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09-28-2021, 06:46 AM
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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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09-28-2021, 09:15 AM
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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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09-28-2021, 10:31 AM
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Join Date: Feb 2009
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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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09-28-2021, 11:53 AM
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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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09-28-2021, 12:19 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2020
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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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09-28-2021, 02:19 PM
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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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09-28-2021, 02:46 PM
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Join Date: May 2020
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Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick are two of the greatest novels and the greatest poems.
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09-28-2021, 08:05 PM
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Columbus, OH
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater
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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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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09-28-2021, 09:39 PM
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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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09-29-2021, 11:19 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2014
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Quote:
Originally Posted by W T Clark
Paradise Lost and Moby-Dick are two of the greatest novels and the greatest poems.
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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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