[Tim Murphy]

Andrew, I presume you're referring to Hurricane Andrew (chuckle!) which grazed Miami but flattened Homestead AFB and environs with 125 knot (140 mph) winds. Your understanding of weather is only surpassed by your taste in poetry. Every American poet I most highly esteem regards Frost as our greatest poet. Your assault on him has all the force of a zephyr expiring on Parnassus.

[MacArthur]

OK. I even think there is an excellent chance you are right...but it's a blindspot which has always nagged me. Like I said in the beginning, I'm strongly disinclined to assume that everyone could be wrong...although in the rarest of cases it must happen (my favorite fairy-tale as a kid was "The Emporer's New Clothes"...such an human story.

Meantime, you only detect astigmatism by failing a vision test-- it beats kissing a telephone pole.

The distaste for Frost is genuine and enduring...from the soul. I disapprove him.

...and I can't be the only one. There must be closet Frost-haters. Lots of them...nobody else goes unscathed. "Most American Poets" stay off the subject...and his claque is very noisy. Wallace Stevens is another like that-- all comments are laudatory...but comment is falling off. Maybe people lay off Frost for the same reason they lay off Steinbeck...why bother?

[ChrisW]

I'd like to figure out the nature of your antipathy, Andrew.
Here's my confession: I don't like Hemingway. I think he was an excellent writer, but at a higher level I dislike him -- behind all the raw candor, he seems like a phony. I feel as if he is trying to pass off his persona as who he really is -- he seems to use his writing to prove that he's a real man. (Well that's how it sounds to me.)
I don't think Frost is trying to prove he's a real man, but he does adopt that New England sage persona -- and maybe partly in order to persuade people that he really is a country sage.
Also, though I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Hemingway's style, I'm not sure I like the effects it had on everybody else's style. After everybody writes short, simple sentences for a while, your readers won't understand long complex ones if you try to revive them.
Sounds as if SOME of your objections to Frost might parallel my reasons for disliking Hemingway -- they might not be technical so much as moral.
Maybe this raises an interesting general question about what relationship writers should have to their own personae.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 20, 2001).]

[Robert J. Clawson]

First of all, Frost could compose well in any received form, including the masque. Secondly, he established (for American poets) dramatic narratives, both monologues and dialogues, as great vehicles for tragic and weird tales. In them, he opened up views of rural life as both lovely and harrowing. We can use his gift as vehicles for exploring our own terrain. He also wrote with wit, and his versification was near perfect, as was his ear.

What more can we ask of a poet? Six great poems? A dozen damn good ones? Try these for six of his greats:

Home Burial
A Servant to Servants
‘Out, Out--’
Design
The Witch of Coos
Provide, Provide

And these for a dozen damn good ones:

A Considerable Speck
Departmental
The Tuft of Flowers
West-Running Brook
A Passing Glimpse
The Road Not Taken
The Oven Bird
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Moon Compasses
Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
To Earthward


I believe that Sound is, in the Trinity of diction and meaning, the Holy Ghost, our spirit. Almost all of Frost’s poems are peculiar songs sung with an unmistakeable voice. What more do we need? What more do we want?

He’ll always be a target. Mac’s not the first to call him a phoney. But I think we have to give him this: he has extraordinary appeal to poets, critics, AND “the middle class.” That high school kids and 60-year-old poets can love his art is just fine with me.

Sometimes I think that readers link Frost with Norman Rockwell, a depictor of Americana. Kind of a sweetie pie. But Frost has such a broad range. I love his Masque of Reason, wherein Job gets to sit down and have it out with God, and God takes to Job's wife. The joke's so deep, so sad, so funny.

I'm a hopeless fan and will re-read his work 'til I go blind.

Bob

[Robert J. Clawson]

"I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.
About the meter...what can I say? How would this weather on Metrical III?"

Mac, I don't know what Alan would say, but this reads as a straight-forward iambic tetrameter to me. Nothing strange here.

Bob

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Closely related to "The Tuft of Flowers" and (especially in the second stanza) "A Considerable Speck". Probably this is a technique most clearly stated in "Range-Finding", or in this poem.

[SteveWal]

MacArthur -

We all have blindspots. Mine's Opera. It's neither theatre nor music, but a horrible conflation of the two. I can't stand all that wailing.

As for Miles Davies and Beethoven - well, sorry, but you're just plain wrong. Miles Davies is definitely better than Beethoven. Beethoven was rubbish at jazz.

Actually, I applaud anyone who stands up against the consensus and says, "Nope, don't like it." There's no law says you have to like Frost. I personally would put him on my "OK" list. Eliot's far better. I'd also far rather read Basil Bunting's "Brigflats" than most British poets of the 50's and 60's.

Oh, and Charles Olson. I can't stand Charles Olson. But then as far as that's concerned, I guess I'm among friends here.

------------------
Steve Waling

[Tim Murphy]

Thanks, Bob, for answering ChrisW' crie de coeur. I'd propose a very different list, but that's the beauty of Frost. He is overwhelmingly the greatest influence on both the New Narrative poets, and the formal lyricists. Discuss him with Warren, Wilbur, Hecht, Ransom, Brinnan--a reverential tone pervades their comments. Same with my generation. I admit that Wakefield and I are special cases, outdoorsmen, sometime farmers; and Clawson has forgotten more about fishing than Richard or I will ever learn. To a city dweller like you, Mac, I'd suggest re-reading "Acquainted with the Night." There's something in Frost for everyone.

Christopher, when I was an undergrad, Emily Hahn taught a fiction seminar at Yale. She was Hemmingway's mistress in Havana and Key West, and she confided to us students: "Ernest's problem was that he had the smallest 'parts' of any man I've ever known."

[ChrisW]

Originally posted by SteveWal:

Actually, I applaud anyone who stands up against the consensus and says, "Nope, don't like it." There's no law says you have to like Frost. I personally would put him on my "OK" list. Eliot's far better. I'd also far rather read Basil Bunting's "Brigflats" than most British poets of the 50's and 60's.

How much does your choice between Eliot and Frost depend on what you think poetry ought to do? They certainly aren't doing the same sort of thing.
I think I prefer what Frost is trying to do. Frost is facing the universe science presents to us (godless, unplanned) and trying to figure out how to live there. Isn't Eliot (for all his brilliance, which I don't deny) just beating his breast over the receding 'sea of faith', like Arnold? (There's something to rile MacArthur! -- be gentle with me though, I admit to being pretty ignorant about Eliot) Of course, some people might well think that breast-beating is all we can do -- and that anything less is a kind of blindness to the truth.

I don't know. At a certain level of skill and originality, how one ranks poets will depend more on what you think the world is like and what poetry ought to be doing in such a world than on features of the poets themselves. Maybe such comparisons should be accompanied by some explication of what dimension along which the two poets are being compared?
What do you think poetryis for and how does Eliot achieve that end better than Frost (or vice versa)?

Tim:
Thanks for sharing that juicy gossip! Poor H! Will try to take that into account when I read him next.

[wendy v]

I love this place.

Mac, it's guilty pleasure reading through your analysis and subsequent comments on Frost. I have a love/hate relationship with him, myself, which generally means a whole lot of things that have to do with the way I read poetry, and the way poetry reads me. I admire your willingness to stand up, and you sure do it with flair. Fun thread.

I have just one confession to make:

I suspected as much about Hemmingway.

wendy