Some angels you must wrestle with before they bless you and poetry is often one of those angels. Most often the difficulty of poetry arises from the expectations that we as readers bring to it. Verse poetry is very different from pros. Pros is the mode of everyday writing. You read it in novels, in newspapers on signs and it's a it's a certain type of reading. It is not to say that that poetry is better than pros but it does acknowledge an essential difference between the two. that poetry is a special form of communication and as such poetry demands a special kind of reading. We don't read poetry the way we would read pros. We and this is where the difficulty comes in because we are an increasingly pros reading culture. Pros requires primarily the intellect. It wants to communicate or discover a message. But poetry requires the intellect to operate in harmony with other faculties of the mind and of the body such as the imagination, our body's sense of rhythm, our appreciation of beauty, and our capacity for emotional and moral feeling. Poetry wants to discover the music of meaning, not just the message of meaning. As CS Lewis wrote in his studies in medieval and Renaissance literature, there are moments in literary history at which to achieve a manner and a music is more important than to deliver any message, however profound or prophetic. The message can wait. It will have to wait forever unless the manner and music are found. Where pros cares about the message, poetry cares about the music. And I think this is something to keep in mind when reading any kind of poetry and this will help with the difficulty. Poetry is the verbal record of human life and experience governed into uniquely disciplined verbal events. TS Elliott was pressed once to define what verse poetry was and uh he rather reluctantly gave a definition. He said, "Whatever else it may be, it is a system of punctuation in which language is ordered in a different way. Where and how the line of poetry ends, how it looks on the page, where the white space is operating with the text itself, how rhythms and sounds are ordered, all constitute a special system of punctuation. The poet Wdsworth once wrote in a letter that the success of a poem depends upon innumerable minutia. That means that every single aspect of a poem contributes to its success and that's something that makes it very different from pros. Everything matters. But the greatest things in life require labor. And for this reason, poetry is often difficult. But in this video, I'm going to give you six poets whose level of difficulty I believe is directly proportionate to their value. That means that these are not the most difficult poets of all time. If they were, I would have given you a different list and Gertude Stein would have been on there. But the most difficult poets here are those with the greatest return for your effort. And the first is Edmund Spencer. It may seem strange to find him on this list. After all, Edmund Spencer's The Fairy Queen was once a household title. And in an age before TV or radio, his epic poem was entertainment, moral instruction, and poetic inspiration allin one. That's why he's often called the poet's poet because uh so many later writers admired him and he inspired so much other poetry. But this also speaks to his difficulty for today's readers and his star has fallen from many uh literature department curricula because u Spencer's uh for some reason it's just not taught as much as it used to be. But Spencer's descriptions are worth the trouble. They're just gorgeous. Here are two stanzas from a description of the garden of Adonis from the fairy queen book three kanto 6. There is continual spring and harvest there continual both mating at one time. For both the boughs do laughing blossoms bare and with fresh colors deck the wanting prime and eek at once the heavy trees they climb which seem to labor under their fruits load. The wilds, the joyous birds make their past time amongst the shady leaves, their sweet abode, and their true loves without suspicion tell abroad. Right in the midset of that paradise there stood a stately mount on whose round top a gloomy grove of myrtle trees did rise, whose shady boughs sharp steel did never lop, nor wicked beasts their tender buds did crop. But like a garland compassed the height, and from their fruitful sides sweet gum did drop, at all the ground with precious dew bedike, threw forth most dainty odors and most sweet delight. We can talk about the beauty of the Spincerian stanza. Uh the lines here being amamic pentameter and then ending with a line of amic hexameter. Uh but there's just such beauty here especially the enactment of the continual meeting within the scheme. We have here what's called a panelpsis the repetition of a word at the beginning and at the end of the line and then also a beautiful a type of kayasmus we could say in these two lines. There is continual spring and harvest there continual. You have the repetition of that and it's just enforcing the sense of the continuation the springtime and harvest cohabiting in one place almost magically. You see that happening there with the rhetorical schemes but it's just a delicious description. Although as you can see the archaic spelling is difficult and I think this is where it's going to give uh contemporary readers the most trouble. His archaic spelling is difficult. His dense allegory can be difficult