PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I have not read any of them, but I would like to point out something about them.  Those of your poems that I have read are very good.  That has to come from somewhere and, as is the case with most poets, its nascent presence can be seen in their early poems---and that is very interesting.  I will cite just two cases in support of this.  There are a couple of poems supposedly written by the ancient Roman poet, Vergil, which, according to the legend, he himself suppressed.  Yet they were good enough to have been preserbed, and ascribed to him, in a time from which we have relatively little.  And when one reads them, one can see the first stirrings of the greatness he brought to his first two collections and the great epic he wrote.  And, a more contemporary example from the twentieth century:  when I was a teenager, the great poem of the twentieth century was considered to be T S Eliot's poem, Ths Waste Land.  (I studied it incessantly at college, and I still love it.)  The poem was published in 1922, in the form we now have.  But in the mid-seventies, the poet's widow published the recently discovered original manuscripts, and readers and scholars learned that the original draft included some poems that Eliot had written in his college years, and he had worked them into the massive structure of the original.  (This manuscript was then submitted to a fellow poet, Ezra Pound, who ruthlessly slashed it down from 2000 or so lines to 434, to give us the form that was published in 1922.  During that editing process, Eliot was not even present, as he was having a nervous breakdown in Switzerland.)  These early poems, while not as great as the "retained" parts of The Waste Land, are still very, very interesting, and some of them are extremely moving.  One line from one of them, which I used to recite to myself during my freshman year, was "And in the evening, through lace curtains, the aspidestra grieves."  I thought a grieving houseplant was a wonderful metaphor, and Eliot was the same age when he wrote it that I was when I read it.  Pound, who was still alive at the time the manuscript was published, was shown the actual original drafts with his slash-marks and snide comments written upon them.  Mrs. Eliot said that, upon lookinjg at these originals after fifty years, Pound began weeping and said, "Why, oh why, did he not restore the cancelled passages?  Why did he listen to me?"  And some of the poems, over which Pound wept, were from Eliot's earliest writing period.  And in some of them were flashes and glimpses of the greatness for which he would be considered, until Wallace Stevens' star began to ascend in the early seventies, to be the greatest poet of the entire twentieth century.  (At college, I actually met a person who had known Eliot; and a very sophomoric letter sent to his widow, Valerie, was honored with a very encouraging letter from her, typed by her personally and scented with lilac perfume.)  I have said all that to say this:  do not discount your early work because you, yourself, might dislike it---as did Vergil and Eliot.  I will cite one more example, and if I have been too verbose, you can easily delete the comment.  I am a devout, but very flawed, Christian.  But I would never, ever, dare disparage or discount of the Gospel of Saint Mark because it is not as theologically profound as, say, the Gospel of Saint John.  Mark's Gospel is our first, our very first, written glimpse of Jesus---and that is as valuable, in that aspect, as the other accounts that followed and were more elaborate and more literate (they tell me that Mark's Greek grammar is the worst in the New Testament).  Early work---whether among the Gospels, or in literary history, or in your own personal writing curve---is valuable for its own sake.  And besides, one of the traditions of Western literature is that the poet is not as competent as the reader in determining what is good, bad, valuable, or valueless, in the work as a whole.  Neither you nor I are better judges of our early work than Saint Mark was of his, or Eliot and Pound was of theirs.  That is for our readers, or literary scholars, to determine after our work, our personal canon, has been completed and closed.  If I have been verbose here, it is only because my response to those poems of yours that I have read had emboldened me to share this with you.  I think your poetry is very talented, and, of course, a towering skyscraper does have to stand on some kind of foundation.