Sorry about the light blogging this week; it's been incredibly busy. 5 tests, each demanding their own share of my time. Yuck! And a paper for my American Literature class.
I am never taking another literature course after this one. I'd even drop this one, except I need 9 English credits to graduate, and my ACT score was good enough to bump me up into the En102 (composition)-En103(Int. to Literature)-En203/4/5/6(Literature course of your choice) track. Foolish me, I took 206, American Literature from 1865-Present, thinking that it would be really interesting to read the stuff that we didn't get into with my high school literature course.
Those of you who have ever read anything written as literature after 1865 are giggling right now.
I think that there must be two separate classes of writing, even in writing fiction and poetry. The first class is the popular, "commoner" literature, the stuff that is fun to read, written to please an audience. The other class is the stuff that is foisted upon us in literature classes, where everything means something normal people wouldn't think of and where people actually write with philosophies like "Poetry should be hard" (T. S. Elliot). The awful, awful stuff studied as great masterpieces. For example, we've just begun on "Imagism." Allow me to quote a poem from this "movement."
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Now, normal people, when they write, want their writing to have a point to it and want that point to be as readily understandable as possible. What is Ezra Pound's point in the above poem? What was he thinking? My counter-poem answers these questions: