[littlemanpoet]

This is an enlightening thread. I greatly appreciate the thoughtful posts, especially by Bill Ferny and Squatter. Bill Ferny, why did you ever choose such a moniker beneath you? The quality of your posts makes me think of you more as a Faramir than a Ferny.

In comparison to any other work of literature, I can’t think of anything else that approaches the scale of Tolkien’s corpus in regards to depth (linguistic, historical, philosophical, and perhaps theological), or in regards to narrative story telling. In many ways its more comparable to Saint Thomas’ Summa or Copleston’s History of Western Philosophy than to works of fiction. What does that say about the author, though? Does the fecundity of the corpus make Tolkien a better artist than other writers, even though other writers may be able to (objectively speaking) pen better poetry or prose, or come up with comparable narrative (i.e. Lewis)?

Tolkien was a philologist. He was a lingual genius. He could speak fluent Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, and many other languages, both dead and living. Being a philologist, he also had a profound sense of the development of language, myth, and history, and the relations between them. Being a lingual genius, it was inevitable that he would compose languages of his own making, just as musical geniuses must compose music. His profound sense of development led him to ask the philological question, "how did these words come to be the way they are?" And thus his subcreated myths and histories were born. No writer before him came close to doing this. And the completion to which he brought his subcreations made his works bear a striking resemblance to reality never before attained, nor since - so far. This same genius required the inclusion of poetry, if I understand Tolkien's creative process at all, for poetry is, as Squatter said, the most sublime of human endeavors.

I do not compare them: I read poetry in my spare time for pleasure, and I do not set those poets up against each other either, because that is not what poetry is about: it isn't about who's best, or who has the most critical acclaim; it's about each individual exploring their language and emotions to create beautiful pieces of writing.

Squatter, thank you for saying this. It reminds me of the the words of one of Tolkien's students to him, "You have been inside language." Or was that C.S. Lewis? In any case, I admit to not having read as much poetry as I would have liked to, but being who I am, I came to understand poetry by writing a lot of it, learning how the forms worked, trying to do the best I could in any form I put my mind to mastering. From that point of view, I have a great appreciation for Tolkien's poetry. He mastered the forms, and the poetry he wrote in any form is quite good. Best? It does not obtain.