you the moment you were first intrigued by poetry: Remember the first?

[Hartigan]

I was just wondering how old the majority of you were when you first became interested in poetry. I'm 16 and have been mesmerized by poetry for about a year now. I was wondering who is a good poet to start with? I've read works by several poets without any specific pattern: going from Machiavelli to William Butler Yeats and then back to Poe, wondering where the heck I'm travelling. Anyone have any ideas on a good preliminary path into poetry, or literature as a whole?

Also, does anybody remember the first poem that you ever read that made you think? The first poem that led you to be interested in poetry. Sorry if this is supposed to be in the Poetry section!

[black-alabaster]

I guess it depends on the kind of poetry you're looking for.

Before about two or three years ago, I couldn't stand poetry. To me, there was no point in it. Metaphors seemed contrived and only free verse spoke to me.

Somewhere along the line, I lost my ability to focus on what I was writing, and just wrote pages of free verse. It helped me focus on what I was trying to say; when I wasn't constricted by the laws of grammar, anything I wrote could make sense.

[miljohnj5]

My first interests were with Robert Frost when I was about your age but the first poem I found the best was "When I Heard the Learned Astronomer" by Whitman.

[Dark Muse]

For me I suppose it was kind of the other way around. That is to say I started writing poetry long before I really became an avid reader of it. Though as a kid I loved the works of Shel Silverstein.

I think the very first poem I wrote was when I was like 6 or 7 years old, and then I began to read Poe when I was in highschool, and it was not untill after highschool I really became an avide Poetry reader, reading both the classics and contemporory works.

[andave_ya]

Yeah, it's only been about a year for me too, when I was 15. This is the first poem that got me interested in poetry. This is a poem by Dorothy L. Sayers from her book "Gaudy Night," which is one of my favorite books.

Here then at home, by no more storms distrest,
Folding laborious hands we sit, wings furled;
Here in close perfume lies the rose-leaf curled,
Here the sun stands and knows not east or west,
Here no tide turns; we have come, last and best,
From the wide zone in dizzying circles hurled
To that still center where the spinning world
Sleeps on its axis, to the heart of rest.

Lay on thy whips, O Love, that we upright,
Poised on the perilous point, in no lax bed
May sleep, as tension at the verberant core
Of music sleeps; for, if thou spare to smite,
Staggering, we stoop, stooping, fall dumb and dead,
And dying so, sleep our sweet sleep no more.

[Dark Star]

This isn't exactly an orthodox opinion but the first poet I loved (and my favorite to this day, although I'm a bit of a newbie in this form of literature) was Leopardi in a translation (by Eamon Grennan) I picked up January last year...so I would have been eighteen at the time.

[ballb]

My first encounter with the poets was when I was 8 or 9 years old. We had a wonderful primary school teacher [elementary school as it would be called in the US]. She was a keen amateur actor and passionate about literature. She gave me a love of literature that has never left left me. I recall that she read to us aloud the entire Rime of The Ancient Mariner over several Thursday afternoon lessons. I was haunted by the poem and it still has an effect on me 45 years later.

[trippy star]

I was always very interested in novels; but around 15 I made the transition to short stories, and a few months ago I made yet another transition to poetry (it seems my attention span is depleting as i get older).

The first poem that really had me intrigued was Lord Byron's, "To Caroline". There are 3 such poem in Hours of Idleness, and I loved and love them all still.
They are fairly long poems to type, so I will provide a favourite excerpt of mine:

That the time must arrive, when, no longer
retaining
Their auburn, those locks must wave thin
to the breeze,
When a few silver hairs of those tresses
remaining,
Prove nature a prey to decay and disease.

[Pensive]

In third grade, I wrote my first poem. Before it, I had said rhymes and stuff and was always interested in reading poetry from the day (well more or less) I learnt to read.

[Lyn]

When I was 17 I think, reading Coleridge's This Lime Tree Bower my prison. I dunno why that caught my attention particularly, I think just the imagery fitted in with the way i felt at the time.

[Psycheinaboat]

I began attempting to write poetry between 2nd and 3rd grade. I think I first became attracted to the rhythm and feelings poetry prompted in me around 1st grade. It is difficult for me to remember specific poets that sparked me back then, but my first poetry books were anthologies. I didn’t know very much about different authors and forms of writing, so the anthologies offered me a wide variety to figure out what really inspired me.

