About his work being too simple:
Read something like W.H. Auden's "Musee De Beaux Arts," and you can easily tell a big gap in talent.
I'm familiar with the work, I don't understand what being more complex has to do with talent. The aim of poetry is not to be complicated, it is to express something through words.
John Steinbeck is not only one of my favourite authors, he's one of the highest regarded novelists around. Part of the reason his work is so powerful is because it is simple. Simplicity has nothing to do with talent.
Edit: I'm 22, from Australia, speak English fluently.
All right, that explains why you keep putting the letter s where there should be a z, as in: "organising[sic]."
Anyways, I love John Steinbeck, and he's hardly simple. He's a simple read, but if you knew anything about his legendary novel "Grapes of Wrath," there is a ton of allusions, allegories, and symbols in it.
A person can get the jist of the injustice, but there is so much more to his writing than one, or even five readings could give.
It's like reading Shakespeare for face value, it's just NOT possible to appreciate him for face value.
I mean crap, it's like reading Hamlet without realizing he's following Sophocles's formula for the tragic hero. There is just so much to writing, the scansion, metonymy, voiced bilabial plosives, sibilance, elisions, hiatus, allusions, allegories, microcosms, enjambments, juxtaposition, consonance, assonance, metaphors, anceps, nuance, etc.
Writing is simply amazing to me, and I cannot say that this poet is really that remarkable. The "we are equal in death" poem has been done a thousand times. The angle he went was pretty hackneyed as well; war poems are almost always the same. Either it glorifies it, or it shuns it. He didn't do anything amazing to me. It's still a great poem, but it's nothing that stirred up my stomach into a fist.
When I feel hot and cold in my forehead, and my lip gets numb from anticipation of the next word, that's how I know poetry.
Or as Emily Dickinson puts it:
"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"
I feel the same way in a sense when presented with true poetry. Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening," or, "Fire and Ice," "Birches," etc.
They all make me feel ill, yet pleasantly surprised with his brilliance. This person stirs no emotions in me, and I am quite aware of his lack of structure. Free form is too simple to me.
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Apropos, a hard read is something like: "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess.
The tools, the allusions, the amazing way he structured it, and created his own language and used it eloquently simply blows my mind. It's still one of my favorite novellas.
That is a far better post than any of your others, because you actually gave examples of what you're talking about and had some substance to what you were saying. It is a shame about your follow up post.
It seems we are talking about different definitions of simple. I call Steinbeck's work simple because of the language he uses, and the way he presents it. Yes there is a lot of depth to his work, but, as you say, he presents things simply. On the other hand, much of the complicated, pretentious rubbish that is published these days has nothing beyond the surface. I do not think that calling a piece of work "simple" infers that it is shallow or deep. I think there is certainly an amount of depth to the work of Slessor, that's why he's studied in schools and published in poetry anthologies. In fact the book that I took that Slessor poem from, also includes Birches and Stopping By Woods on A Snowy Evening in it. Clearly John McKenzie (the editor of the anthology, and an English professor) thinks Slessor is comparable with Frost.
I am not sure if a poem is in the same book with another truly makes them comparable in terms of skill. "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" is arguably one of the best poems in the English language.
The poem that you had shown me was good in terms of imagery. The message has been done before, and his attack angle had been done before as well.
How many people have used iambic tetrameter quatrains, with sibilance weaving in and out, using metonymy, complex metaphors, personification, all the while making it seem like something as simple as a person stopping to enjoy the weather on the Winter Solstice.
Even though the true message is a person contemplating suicide, and chaos, whether which is better, using his horse as an allegory for his superego to usher him on to move, the road being his life, and the way to go before his death.
More of course is said, but I summed it up, and I probably left out a few meaty details.
Such as
Birches, it's beautiful, it alludes to one of the most important things you can find in art: axis mundi.
The Birch is rooted to the earth, he wishes to climb to the heavens, the tree is the pathway to the divine. While it's rooted to the earth, it aims to the heavens. It's so eloquent it could make me cry. It's a beautiful piece, I can almost hear his pen scratching away at the paper as these beautiful thoughts dripped from his abstract head.