Poems I Like - and Why (Leonard Peikoff lecture)

[KyaryPamyu 41]

The following is a list of poems featured/mentioned in Poems I Like - and Why (lecture by Leonard Peikoff)

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LP's definition of poetry:
"Poetry is the form of literature whose medium is the sound of concepts"

• Poems need not have events and characters
• Most suited to the eloquent, powerful statement of a relatively simple thought, sentiment or inspirational idea, an expression of love, a short story, a joke. Best suited to shorter works
• A cross between literature and music
• Like music scores, poems MUST be read out loud
• A poem must not sound like a poem - and yet it rhymes (must sound natural)
• Poems combine the sensory (auditory) field with the intellectual one; brain + ears, mind + body
• Two essential elements
  • rhytm
  • rhyme - "a repeated pattern of recognizable sounds at the end of the lines". Rhyming creates auditory expectations. The meaning can be a total twist - you hit the expected sound but it has a completely different meaning than what you anticipated

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METAPHYSICAL POEMS

• Richard Cory (Edward Robinson) - a malevolent universe poem with a punch
• Invictus (William Henley) - Byronic view of existence
• Say not the Struggle nought Availeth (Arthur Hugh Clough) - it looks bad, but stand back, we're winning
• The Gods of the Copybook Headings (Kipling) - the issue underneath the benevolent/malevolent universe premise: I wish vs it is. LP's top favorite.

POEMS ON EPISTEMOLOGY

• Flower in the Crannied Wall (Lord Tennyson) - integration; the true is the Whole (Tennyson is LP's favorite poet)
• The Daffodils; The Tables Turned (William Wordsworth) - an opponent of reason and integration
• The Thinker (Berton Braley) - the theme of Atlas Shrugged

POEMS ON MORALITY
Two favorites of Ayn Rand, found in her papers:

1. Mourn Not The Dead (Ralph Chaplin) - on moral judgement
2. Short poem by 'A Nony Mous' (1960 July-August issue of Success Magazine)
    Why should you begrudge another 
    The fortunes he does reap?
    Bless him, he's one brother 
    That you don't have to keep! 

• The Westerner (C. B. Clarke) - egoism and individualism. Ayn Rand had the last two lines of this poem in a placard frame.

INSPIRATIONAL POEMS
Poems that stress some virtue, such as strenght, heroism, persistence, courage.

• Columbus (Joachim Miller) - the virtue of persistence, Man the Hero
• If (Kipling) - a description of the Ideal Man (Ayn Rand's top favorite)

LOVE POEMS

• To His Coy Mistress (Andrew Marvell) - what to say to a woman that won't put out...
• Sonnets from the Portuguese 43: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (Elizabeth Browning)
• Love and Sleep (Algernon Charles Swinburne)

POLITICAL POEMS

• Retaliation (Olver Goldsmith) - a thinker wants to go into politics
• A song: “Men of England” (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
• What is a communist? (Ebenezer Elliott) 

FUNNY POEMS

• Ogden Nash poems; The Pig; The Germ; The Duck; The Panther; The Ostrich; The Pizza; Which the chicken which the egg; Kind of an ode to duty (moral-practical dichotomy); Lines Fraught With Naught But Thought

MISC POEMS

• The Lotos-eaters (Tennyson) - must be read in an increasingly sleepy way
• The Confessional (Robert Browning) - a tragic, compelling story
• Ulysses (Tennyson) - Man the Hero (white rhyme)
• Sometimes (Thomas S. Jones, Jr) - a man who betrayed his potential
• Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher (Walter Savage Landor)
• Do not go gentle into that good night (Dylan Thomas)
• Beethoven And Angelo (John Bannister Tabb)
• An Essay on Man: Epistle I | Epitaph on Sir Isaac Newton (Alexander Pope)
• The Arrow and the Song (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
• The Song of Roland (translated by Dorothy L. Sayers)
• It's all a state of mind (Success Magazine, March 1963 issue)
• The Highwayman (Alfred Noyes)
• America for Me (Van Dyke) - an ode to America
• Drinking (Abraham Cowley) - or, as LP calls it, "The Metaphysics of Vodka"
• On a Girdle (Edmund Waller)
• Be Strong (Maltbie Davenport Babcock)
• Opportunity (John James Ingalls)
• Gunga Din (Kipling) - recommended by somebody in the audience
• Tennyson poems: Break, break, break; Crossing the bar; Rizpah (LP refused to read this one because it makes him cry)
• An ode to my mistress' breasts (mentioned during a Q&A session, LP might have referred to the girdle one by Waller)

Edited May 8, 2017 by KyaryPamyu

[Boydstun 181]

Thanks!

The sound in this production is a poem plus. I close my eyes to enjoy it best.

Ode to a Nightingale