because it will require a little bit of uh knowledge of history and the Elizabeth and style much like Shakespeare's can feel intimidating. Persist, however, and you'll find not only dazzling language such as this, but also a poet shaping English verse into something monumental. Once you read Spencer, you'll be able to hear him in the romantics in the 17th century, in the 18th century, even among some of the poets who are writing today. And he was strengthening the moral imagination with beauty in this poem. So my advice is this. Read the poem, but with a visual imagination, an imagination like a screenplay. Imagine uh watching perhaps how it would look if if this were cast on television. Employ the visual imagination to the max. Don't rush. Let the description get lost in this garden. Um, read slowly and allow yourself to hear the music of the verse. Keep a sidebyside edition with modernized spelling. If you have to read cliff notes before each uh kanto, that will help you keep track of what's going on in the narrative, but get lost in the beauty of the language because that's what Spencer is all about. Remember that uh if you want to really understand the poem, allegory can be a key once you know that the Red Cross knight represents holiness, una represents truth and so on, the narrative really opens up and a guide such as a cliffnotes guide will help with that. But really what you want is uh not to substitute the reading experience with summary but to allow the summary to enhance your actual imaginative encounter with the poetry which is just beautiful in Spencer. Now the next poet is John Dunn and I might group along with him the whole metaphysical stylists. George Herbert, Andrew Marll, Crashaw. These are all labeled metaphysical poets because of their intellectual strength. Samuel Johnson thought that their poetry was just showing off how much they know about all different subjects. in his life of Cowi. He wrote that the metaphysical poets were men of learning and to show their learning was their whole endeavor. Meaning they just wanted to just kind of show off. But don't think of it as showing off, especially with Dunn. Dun's poetry is the Renaissance lyric par excalons. His poetry yokes science and theology. It actually combines many subjects, not just science and theology, but eroticism, philosophy, esoteric philosophy, hermetic philosophy, neoplateness. And the the joy of of Dunn is in his startling metaphor, something he calls something critics call conceits. Dun can feel abrupt, argumentative, and strange. And his difficulty is in his brilliance. He asks us to hold together the sacred and the profane. uh the the high and the low, the cosmic and the intimate, or the cosmic and the comic even, and often within the same line or poem. Reading Don is like entering into a mind that refuses to simplify experience. He's encyclopedic. That's probably the best way to describe Don in a word. Now, I said that the key to Don is conceit. And I don't mean conceit in the negative way. Conceit, it comes from the root of our our word concept. Uh, conceit is an extended comparison between two seemingly dissimilar things and D does this amazingly well. D usually yolks surprising things together in his conceits and that's where his ingenuity and innovation lie. Don't expect Dun to be romantic, even in his love poetry. Uh, at least romantic in the sense of what we might understand that word by. Instead, look for the conceits, the startling comparisons. Ask what images are being put together. Uh ask what they illuminate about love, death, the soul, or faith. Circle key metaphors and map them out. Let the ingenuity just simply unfold in the reading. But take for example this passage from Dun's poem, a valediction for bbidding mourning. Validiction is a saying farewell. And this is just the end of the poem. Think about okay. So what images are being yolked together here? Our two souls therefore which are one, though I must go, endure not yet a breach, but an expansion like gold to airy thinness beat. So there's one elemental metaphor. Um even though I'm leaving you, we're still one. There's no breach, but we're just expanding wider. And this metaphor of expansion is going to be used again and developed further in this next paragraph. So first metaphor is with gold beaten into gold leaf which then allows the gold to be spread over a wider surface. But then this logical maneuver here if they be two they are too so as stiff twin compasses are two. Now a compass here's a compass is like this. So he says well if we are to and we if we are not one we are like this where uh the soul is the fixed foot which is on the paper makes no show to move but doth if the other do which is this leg here which roams and though it in the center that's how you make a circle put that in the center. And though it in the center sit, yet when the other far doth roam, it leans and hearkens after it and grows erect as that comes home. So coming home to the point, if you were to contract the circle, you see how straighter it's getting. That is the compass growing erect. And there also might be a bit of an erotic joke going on here. Such wilt thou be to me. So he's bringing the metaphor back home in this final stanza. who must like the other foot obliquely run. Thy firmness makes my circle just and makes me end where I begun. So here Don compares the lovers to the lengths of the compass in a wildly original