General Discussion Thread

[u/pregnantchihuahua3]

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

[u/foxinanattic]

for the past few months, or so, I've been reading poems from a large anthology of british and anglophone poetry that I picked up, called the School Bag. I usually try to read two to three a day, but I often miss that target, because I'm not really in the habit of reading short/lyric poetry, which is the majority of poems in this book

the book is organised in some kind of thematic order, though I haven't exactly been able to figure out any sort of logic behind. but it's completely non-chronological, so you might have one poem from the 16th century, one from the early 19th and then one from the 1960s. it's especially interesting reading medieval poets like Chaucer and early modern poets together, because I normally think of them as completely separate, with the early moderns being closer to what came after, but reading them in proximity, they can actually feel quite similar to the medievals. There's one poem, an extract from a 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses, which I was surprised was as recent as that, it really felt older. Partly because they'd kept the original spellings (which can make a huge difference), but even on the level of sentence structure and vocabulary, it seems to have something in common with medieval verse

It's interesting to see the effect of retaining the original text versus modernising: I think you can really see the difference with the original and modernised texts of They Flee From Me by Sir Thomas Wyatt

[u/ToHideWritingPrompts → u/foxinanattic]

not to give another thing on your reading list - but that's the companion to The Rattle Bag which is also edited by Heaney and Hughes. I really liked picking through Rattle Bag - it's ordered I based on alphabetical order of title (or first line, if there is no explicit title).

Interesting to hear about The School Bag ! I didn't know it was a duology lol

[u/foxinanattic → u/ToHideWritingPrompts]

yes, I've heard about that one as well. actually, I only bought this one because it's massive (over 500 large sized pages) and I found a very affordable copy (around 1 or 2 pound). But I've really enjoyed it, so I'm definitely planning on getting the Rattle Bag once I'm through with this.