Friday 5 January 2018

How reading Poetry is different than reading Prose fiction?

Well, reading is always a good habit and we often hope that we somehow get to finish at least 10 good books in a year so that our intellectual quota of life hangs in balance. However, people often think that reading is reading and that can be reading anything. Let me tell my opinion to the readers about such issues. I don't think that reading can be managed in the same way - reading different things are certainly different in the terms of experience and practicality. And the matter of fact is that reading a novel and reading poetry are two different things - two different kinds of reading practice altogether. 


Do you remember reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land? Do you also remember reading Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse? Were both same things? Where do you think you had to invest more of your mind to decrypt the fiction and get out the pleasure or the pain quotient of it? Was reading and understanding poetry too easy? Was reading the novel at the same time grasping what you were reading? 

The answers to these questions will let the readers know the basic differences between reading poetry and reading prose fiction. What I believe, on general occasions, is that reading poetry is often difficult because we are messing with a different lot of words in very different orders, unlike the novels where we just have to get the core and we have it. A poem can have thousands of possible and logical interpretations but a novel does have a universal interpretation because it seldom varies. 

These are my views about different kinds of reading mechanism we employ when we read fiction in prose and verse forms. If you want to read more interesting literary facts and opinions, you should explore the website: Literature News 

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