metaphor. It's jarring at first, but as the development of the image unfolds here in these last three lines gracefully, uh it it acquires strength and actually becomes one of the most pleasing effects of his verse. So I think the pleasure of reading Dunn for me is is actually seldom the music in Dun's case, although he has great music sometimes, but rather in the intellectual satisfaction of pairing two very different images and ideas together. It's like a magic act and there's something just so entertaining about it. So the third most difficult poet is William Blake and I confess that for many years Blake was impenetrable to me even though I was endlessly fascinated by him ever since I was an undergraduate. My first paper in a romanticist class was actually on Blake's urisen. Uh but I could not read him for more than an hour without uh my head spinning. And in each reading uh the inner logic of his poetry constantly escaped me. There is a topsyturviness to his poems. Um, and you have to suspend sort of orthodox understanding of heaven and hell, the spirit and the body, and uh to just kind of enter in and try to follow along with the inner spiritual logic by which his poems move. Just listen to this for example from his the marriage of heaven and hell. By the way, this is the beautiful the William Blake archive which is a fantastic it's just a work of art, work of scholarly art and uh it's all available for free and you can read the poems as they're meant to be read. So, by the way, this passage is on the origin of the gods. Let me get to the origin of the gods here. Here it is. The ancient poet animated all sensible objects with gods or geniuses, calling them by the names, and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country placing it under its mental deity till a system was formed which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood. So he's talking about how religion began choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounced that the gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. Okay, this is a pretty straightforward passage. It's pros poetry, but it's also mixing in with the imagery here. So my advice is to approach Blake as if you're interpreting a dream. I think people who deal with symbols, um, people who are familiar with dream interpretation or, uh, reading tarot cards or studying biblical types or having studied esoterism or alchemy or Jung's archetypes have an advantage over anyone else. When it comes to reading Blake, because such practices require interpretation of both word and image, that don't worry about decoding everything on the first pass. Read in small doses and let the strangeness wash over you. Blake was also a painter as you can see here. These are his images, these copper plate etchings and they can help you make sense of the meaning. This is how the poem was meant to be experienced with the text. And look, if you click on the magnify button here, they have this beautiful feature. You can zoom in. So here are the gods. Here looks like a a spirit of the woods or of the earth. A genus Lokai. Here is very clearly a spirit of the water uh looking down upon a a human child. It looks who has its arms outstretched to receive the beautifific vision of this spiritual person. This perhaps is the the growing intellect. And then all throughout the text you have these moments where you have these birds, these animals in the uh in the text itself. Look at that. and and they can actually help you. So when it gets down to talking about the development of the priesthood, we see these um forms, human bodies subjugated in these uh bodily postures of of either prayer, our worship, something set up there and then down below uh we have these gods. It's it appears beneath in the darkness at the bottom of the page. Uh so this is representing how the deities have been kind of suppressed by the priesthood. whereas here in the beginning they were um in this very adivistic adivistic and beautiful um setting. So the the key there is the imagery and you want to experience William Blake this way. Now the next difficult poet is Wallace Stevens. Wallace Stevens was born 1879 lived to 1955 and he was an insurance executive by day and a poet by night. For all of you poets out there working full-time jobs in the world and producing beautiful art in your downtime, Stevens is your encouragement. Not many poets until our own moment went to MFA programs to be made poets. Um, most of them were self-taught. Not that there's anything wrong with MFA programs, but Stevens wrote some of the most beautiful philosophically demanding poetry of the 20th century. As an insurance executive, he meditates on the act of meaning making. His poems are these reflections on how we make sense of our world and that's why his poetry can be difficult. His poems are lush with images and abstract in their logic. I take for example his poem anecdote of the jar. Uh this is from his first volume of poetry Harmonium which was published in 1923. I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it was upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness around that hill. The wilderness rose up to it and sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground and tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush like nothing else in Tennessee. This is a poem about among other things the activity of the human subjectivity in the imagination represented