[Beverly S]

I first became interested in poetry about six years ago. I started writing poetry at that time and then shortly after began reading some poetry. I love all kinds of poetry - modern and the old stuff. It's all great to me!

[Granny5]

We had a student teacher in 7th grade English (About a hundred years ago) and he taught poetry with Simon and Garfunkel lyrics. That's when I got hooked.

[Petrarch's Love]

I was just wondering how old the majority of you were when you first became interested in poetry. I'm 16 and have been mesmerized by poetry for about a year now. I was wondering who is a good poet to start with? I've read works by several poets without any specific pattern: going from Machiavelli to William Butler Yeats and then back to Poe, wondering where the heck I'm travelling. Anyone have any ideas on a good preliminary path into poetry, or literature as a whole?

Also, does anybody remember the first poem that you ever read that made you think? The first poem that led you to be interested in poetry. Sorry if this is supposed to be in the Poetry section!

First of all, welcome to the forums, Hartigan. Always glad to see another poetry lover around the place. :)

I think I always liked poetry as a child, but the first time I really was conscious of being enamored with a poem was when I read "On Chapman's Homer" by John Keats when I was about 13. That's definitely the first poem that made me "think" as you put it.

It's great to hear that you've been reading at whim and wondering where the heck you're travelling. That's the way to do it, just read whatever strikes you as interesting. I had a copy of the Oxford English Verse and another anthology called Immortal Poems of the English Language that I carried around reading cover to cover during my teen years. There's a lot to be said for going out and finding yourself a nice fat anthology of poems and then just reading around finding things you like in it. If you're interested in an introduction to literature, the Norton Anthologies are the ones most often used for teaching survey classes and such, and contain a large sampling of literature throughout the ages. They also have very brief biographical info. on the writers and useful notes. You can get the Norton Anthology of English Literature either in two volumes (one pre-1800 and the second from then to the present) or in six volumes that cover the same span, but with more depth for each of the periods. I think there's also a Norton Anthology of Poetry if you just want a selection of poems. The volumes are a bit expensive new, but you can find reasonable prices used, and certainly find copies at any local library.

By the way, what was the first poem that made you think?

[thegreenthing]

I think it was about two years ago, when I was fourteen. I had just read some of Poe's short stories and then thought why not try some of his poetry, because I liked his stories. Can't say that I've read too much poetry since, but some T.S. Eliott, Leonard Cohen and Harry Martinsson.

[Lady Raven]

My very first interest in poetry began when I was about 3...I loved Mother Goose Rhymes and could recite them all by the time I was 4. Next was A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson when I was about 5. When I was 12 I fell in love with e.e. cummings and Langston Hughes.

[quasimodo1]

Robert Service (1874-1958)
The Cremation of Sam McGee

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee. .....

{8 yrs approx.}

[Virgil]

I guess I became interested in poetry in my freshman year in college when we read T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." I guess high school teachers never taught us much poetry, at least I don't remember it. But Prufrock or perhaps the teacher I had who taught it really stimulated us to poetry.

[mortalterror]

This isn't exactly an orthodox opinion but the first poet I loved (and my favorite to this day, although I'm a bit of a newbie in this form of literature) was Leopardi in a translation (by Eamon Grennan) I picked up January last year...so I would have been eighteen at the time.

That book was one of the luckiest finds I've ever stumbled across.

The first poem to ever leave a deep impression was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I heard a recording in my high school English class, while we were reading it and it really put the zap on my head. I'd take it out and read it every month or so for years. But I wasn't ever exposed to anything else and I wasn't interested in poetry.

In college I took a class on poetry, which I hated, because I couldn't understand anything and the professor gave me attitude. But I did discover T.S. Eliot in another class, which I suppose led to me reading his complete works and buying a couple anthologies after I graduated. I bought Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and then I bought The Norton Anthology of Poetry. These gave me a brief keyhole view into the world of poetry, but I knew there was more out there; so I started buying real poetry books like Paradise Lost, The Odyssey, and the Selected Poems of Wordsworth.

