Gothic Poetry

Can't resist just giving a shout-out for The Longman Anthology of Gothic Verse - just in case you're in need of a last-minute Hallowe'en gift for yourself. Great to dip into last thing before bedtime ...

Now, that's interesting: five of the poems you mention have become favourites of mine (assuming you're referring to Goethe's The Bride of Corinth) - or were to start with, but Darkness has quite faded from my mind since we read it. I shall have to hunt it up.

>2 alaudacorax: That's a thing? I need it! I still have my Longmans on Romantic Literature and a couple books on 20th Century and Modernist lit.

I'm a bigger fan of poetry than of general literature, and I think one of the reasons I like Lovecraft is that he inserts little spans in this work that could stand well as little poems. The obvious one, of course;

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
and with strange aeons, even death may die."

The last paragraph in "The Festival" is one of my favourite of his passages as well, though that's something of a spoiler, maybe, so people might need to go check that one out themselves.

Interesting how often the poems here that I'm familiar wouldn't strike me as Gothic. Might be that, I find, a lot of poetry mood can depend on the reading of it.

I tried but I couldn't do it. I wanted to find a short film from the 90s in the National Film Board of Canada of Max Ferguson's reading of Robert Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee." No such luck though. I saw this often enough on television but even youtube doesn't appear to have a segment on early searches. I'm of the mind that Ferguson's narration has so much more character and gritty feel to it than Johnny Cash (lots of his narration to be found).

I did find this one as a sort of "middle ground." It's specifically intended to be a classic horror reading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxbEz2FdC0Y

Vince Price is fantastic.

Here's more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxQcBKUPm8o

"Vincent"
a short animation by Tim Burton.

Tim Burton is pretty great, too.

>23 frahealee:

Never would have thought of Surfacing as being psychological terror. Psychological yes, but I suppose it's not the sort of material that would put me on edge. My teacher chalked it up to bad mushrooms.

I never read a lot of her poetry as it was long and complicated and less my thing, but I remember "Half-Hanged Mary" and looked it up to read over.

>30 frahealee: It's that last bit following her half-dead communing with whatever that puts this poem towards the Gothic end for me. I've read little of Atwood and I'm not the biggest fan of long poems (and hers tend to be long) but I do like her writing style, particularly the juxtaposition of elaborate and direct verse. It's like a witch weaving an intricate curse, and then turning to the next guy saying "and $#*@ you too!" Hee hee.

Can I suggest a poem as an example of "Colonial Gothic"? It came to mind when I was writing about William Hope Hodgson's "The Goddess of Death" over in The Weird Tradition group.

It's the much-parodied "The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God" by J.Milton Hayes (no Touchstone). There's an amusingly cynical (but illuminating) quote about how Hayes constructed the poem within his Wikipedia entry.

>35 housefulofpaper:

I can recite that by memory ... with much use of body language and the odd touch of Robert Newton ...