Where Can I Find Original Poetry Not From The Legendary Poets By But Lesser Mortals

Why is poetry important in general?

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:Its loveliness increases; it will neverPass into nothingness; but still will keepA bower quiet for us, and a sleepFull of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathingA flowery band to bind us to the earth,Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearthOf noble natures, of the gloomy days,Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened waysMade for our searching: yes, in spite of all,Some shape of beauty moves away the pallFrom our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boonFor simple sheep; and such are daffodilsWith the green world they live in; and clear rillsThat for themselves a cooling covert makeAgainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:And such too is the grandeur of the doomsWe have imagined for the mighty dead;All lovely tales that we have heard or read:An endless fountain of immortal drink,Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.The above is the first stanza from John Keats’ Endymion. I don’t have anything in particular to say about the poem, but when talking about the importance of poetry, I felt compelled to include it because the poem as it exists itself is important and a thing of beauty.I’m not particularly well versed in the study of poetry, or even literature on the whole. I read books, I read poems, I come up with my own ideas, but it is for the joy of it, not academic exercises (I realise the two can be one and the same).So, as such, it wouldn’t be for me to write about the importance of poetry from an academic standpoint. I could try, but I wouldn’t do it justice, and points I might highlight would be far better found in books on poetry, or even here on Quora.Instead, I will simply talk about why poetry is important to me, and therefore why it might be important to you.To me, poetry is using condensed language to tell a story. It distils feelings down to their rawest state, compressing the language and displaying it in an almost formulaic manner.It causes your perspective to shift and your interpretations to mutate. Feel things more intensely. It goes beyond the seemingly human capacity to write or perceive or paint it, to the point that it reaches across from your soul to the soul of the poet.It’s that feeling that gives poetry its inherent importance.

Was Achilles a real character? If so, how do we know he actually existed?

This is definitely in the “we’ll never know for sure” category.The name does actually date back to the hypothetical Trojan war period (dated some time in the 12th or 13th century BC): there’s an individual named a-ki-re-u in a tablet from Knossos but he’s definitely not the warrior of legend, he’s a shepherd and probably a serf or slave.There was a “tomb of Achilles” in the Troad, which was a popular tourist attraction in antiquity. However that doesn’t prove much : there are plenty of cases where a famous name gets attached to a monument of forgotten origin.In general the oral tradition of the Iliad is a distorting mirror — it has surprising bits of deep history mixed with fictions and confusions. Homer seems to have gotten at least two other proper name right, since we’ve found Hittite records of a ruler named Alaksandu — that is, the alternate name Homer gives for Paris — was ruler of Wilusa, (Homer’s Ilios ) somwhere in northwestern Turkey.This Hittite tablet refers to an attack by the Ahhiwaya (assumed to be Homer’s “Achaeans”) on Wilusa (Homer’s Ilios)But these correspondences are no guarantee of literal accuracy The poems preserve without understanding bits and pieces of Mycenaean context , which was at least four centuries gone when the poems took their familiar form. There are chariots, but the aren’t used in logical ways; there are bronze weapons, but the workers have iron tools; there is even writing, but it’s an inexplicable act of magic instead of the obsessive bureaucratic record-keeping of Mycenaean times. Four centuries is a long time for an oral tradition to mutate its subject matter in subtle and not so subtle ways. Consider — as an example — the school of thought that holds the “wooden horse” is just a mythologized, distorted version of a typical near-eastern battering ram or siege tower as repeated by illiterate Greeks who hand’t seen one in four centuries.The wooden horse? This Assyrian siege engine , filtered through four centuries of oral transmission, could be the origin of the famous horse.If I had to bet, I’d say that there probably was an individual Mycenaean warlord named Achilles who made a name for himself and achieved a certain immortality through the oral tradition. But I doubt the Achilles of the poem shares much more with him than a name.