I wish I'd had more formal training, because I cannot write poetry. When I read it, I do not see the meter. I can't tell the difference between iambic, trochaic, and spondee no matter how many times I read the definitions or examples from my books. Verse is a dark country to me, and I feel only half literate most of the time. That is why I think we need to change the way we educate our kids. I do not want my children to go to a school where they will not learn poetry, music, or art. They shouldn't have to pick up an education piecemeal later in life, as I did.

[antiprefix]

I started appreciating the lyrics in music around 3rd or 4th grade.

[Erichtho]

I was acquainted with poetry through folk-songs in my earliest childhood, later we memorised poems in kindergarten and primary school.
One of the first poems that left an impression on me was Goethe's Osterspaziergang:

Vom Eise befreit sind Strom und Bäche
Durch des Frühlings holden, belebenden Blick,
Im Tale grünet Hoffnungsglück...

[From the ice they are freed, the stream and brook,
By the Spring's enlivening, lovely look;
The valley's green with joys of hope... (Edgar Alfred Bowring)]

It was years later that I discovered that this poem was actually part of a drama (Faust I)...

[antiprefix]

It was years later that I discovered that this poem was actually part of a drama (Faust I)...

Faust is on my list of writings to read. Hast du Faust auf Deutsch gelesen?

[Erichtho]

Faust is on my list of writings to read. Hast du Faust auf Deutsch gelesen?

Yes, I am German.

[DCD1979]

I don't know exactly when I first got into poetry or writing in general. My mom said I had always been interested in writing. In second grade, I met my first pen pal at Girl Scout camp. Since Katie, I have had over 100 pen pals across the US, Korea, England, Germany, Australia, Italy, and Ghana, Africa. Most only lasted 1 or 2 letters, while Katie and I wrote almost non-stop between ages of 8 through probably 19 or 20. We are now 28. Mi-Kyung from Korea lasted from 7th grade through out high school.
In third grade, I was asked to write a story for Right-to-Read week. Unfortunately, with all the changes in technology, it is no longer available. In 6th grade (age 12) I took a creative writing class for about 8 weeks. This is when I began writing on a regular basis. At first I wrote childrens' short stories and poems, but by 17 realized how lame they were and began writing more "grown up" poems.

[Dori]

I would be lying if I said my interest for poetry goes back more than a few months ago. Walt Whitman got me interested. :)

[AimusSage]

I was 86 when I was first interested in poetry, and then I travelled back in time to enlighten a younger me to the delights of poetry at a far younger age. I can now say that I was first intrigued by poetry at a very early age. But really, 86 would be the honest answer, so I'm sticking to that one.

[islandclimber]

I am embarassed to say it, considering how much I love poetry now.. but in high school and the beginning of University, these interests would not have gone over well with my friends at the time, so I kind of quelled them... I still read alot but never poetry... I loved poetry when I was young.. up to the age of about 15 and then hid that until I was almost 20... so for the last four and a half years I've been in love with poetry again... Neruda made me fall in love with it again.. well Neruda and beginning to write poetry again..

[lakeside_girl]

i'm probably a little older than most of you, mid thirties; we started poetry about 5th grade. in fact, from 5th to 10th grade we had to memorize poetry. the first one was jabberwocky(crazy lewis) several robert frost poems ( i think he inspires alot of young minds to love poetry) , rubiayat (fitzgerald translation)..etc.. i hated the memory part, but i think it certainly started my obsession that still holds me today, thousands of dollars and brain cells later. read about the poets, too. it's just a suggestion, but i found it all so much more dear when i heard of their particular personalities/struggles, etc...read about the literary time period they crafted their masterpieces. read as many as you can; you will never run out. it's great you are here!!

[JBI]

Depends what you call liking poetry. Most people fall into two groups. Those who like poetry, and those who like Poe.

[barrie]

Hi Folks,

When I was about seven years old--I would listen to old 45 RPMs--and type up the lyrics using my two index fingers. I would type them up in poem form; and see them as poems.

Be well & happy,
Barrie

[kelby_lake]

The first classic poem I ever did was The Tyger, and I've always liked it. I can recite it :)
my dad used to read poems with us when we were little- we got to choose a poem and then we'd read it to the other two.

