#they're actual professionals/academics and are really informative and cool and ahhhhh

[purgatoryandme]

Hi, I fell in love with Illuminate Me, mostly because I'm a huge poetry fan, but I don't know a lot of poetry--you have such a way of pulling quotes and with words, I was wondering if you had a collection of favorite poems or quotes or works of literature and how you have such a wide breadth of knowledge of literature? Thanks, and thank you for sharing your work with us!

Hi! I'm so happy you enjoyed IM and that it's such a hit with poetry/classics lovers! I've got a few asks already answered with a literature list, some inspiration lit pieces, and inspiration lit for specific characters under the IM tag, but I don't think I've said anything specifically about poetry in detail yet.

I don't have any specific collection that's a favourite, but I do have poets whose imagery agrees with me more than anyone else's. These are the ones that are usually on the top of my head: I love Baudelaire for his religious imagery and overall use of symbolism (Les Fleurs Du Mal is a good collection despite me saying I don't have any fave). Yeats is a deeply talented poet, though a very hateable man, whose poetry tends to be self-referential is a delightful way. There's a certain breathlessness to it - clearly a man fascinated by the world around him. Poetic epics own my whole heart - The Odyssey, the Iiliad, the Aenid, Beowolf, the Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost and more. There's something about longform narrative poetry that is just deeply satisfying to read and connect with. The Wasteland is an excellent piece, though difficult to get into because it is EXTREMELY reference heavy. "April is the cruelest month" is a line that is forever and always stuck in my head. What an opener! How chilling! William Ernest Henley's poetry has this iron-willed spirit to it that calls to me on a personal level, and his use of meter and rhyme is just...good. It's so good. I'd recommend looking for concentration camp poetry if you're interested in history and the development of poetry as a form of resistance, healing, and speech. Fascinating stuff - I know in one of the linked asks I rec a book on it. The translated works of Jalaluddin Rumi is lyrical and measured and has such an amazing grasp of symbolism and the divine. The thing about translation is you have to poke around a fair bit to find something that balances honest translation with keeping the original feeling/meter/rhyming scheme of the original. Anything King Arthur related! I love me a good historical mythos!

My mother has a collection of illuminated world classics that I was pretty obsessed with as a kid. She kept them in this amazing walnut wood cabinet my grandfather made and I couldn't reach any of the books lol. They were shiny and gold and were full of translated poetic epics, plays, and cornerstone literature. I've always enjoyed classics for the referential aspects even if I wasn't a fan of the actual contents pretty often - it's cool to see how they shaped literature today - and admittedly some of my love was formed out of spite against the recommended reading curriculum. I loved English in elementary and high school (especially poetry - I used to be deranged about Shel Silverstein), but didn't pursue it further for my education because I didn't enjoy the overtly structured nature of interpretation you're forced into and, well...science was my second love, and the one that I moved on with. However, whenever I wanted a break from scientific academia, I used to go into the old arts library on my campus, go through the book stacks where nobody usually hung out, and pull interesting titles on historical and cultural literature.

To give more detail than I have before and to keep replies fresh: originally I was going to write a different story and Illuminate Me was just a tester fic. I was inspired to use classical literature quotes in it (before I had much of a plot fleshed out for it at all beyond "Space" and "Extremis" and "post-Siberia") after going through a classical Japanese poetry collection about moon watching so I could find a very particular phrase to use in ANOTHER fic (that I never actually wound up using the phrase in lmao). Going through the classical archives and struggling SO HARD to remember what exactly I wanted out of the symbolism got me mulling over examples of the kind of feeling I was going for, which brought me back to Eliot Kermode's "The Shudder" essay, and then I was back down the rabbit hole of all the classics I've ever loved and, in particular, that one line from Paradise Lost.

All in all, I wouldn't say I'm particularly well-read, but I would say I'm particularly stubborn about freedom of interpretation and the layered referential aspects of poetry! I like what I like, and I think was makes any good reader or writer is just that: you like what you like, and while you might learn to build on it, you shall not be swayed from what's in your heart. Have fun! Explore! Check out historical pieces and see how they sweeten more modern works, how slam poetry entirely evades a lot of classical convention for something raw and punchy, and bounce between dainty flowered depictions of love to tortured depictions of the divine and back again. Keep quotes that call to you close to your heart, and freely remove them from their context as you will, and go crazy. That's how you make love AND your research abilities fluorish!