in miniature. In a way you can't really speak of the jar as a symbol because it very clearly has its own objective autonomy here. It's its own thing. Isn't it also a symbol of the human mind? Is not your mind a little jar placed upon a hill that subjugates all that surrounds it to its own center? Stevens's central drama in much of his poetry lies between the brute fact of the world and the shaping power of the imagination. Reality is often stark, even bare. Imagination invests it with grandeur, almost tames it, we might say. David Perkins put it really well when he said that while other modernist poetry was interested in image and metaphor, the poetry of Stevens was an escape into fantasy that lifted the pressure of reality while also highlighting reality in some aspects. And that's from Perkins beautiful two volume collection on the study of modernism, which I recommended in an earlier video. My advice if you're going to read Wallace Stevens is to accept the difficulty as essentual and not accidental. That is, you must understand that the difficulty of his poems may not come so much from your ignorance but from the poems themselves as important features of the poems that contribute to their success. It's it's demanding. Let me put it this way. When we come to poetry with certain expectations that it should say as most poetry does stir our emotions or that it should speak of nature and of flowers uh that it should speak of human beings and of human life and the human heart. That may throw us off with Stevens. Stevens's poetry gives us something different. He's philosophical intellectual. Uh he's very much like the metaphysical poets the school of the metaphysical poets with John Dunn. I would say he's a metaphysical poet without the metaphysics. There's a paradox there and that's part of Stevens. There is an oblquity to his poetry as some critics have have called it a difficulty. Yet Stevens rewards patience with deep reflections on how we live and perceive how we make meaning. And if you've ever wondered how art itself helps us bear existence, to bear reality, Stevens is your poet. Now number five is Marian Moore. She was born in 1887 and died at 1972. So she's also in the modernist school here. Her poetry is a strange blend of the whimsical and the precise exacting eye of a naturalist. She's witty and she's very idiosyncratic both in her person and in her poetry. And her poems often quote from unlikely sources. It's documentary in that way. She'll pull things from objects or things she sees, random documents even such as manuals, newspapers, travel guides, receipts, and she weaves them in to intricate verse. Good example of that is her poem, No Swan So Fine. Here we are from the poetry foundation website. No water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles. No swan with swart blind look scans and ambidextrous legs so fine as the chinted china one with fawn brown eyes and tooththed gold collar on to show whose bird it was. lodged in the Louis 15th candalobram tree of cooxcomb tinted buttons, dalas, sea urchins and everlastings. It perches on the branching foam of polish of polished sculptured flowers at ease and tall. The king is dead. And this fantastic poem, you can see how the shape of it, the visual um icon of the poem itself is of course part of the poetry. It's not something just heard. It's something also read from the page and the visual encounter with the poem. Even where these dashes come in where the words are incompleted, something characteristic of more is very much informing the poem. It's very much a part of the poet and its experience. Uh this one was inspired by uh Louis V 15th's porcelain swan centerpiece uh which was in a collection near Paris. The piece is ornately decorated in Rakoko's style. It is lavish aristocratic. It's fine as she describes. It's fine in the extreme more often built poems around objects she had seen in museums. This is called a certain type of poetry that's called ecrastic poetry. She also builds them around ideas she finds in encyclopedias and in exhibition cataloges. Really, anything of the daily life as fair game. So, the poem has its roots in visual art and the culture of European aristocracy uh refracted through Moore's sharp eye for detail as we see here. Notice her salabic form. Count the syllables per line and you'll see her discipline. Uh she's great with salabic form. Don't be put off by the factual style, the very documentary style. Instead, think of her as a curator who carefully arranges details to reveal hidden patterns of truth, hidden sensations and encounters with objects through the site and then mediated through language. My advice when reading Moore, I think the key to enjoying Moore's poetry is possessing a keen interest in animals and things, especially the life of things we might call it. Listen to her poetry and read it aloud and listen to yourself reading it aloud and allow your imagination to move with the sound. She was a master of salabic verse which gave her poems a distinctive rhythm. So there's music there too. At first her work may seem fragmented or overly intellectual. You might feel like you're not getting anything out of it. You might feel like you're not really getting it. Like it's trying to tell you something. You don't know what it's trying to tell you. But with time I think and with patience uh the meaning in the music both appear uh often together and her subtle