[blp]

I always liked poetry and wrote it as a child. I liked a lot of nonsense stuff, Roald Dahl, Ogden Nash etc. The first 'grownup' poem that mattered to me was Eliot's 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock', which I discovered, age seventeen, when it was taught to the other English class in my year. They had to make up little plays based on famous lines from it. I couldn't believe a poem could be that good and was very jealous that the other class were getting to study it.

At the time, I also liked a lot of song lyrics, especially those by Morrissey, Birthday Party era Nick Cave, before he became a sort of southern gothic pasticheur, Jeffry Lee Lewis from the Gun Club who already fit that description, but did it right and Mark E. Smith from the Fall. And, actually, I still like most of that stuff and think it's great art, though I'm not sure it all works without the music.

[Tournesol]

I used to always be interested in poetry.

However, when I was about 15 I started reading Shakespeare's Sonnets - and I fell in love with them!

Ever since then, I've been reading poems, and writing verses of my own!
It's a passion that will stay with me always!!!

[wessexgirl]

I suppose I really started reading poetry when I was a young mum. I just got anthologies out of the Library, of all different types of poetry, and was enchanted by so many poets. I went on to study the Romantic poets in my degree, and adore them.

I can remember 2 specific poems/antholgies when I was a child though, which stick with me. I've always loved books, and I remember having a book when I was very young, by A.A.Milne of the Christopher Robin poems. I also remember painting a picture of Bess (the landlord's daughter, the landlord's black-eyed daughter :D ) from The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes. I still love that poem now, and it is still being taught in British schools. My daughter is a teacher, and has had to teach it with her class, although she hadn't heard of it at her school. The students in my school study it too.

I listen to poetry a lot on audio formats, as it's lovely to hear them read by good readers, with great voices. I'd suggest giving that a try if you can get hold of some, although obviously read as much as you can too. :)

[strawberryhead]

I've been lucky because my father is a lover of poetry, and was always keen that i grow up with a love of poetry. His efforts have paid off, as for the last few years i have been reading and writing more poetry than he does! I remember the first poem i really loved. I was about 10 when i read it: Walter de la Mare's "The Listeners" I loved the eerie atmosphere of it. It just seemed so wonderful to me. I read it over and over! In fact, i think i can trace my love of reading right back to that moment, when i fell in love with that poem!

[firefangled]

When I was about five or six, my parents bought a set of cloth bound books called Collier's Junior Classics. Each book was a different color and had rough-cut pages. My mother used to read from these and I was facinated by two particular poems, The Yarn of the Nancy Belle by W.S. Gilbert, and The Fairies by William Allingham. By the first grade I had memorized the Yarn of the Nancy Belle, a ballad with similar story and rhyme as Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I can still recite the entire poem from memory, fifty years later. The Fairies I cannot say the same, but I do remember the first verse, which I love:

Up the airy mountain
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a-hunting
For fear of little men.
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.

[Guinivere]

I was 13 when my Grandmother took me to an anglican service on Sunday and the minister gave a sermon on immortality. He spoke about Matthew Arnold's poem Immortality and I guess that was the first time I became intrigued with poetry.

Immortality - a poem by Matthew Arnold

Foil'd by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn,
We leave the brutal world to take its way,
And, Patience! in another life, we say
The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne.

And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn
The world's poor, routed leavings? or will they,
Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day,
Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be
Kept on after the grave, but not begun;
And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing only he,
His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,
Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

[qimissung]

We had a book of poems for children, and I read it along with everything else. It had poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson ("When I was down beside the sea..."), and Rossetti ("Who has seen the wind?"), Lear (There was and old person of Ware..."), and de la Mare, (Someone came knocking at my wee small door...") among others. I wrote my first poem when I was about sixteen. Sadly it no longer exists. It was fairly good, I think. It just kind of popped out. It took me awhile after that to realize that writing poetry, as in reading it, could be something that was pondered.

I continued the love affair as an adult when a friend gave me an anthology. As to why I love it, I guess Keats said it best: it allows me to travel "in the realms of gold."

"Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortz when with eagle eye
He stared at the Pacific, and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent upon a peak in Darien."

I love looking at the world with a wild surmise, and I love living on a peak in Darien.

And I have loved reading all of your stories. Thank you for them.

