[Allen Tice]

Thanks. To the extent that it is reasonable to suspect that Eliot experienced a possible sense of personal inability stemming from early medical treatment, let's reread "The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / ... / And how should I presume?"

Speculation is no more than that. Eliot is more than that.

mmm

[Paddy Raghunathan]

A very interesting thread.

Just curious: what did Eliot think of Frost, and in turn, Frost of Eliot?

Paddy

[Allen Tice]

Thank you. I hope your interest is rewarded. Nothing of what I've said (or rhetorically overstated) is more than speculation with a touch of high-flown rhetoric. On Frost and Eliot, I defer to anyone who might know some facts.
Best.

[Michael F]

From Jay Parini’s bio of Frost, I gather Frost was never very enthusiastic about Eliot or his work. He thought Eliot the man was a fake and a snob, and he disliked Eliot the poet’s allusive obscurity. “I don’t like obscurity in poetry. I don’t think a thing has to be obvious before it is said, but it ought to be obvious once it is said. I like to read Eliot because it is fun seeing the way he does things, but I am always glad it his way and not mine.”

Eliot appears to have been more generous, at least publically. They met at a black-tie dinner in England in the 1950s, and Eliot toasted Frost as “perhaps the most eminent, the most distinguished, I must call it, Anglo-American poet now living”.

I recall generally from Parini's bio that Frost could be a prickly person, and not terribly magnanimous toward what he appeared to regard as “the competition”.

[RCL]

For years I read Frost’s “Directive” as a sly comment on Eliot’s (and modernism’s) elusive and allusive traits. Somewhere, I can’t recall, he even commented that he too could play their game, “Directive” an example. Does Parini comment on the poem or its Eliotic echoes?

[Michael F]

Hi Ralph,

Parini does comment on “Directive”. He writes that it occupies some of the same emotional terrain as The Waste Land and he even sees a direct allusion to Eliot in the image of the broken goblet -- but he doesn’t claim it is a response to Eliot or the Modernists. While Parini thinks “Directive” is a unique poem in Frost’s work, he puts the poem in the tradition of the “Greater Romantic Lyric”, like Wordsworth’s "Tintern Abbey": a concrete place provokes a meditation on time and the poet’s experience, and concludes in an epiphany, or a ‘stay against confusion’.

That doesn’t mean Frost didn’t intend it the way you say. I think I read somewhere that Frost composed “Desert Places” as a response to critics – i.e., that for all his carefully cultivated simple country persona, he wasn’t just writing about moss and phoebes. And that is surely true: there is a lot of darkness in Frost, I find.

[RCL]

Michael,

Thanks for the additional information. It's about time I read Parini's bio.

[Gregory Dowling]

Frank Lentricchia is very good on Frost's "Directive" as a response to Eliot among other things.

[Paddy Raghunathan]

Interesting insight, thank you Michael.

Paddy

[John Whitworth]

Re Auden. That was why he damned his early political poetry, quite rightly in my opinion, not that the politics were themeslves vicious, though they were, but because they were not actually his. He was much nicer than that.