tsadkiel
Legend
Poetry and stuff
(tsadkiel waves his degree in English Lit. around for emphasis)
The English Romantics would tend to disagree with you on this point - "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion," and all that.*
As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I've taken my fair share of poetry classes (and edited my college's literary magazine for a while) and I've seen some really crappy poetry that was the result of laborious effort. I've also been present when some fairly good poetry was created on the spot. Hard work and revision is a good thing. So is inspiration.
* Though the Romantics talked a lot about how poetry is spontaneous, there are a lot of surviving revisions that show they put a lot of work into their poetry after the initial burst of inspiration. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Guacamole said:Good poetry is laborious, no ifs, ands, ors, buts. Bad poetry is the kind where you write your feelings down on paper, without a thought to anything other than your feelins, and call it talent, or what not.
(tsadkiel waves his degree in English Lit. around for emphasis)
The English Romantics would tend to disagree with you on this point - "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion," and all that.*
As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle. I've taken my fair share of poetry classes (and edited my college's literary magazine for a while) and I've seen some really crappy poetry that was the result of laborious effort. I've also been present when some fairly good poetry was created on the spot. Hard work and revision is a good thing. So is inspiration.
* Though the Romantics talked a lot about how poetry is spontaneous, there are a lot of surviving revisions that show they put a lot of work into their poetry after the initial burst of inspiration. The two are not mutually exclusive.