[CathyEarnshaw]

I really had no interest in poetry until I was 17 when I took my first British literature class senior year in high school. Up until then, teachers had mostly introduced us to American poetry, which I still don't fancy for the most part. It was really the Romantic and Victorian poetry in general that got me into poetry, although I can't think of a specific. You seem to be taking the right track with Yeats and the classics.

[Haven]

I was in primary school , aged around 10 yrs, in Scotland when I was first introduced to poetry and loved Hilaire Belloc's "Rebecca" http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/6193/... :)

[Niamh]

When i was about eight or nine, my teacher in school taught us alot of poetry, and my whole class got very into it. my school was so into poetry that we printed our own booklet of poetry written by students and called it Sweeping the Streets of Glory. :) It was only sold amongst the community, but it was great. The same teacher taught my class the Weck of the Hesperus when we where nine. We all knew it off by heart, but i couldnt quote it now for the life of me.

[blazeofglory]

I had passions for poetry when I was merely a nine year old and it began with religious hymns and in due course I took to literary poems. Poetry has been a subjection of obsession and I got intoxicated by poetry and read and wrote an this happened for years.

Even now I keep on reading poems for all I that feel is that in poetry there is something rare, unlike works of prose poetry is a source of great mystery.

Every time I read I find it something really different, something highly moving. Something that keeps us close to understanding the secret of the universe. Poetry is a reservoir of inspirations. Even now also I read Sufi poems.

[JBI]

Started when I was 6 when my mom tried to teach me reading by reading out loud The Night Before Christmas. I simply memorized it, and recited it back, leading to me having to teach myself to read.

[Leabhar]

The first poem I remember reading and liking was A Dream Within A Dream by Poe, I was around 12-13. It is still one of my favorites.

[book_jones]

Langston Hughes was the first poet I ever liked. I don't remember any specific poems, but I do remember being a big fan in 2nd or 3rd grade. I read a lot of Dr. Seuss before that, but I never really recognized that as poetry. Hughes was the first poet I ever liked that I knew was a poet.

[stlukesguild]

Depends what you call liking poetry. Most people fall into two groups. Those who like poetry, and those who like Poe.

How did I miss this little dig?:lol: I think my first exposure to poetry... as far as I can rememeber... must have been Dr. Seuss: "I do not like green eggs and ham, Sam I am..." I never read much poetry (voluntarily) until just before college and I discovered Baudelaire and Rimbaud... and then Rilke, Dante, Homer, and on it went...

[K. Skywalker]

I hated poetry when I was younger. I can't understand the meaning of what they were about. Rhymes did not interest me at all until I joined a poetry contest in elementary school (my teachers made me) and that's where I started to like them. :)

[Ignoramus]

I was maybe 9 when I came across Christian Morgenstern, Galgenlieder (in the original German which was the local language where I lived at the time). My brother and I immediately memorized the entire book and drove everybody nuts with our spontaneous recitals I'm sure...

Not sure if that truly rates as poetry - they are nonsense verses with lots of wordplay, highly original, not really for kids (Galgen is gallows, the premise being that dangling after being hanged gives you a special view on the world, hence the bizarre outlook expressed in some of the verses), but they are not gruesome, just funny verses.

English translation is terribly difficult. You can get an idea at this website where some translations are actually not bad at all:

www.jbeilharz.de/morgenstern/morgenstern_poems.html

[cipherdecoy]

Not that early. I was 13 and that was when I wrote my first poem. :)

[Judas130]

I always loved trying to analyze poems as far back as i remember, especially in compulsory education. To be honest, I started writing it when I realised I couldn't paint or do Art all that well. The problem is, i feel people can be quite lazy these days (mainly the young) with getting into literature, after all, a beautiful painting or drawing is far simpler to look in to. Is poetry losing it's audience? I'd hate to see that happen, there's a brain inside each kid and those brains can make great poets themselves.

I think writing, if you know what you're doing, can craft something very real. I write because when i paint i'm never happy with the outcome, but when i write im relatively happy with the end product. Yet my ideas are biased, i'm certain a painter who could not write could create true beauty, much like the poet who could not paint can also.

[wilbur lim]

I relish to learn poetry since 12.I did not read sublimely simple poems,but mediocre ones.I heard about http://poetry.com and commenced to read and partake that poetry contest.It is noteworthy indeed.But now I terminated reading poetry temporarily as I am focusing on Science.

