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  #1  
Unread 09-28-2021, 06:46 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Default Poetry For Our Times

Armando Iannucci, the comedy film director, has published a long "mock epic" poem about England's response to the pandemic in the Guardian. It's rather lengthy, rambling, and is in the language of something approaching Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, except without the rhyming couplets, so maybe Paradise Lost is more appropriate, except Iannucci has a much weaker grasp of the iambic than Milton. Still, I laughed while reading it, so it must be somewhat of a success.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...past-18-months
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Unread 09-28-2021, 09:15 AM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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I couldn't get very far. To say he has a weak grasp of the iambic is to give him credit for having any grasp at all, which I'm not seeing.
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Unread 09-28-2021, 10:31 AM
Jerome Betts Jerome Betts is offline
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What Roger said. An expense of pixels in a waste of time.


This is an edited extract from Pandemonium: Some Verses on the Current Predicament (Little, Brown, 4 November). Armando plans to donate his profits to Mental Health UK.

Appropriate.
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Unread 09-28-2021, 11:53 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Ha, ha, I was a little uncharacteristically kind toward the poem. The truth is, there are some amusing passages, but, yes, by and large, the poem is quite terribly made.

Iannucci is not the first to attempt to turn Covid into poetry, who can forget David Hare's god awful prose rant under the name "poem" about Boris Johnson. It seems to me that these men are treating poetry with less of the intelligence they put into their other "art".
But the Death of Stalin is a marvellous film.
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Unread 09-28-2021, 12:19 PM
Joe Crocker Joe Crocker is offline
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Iannucci began a Dphil at Oxbridge on Milton. He is a literate, sharp and ingeniously funny man. However, I didn't make it to the bottom of his epic extract. And then again, I've never even started Milton's
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Unread 09-28-2021, 02:19 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Joe, Paradise Lost is stupendously good. If you find an edition without footnotes and just read it like a novel, you'll love it.
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  #7  
Unread 09-28-2021, 02:46 PM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick are two of the greatest novels and the greatest poems.
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Unread 09-28-2021, 08:05 PM
E. Shaun Russell E. Shaun Russell is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater View Post
Joe, Paradise Lost is stupendously good. If you find an edition without footnotes and just read it like a novel, you'll love it.

Absolutely. I'm just finishing up writing a chapter on Milton (albeit his 1645 Poems), so I'm likely biased, but if you just let yourself get immersed in the words, Paradise Lost is such a beautiful read...in addition to its well-earned laurels as one of the greatest works of English literature. There are few literary tropes I think about more than how Satan's beguiling, compelling, and wondrous language in the first two books breaks down into disjointed utterances like "Mee miserable!" in Book 4.


P.S. Jerome, don't think your cheeky nod to Sonnet 129 went unnoticed...
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Unread 09-28-2021, 09:39 PM
Michael Cantor Michael Cantor is offline
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By the time I was half-way through his self-involved introduction I knew this was going to be awful, and I wasn't disappointed. I got about two dozen lines into the poem, and gave up. How anybody can actually publish this is beyond me.
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Unread 09-29-2021, 11:19 AM
David Callin David Callin is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by W T Clark View Post
Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick are two of the greatest novels and the greatest poems.
Strangely enough, I am rereading Moby Dick - after a space of about 40 years - at the moment. I must admit, I'm finding the scenes of whale slaughter - gleeful whale slaughter, no less - hard going.
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