humor and vision her perspective uh emerge slowly. She teaches us to see the extraordinary and the ordinary with unmatched precision. And in a way in that respect she's like Elizabeth Bishop. Finally the last poet on this list is Hart Crane. Crane's verse is a symphony of poetry. His great work uh he has several great works, The Bridge, but uh the one I'd recommend starting with is Voyages. Why is Hart Crane on this list? I think it's because his syntax is complicated. It's very naughty. Um it's it's it can be difficult to untangle. His images are very densely layered. Marian Moore, by the way, often quibbled with it. She was the editor of the dial uh to which Crane submitted several of his of his poems. She often rejected his poems, but if she didn't reject it outright, she would often send the poems back heavily revised and annotated, which annoyed Crane. But reading Crane is like really it's like swimming along an ocean shore where the breakers are actually um quite disruptive to an even rhythm of swimming. You don't get a sort of swimmer's cadence there. It's it's constantly kind of being overwhelmed by something coming at it. And his vision of poetry really helps us here. He sees poetry as the vessel of transcendence that makes him one of the boldest voices in American letters, especially uh of among the American modernist poets. Take for example this beautiful transition between the first section of voyages and the second. Oh, brilliant kids. Frisk with your dog, fondle your shells and sticks, bleached by time and the elements. But there is a line you must not cross nor ever trust beyond it. Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses to liken faithful from too wide a breast. The bottom of the sea is cruel. This is a transition into part two. And yet this great wink of eternity of rimless floods unfettered lewardings semi sheetated and processioned where her uninoal vast belly moonward bins laughing the wrapped inflections of our love. Take this sea whose dipass nails on scrolls of silver snowy sentences. The sceptered terror of whose sessions rend as her demeanor's motion well or ill. All but the pieties of lovers hands. You can see what I mean about the dense syntax and the metaphors accumulate. They pile up on each other and his addiction is elevated to the point sometimes of overwhelm. But that's the beauty of it. So my advice with Hart Crane is to treat Crane's poetry like music. And don't panic if you don't follow every image. In his essay titled General Aim and Theories, he tells us how the poetry works. So let me read you just this brief passage from the essay because he gives good advice for reading his own poetry. Here it is as though a poem gave the reader as he left it a single new word never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate but self-evident as an active principle in the reader's consciousness henceforward. The motion of the poem must be derived from the implicit emotional dynamics of the materials used and the terms of expression employed are often selected less for their logical that is literal significance than for their associational meanings. So you see how pros logic when reading poetry reading crane's poetry especially will actually sometimes lead you astray via this and their metaphorical interreationships. There's the associational meaning here. The entire construction of the poem is raised on the organic principle of a logic of metaphor which anti-dates our so-called pure logic. So he's saying there's a logic of metaphor of association which is older than our very analytical uh or scientific modes of of intellectual logic and which and this logic of metaphor which is the genetic basis of all speech. Hence, consciousness and thought extension. The poetry for Hart Crane is actually going back to the origins of language. And that's what's so fascinating about it. He's getting back to what language was before it became pros. And the the logic of his poetry moves according to that logic of metaphor. So you must suspend your intellectual logic and intuit it higher laws of logic such as the logic of metaphor which uh only have their full effect in the logic of music. Those metaphors will only have the full effect there. Read aloud. Again, hear the rhythms and allow emotion to guide you before meaning does. Over time, the larger themes will emerge from the poem. And so, patience is really the advice I'd give for reading all of these poems. Now, despite what the title of this video may suggest, this video is meant to encourage you. Any one of you watching this video can find difficult poets worth reading and perhaps even discover a new love in a difficult poet. And they also believe that each of you have not only the ability to become great readers of great poets but can also contribute to the collective understanding of the great poets. Many of you have a knowledge of life and have experience that many academics do not have. And in that respect many have more in common with the poets than the scholars themselves. And vice versa academics have other forms of knowledge that can help uh understanding and appreciating poetry. The point is we need each other to widen the circumference of our collective knowledge. And I think that's something really beautiful that I find happening in the comment sections of these videos. So, uh, I hope you'll find The Difficult Poets worth reading. Thanks for watching and until next