[blazeofglory]

I was an eight year old when I started writing poetry

[mercymyqueen]

I have to say my first intro to poetry was probably Mother Goose. I was rather obsessed with those rhymes as a toddler. I taught myself to read off them, or taught myself to do what I'm convinced was reading.

I always read and wrote poetry afterwards, but other than assorted Lewis Carrols, I didn't have any favorite poems or poets 'til I discovered the Romantics my sophomore year of high school. I was in an advanced Euro history course, and Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Keats all came almost simultaneously.

My favorite poem of all time is Wordsworth's 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways' I memorized it accidentally, and now I copy it on everything.

[Furbla]

The first time I heard poetry was in the city, when a street beggar was reciting a flamboyant version of Shakespear. It was touching and ever since, I have been reading poetry but not daring to write it, in angst I will destroy the purpose in which it was meant.

[AshleyEliz]

I was rather young.

I don't remember too much about it, other than my grandfather reading Robert Frost to me during the summer - I must have been about 6, or 7 - at the time I obviously didn't understand any of it. But I saw how much my Grandfather seemed to be moved by whatever it was he was reading. So I humored him - and I just liked hearing him talk - and asked him to read me one every day, or close to it.

[Peggy-O]

At a very young age; I've always considered exceptional lyrics to be poetry, and I have always been an avid music fan. Thus, poetry is one of my first loves.

[stlukesguild]

Christian Morgenstern most certainly does count as poetry. His work is included in most of the anthologies of Modern German Poetry that I have seen, and he is a marvelous example of that tradition of nonsense poetry that included Lewiss Carroll and Edward Lear in English. Some of the works are quite marvelous... and I probably have just enough of my German left over from high-school to fudge through them (with a translation and dictionary along side) in the original to an even greater appreciation.

[kiz_paws]

At a very young age; I've always considered exceptional lyrics to be poetry, and I have always been an avid music fan. Thus, poetry is one of my first loves.
I am glad you posted this. :) I was going to reply to this thread that my first real appreciation for poetry was through the lyrics of a song done by Gordon Lightfoot -- Black Day In July. I was in Junior High and our teacher was teaching us about ballads, etc., and he made us listen to the song and 'analyze' (as far as a young teen is capable?) what we got out of the lyrics. This opened up a whole new world to me, as silly as it sounds. So lyrics, good ones, are beautiful poetry to me.

My favorite poet, well, don't really have a favorite. Perhaps Leonard Cohen.

I struggle with writing reasonable poetry, but I do love the fine art of HAIKU. ;) And I so enjoy reading the wonderful outpouring of poetry that this site offers. We have a lot of really talented people here. I really and truly mean that. :nod:

[blp]

My first sense that I could be interested in poetry came from pop music lyricists who'd obviously read good poetry and lit: Bowie, Dylan, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Mark E. Smith, Nick Cave (Birthday Party era).

The next thing, when I was about 17, was Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The members of the English class I wasn't in were assigned to make up little skits based on it and we went and watched them. I hadn't known a poem could be so good.

[Peggy-O]

I am glad you posted this. :) I was going to reply to this thread that my first real appreciation for poetry was through the lyrics of a song done by Gordon Lightfoot -- Black Day In July. I was in Junior High and our teacher was teaching us about ballads, etc., and he made us listen to the song and 'analyze' (as far as a young teen is capable?) what we got out of the lyrics. This opened up a whole new world to me, as silly as it sounds. So lyrics, good ones, are beautiful poetry to me.

My favorite poet, well, don't really have a favorite. Perhaps Leonard Cohen.

I struggle with writing reasonable poetry, but I do love the fine art of HAIKU. ;) And I so enjoy reading the wonderful outpouring of poetry that this site offers. We have a lot of really talented people here. I really and truly mean that. :nod:

Leonard Cohen's poetry is incredible. My favourite poem of his is "What I'm Doing Here" from Flowers for Hitler.
And thanks.

[JBI]

Leonard Cohen's poetry is incredible. My favourite poem of his is "What I'm Doing Here" from Flowers for Hitler.
And thanks.

