Questions About The Collected Poems

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Is everyone born a poet? Read our pre-eminent American poets Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman. Let’s face it: everyone is born a poet. Parents and school rob children of poetry. Vividly, our greatest poets of the 20th & 19th centuries—Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman—were “men who suffered and minds who created” (from T.S. Eliot). In school we all read Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and Whitman’s

John Ferngrove Everyone can play with and enjoy their language and perhaps create something that they can look back on later and still take pleasure from, or even ap…moreEveryone can play with and enjoy their language and perhaps create something that they can look back on later and still take pleasure from, or even appear to give pleasure to another, perhaps just one, perhaps more. But having got really serious about poetry and dug, and indeed still digging, into the forms and patterns that give each poet their individual voice I have to say that while I have made some headway into at least a little understanding of their techniques. But with Stevens the harder I look at what he does the more baffled I am as to what exactly he is doing. His mind seems to be wired in a different way to the rest of us. A true, almost savant-like genius.(less)

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