He's regarded as a somewhat renown novelist and poet here, and has piles upon piles of scholarship written about him. It's a shame though that he is only known as a singer/songwriter outside of Canada, pretty much, as he was a poet and novelist first, and I think achieves more in his poetry than in his songs.

[oopsycandy]

I don't remember how old I was but it went;

The cabbage is a funny veg
All green and crisp and brainy
I sometimes wear one on my head
When its cold and rainy.
:lol:


I think its Roger McGough but I'm not sure. I just remember being very young and loving the silliness and sound of it.

My first 'proper' poem was Ozymandias when I was about 12 and Its still a favourite.

[mono]

In middle school, I remember really coming to fall in love with Emily Dickinson; I think, if she did not start it, she definitely lit the largest fire that created my affinity for poetry - Robert Frost, too. Some of the Greek and Roman classics came around the same time: The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Horace, The Aeneid of Virgil.
Some notables who kept that fire going: D.H. Lawrence, Rumi, John Keats, the transcendentalists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sylvia Plath, William Butler Yeats, and I still consider Faust by Goethe one of the best pieces of literature ever written. :nod:

[alakungfu]

In fourth grade, the whole class had to write a poem to submit into a regional contest, and after a lot of work and, after arriving at a subversion of the original poem, mine was submitted and published. I learned that, if everything else is essentially somple, there is one activity that seems simple but is really complicated and supplies you with that elusive thrill of the chase; poetry is something that is never spelled out for you.

[arabian night]

I was 11 and it was during my Grandfather's funeral :) I realised how our life is just a short journey, so I decided to write a poem regarding childhood and phases in life. Of course it was in Arabic as it is my mother-tongue :) However, my first experience with English poetry was when I was 18 at uni, and I started writing in English too :)

[positiveion]

In the 9th grade when an English teacher I hated forcefully introduced me to Cummings.
Previously, I had stumbled on some Poe and some of Palahniuk's poems aren't bad. But I had never been so completely enthralled by a poem before.

[prendrelemick]

OK, I'm a hill farmer and in the 80's I stumbled across Ted Hughes' Moortown Diaries, and I Thought, "This is my life exactly" it was instant connection.

[Neo_Sephiroth]

Good grief...The first poem that caught my interest...Hmmm...Man, I can't remember!:sick:

[librarius_qui]

(I'm 33 ...)









































:crash: Kidding. The thought passed through my mind though, as I was reading the thread along the way from the beginning.

I don't think I like poetry, however, as much as I like poets. For instance, I'm enjoying to read the verses of a member of this forum ...

I don't know what's to like poetry. This I could say. As well as I can say that I usually produce things more than consuming them. Except poetry. I've wrote some verses, but I don't know if they're ... interesting. I don't think so.

I don't know poetry as well as I'd ... possibly like to know. I like narrative "poetry", because it isn't poetry.

I build with the language in prose, so, what's poetry? (...)

And, however, there's always something in your mind ... "Saiba que os poetas, como os cegos, podem ver na escuridão" ("know this: that the poets, like the blind men, can see in the dark"). It's from a bossa nova song, by Edu Lobo (the song) and Chico Buarque (the lyrics), so, possibly the first thing that called my att-- ALAS! that I just found out!!! :) : I was 12. It was this verse. In a song. But I'd think about it as a verse about 21 years later. (Now.)

Another fact is that I never cared about writing poetry, or being a poet. (Well, yes, I tried some sonets, but they were awful! To make as well as to read!) So I never thought about it. I still don't intend to make the career, but I have a little greater interest in poetry right now, because I'm very near some very clever poets ... (In my life outside this place. -- As well (...) (?)) So, it calls my attention. Has been, at least.

I'd like to read some more. But I have to get rid of the ordinateur, at my week nights. I think it'll help me a lot with ...

What a lot of nonsense I wrote! Blast, I think I'm getting dangerous(ly boring), or at least I feel so.


Libri*

[Dori]

I would be lying if I said my interest for poetry goes back more than a few months ago. Walt Whitman got me interested. :)

Okay. It is a year later (approximately) and I don't think Walt Whitman got me interested into poetry as much as other poets have just recently. As of late, we've been reading William Blake and John Keats in English class, and their poetry has had a much larger influence on me than good ol' Walt. I've read Blake's "The Tyger," "The Lamb," and "London," and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and his "Ode on a Grecian Urn." I absolutely loved these poems, so I read ahead on what was listed on the syllabus that my English teacher gave us. I read "Ozymandias" by Shelley and "Jabberwocky" by Lewis Carroll. Both of those are great too!

I also read some e. e. cummings, and I liked him as well.

All of these poems have inspired me to start reading this huge book of English poetry which I acquired years ago for free.

I think "Ode to a Nightingale" is my favorite, and "Jabberwocky" is my second.


(I'm 33 ...)









































:crash: Kidding. The thought passed through my mind though, as I was reading the thread along the way from the beginning.

I don't think I like poetry, however, as much as I like poets. For instance, I'm enjoying to read the verses of a member of this forum ...

I don't know what's to like poetry. This I could say. As well as I can say that I usually produce things more than consuming them. Except poetry. I've wrote some verses, but I don't know if they're ... interesting. I don't think so.

I don't know poetry as well as I'd ... possibly like to know. I like narrative "poetry", because it isn't poetry.

I build with the language in prose, so, what's poetry? (...)

And, however, there's always something in your mind ... "Saiba que os poetas, como os cegos, podem ver na escuridão" ("know this: that the poets, like the blind men, can see in the dark"). It's from a bossa nova song, by Edu Lobo (the song) and Chico Buarque (the lyrics), so, possibly the first thing that called my att-- ALAS! that I just found out!!! :) : I was 12. It was this verse. In a song. But I'd think about it as a verse about 21 years later. (Now.)

Another fact is that I never cared about writing poetry, or being a poet. (Well, yes, I tried some sonets, but they were awful! To make as well as to read!) So I never thought about it. I still don't intend to make the career, but I have a little greater interest in poetry right now, because I'm very near some very clever poets ... (In my life outside this place. -- As well (...) (?)) So, it calls my attention. Has been, at least.

I'd like to read some more. But I have to get rid of the ordinateur, at my week nights. I think it'll help me a lot with ...

What a lot of nonsense I wrote! Blast, I think I'm getting dangerous(ly boring), or at least I feel so.


Libri*

:lol: You do ramble on and on...:p

[rozreads]

I think I've been into poetry since nursery rhymes, but the first poem I can remember that moved me was Robert Frost's Stopping by Woods. I think it was about fifth grade. It actually put me there in the woods thinking about life's little wonders among the duties we all must face. I still love it. I think you are already on the right path, because there is no right path. You let your love of poetry show you the way.

[Janine]

My father read us poetry when we were small children. I recall 'Wyken Blinken and Nod' quite well. I still love that poem to this day. Aside from that nursery rhymes - the typical ones were introduced to my sister and I at a very young age so we grew up loving poems. I believe my father ingrained the love of reading and poetry in us from the beginning.

[MarkBastable]

Probably Carroll's ''A-sitting On a Gate". Though before that I was intrigued by how words worked when I realised, at about the age of eight, that despite my having been sure of it for five or more years, one man and his dog did not actually go to a town called Mowermeadow.

[qspeechc]

A few weeks ago, actually. It was Hopkins "Pied Beauty", I love the sound of it.

[Bitterfly]

Baudelaire, in high school, and then in college, followed by his fellow poets from the 19th and early 20th centuries. English-language poetry much later on - I used to find it less beautiful, but now it's almost the reverse. Syllabic verse is actually more difficult to pull off!

[JBI]

Are you saying then that French syllabic verse is too difficult to pull off relative to English conventions?

[NisreenS]

I was 11 when I wrote my first poem.

[thescholar]

Four days after my thirteenth birthday, when I read If,by Rudyard Kipling. It made me feel unstoppable, as it described success in a simple and inspirational manner.

[Bitterfly]

Are you saying then that French syllabic verse is too difficult to pull off relative to English conventions?

Sorry, I'd missed your question before. To answer your question (I think I wasn't very clear the first time around), I just meant (rather vacuously :p ) that syllabic verse is now less congenial to me than accentual verse because I find it less melodious and less readable-out-loud. I get an almost sensual kick out of iambic pentameters, for instance, that I don't get out of alexandrines (even if I'm still very attached to some French poets - Verlaine, Baudelaire, Apollinaire, Rimbaud or Mallarmé, to name but a few).