[Richard Wakefield]

This could go on any of several boards, but let's see how it works on this one. In the mid-50s the poet and critic Yvor Winters wrote a famous essay titled "Robert Frost: or, The Spiritual Drifter as Poet" in which he beat RF up largely for not fulfilling Winters' ideal of what poetry ought to be. Here's an excerpt. I'd like to know if -- and if so, how -- Winters' credo is useful to poets and critics today.

Frost early began to endeavor to make his style approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation, and this endeavor has added to his reputation: it has helped make him seem "natural." But poetry is not conversation. Conversation is the most careless and formless of human utterance; it is spontaneous and unrevised, and its vocabulary is commonly limited. Poetry is the most difficult form of human utterance; we revise poems carefully in order to make them more nearly perfect. The two forms of expression are extremes, they are not close to each other. We do not praise a violinist for playing as if he were improvising; we praise him for playing well. And when a man plays well or writes well, his audience must have intelligence, training, and patience in order to appreciate him. We do not understand difficult matters "naturally."

I'm tempted to dismiss Winters altogether by responding that he creates a false dichotomy. The "two forms of expression" are not extremes or, if they are, they are like many seeming polarities that turn out to be very near one another: love and hate, say, or simplicity and wisdom. Yet I also have to concede that "intelligence, patience, and training" really do make a difference in our reading, and our tastes change -- we might say "mature" or "become more discerning" -- as we nurture those qualities in ourselves.

Then there's the question whether Winters was reading Frost very well. I think you have to run over his poetry pretty superficially to believe it is "careless and formless."

[Alan Sullivan]

In this passage, at least, Winters doesn't say that Frost's verse is careless and formless; he reserves his complaints for "conversation," and remarks only that Frost tries to "approximate" it.

Contemporary poets seem to mean several things, sometimes overlapping, sometimes contradictory, when they use the word "conversation." Sometimes they mean colloquial speech. Greg Williamson does a fine job of integrating colloquialism into diction far too complex for the label "conversational." Tim Murphy likes to heist lines he has actually heard in his native North Dakota. For others, conversational voice means a loose meter, the topic of many debates in the Eratosphere. Among practitioners of free verse, "conversation" seems often to mean the sort of shrunken vocabulary and plain sound that Winters deplores.

I think the emphasis on "conversation" plays to the egalitarian impulse, which is closely linked with an innate American anti-intellectualism. In the context of present day aesthetics, such an affectation contributes to the peril of real poetry. Frost would no doubt be horrified if he could see what has happened to poetic standards since his death. I suspect he would second guess himself on this subject, if he were alive to speak of it today.

Alan Sullivan

[Julie]

Originally posted by Richard Wakefield:
We do not praise a violinist for playing as if he were improvising; we praise him for playing well.

This is where I think the false dichotomy arises. We praise the musician (or comedian) most for improvisation that masquerades as something practiced. Then we feel as if we're watching the "creative mind at work" or some such thing. I think by introducing "improvising" into his discussion, Winters hoists himself on his own petard.

Julie

[Richard Wakefield]

Julie, I agree. Winters is so intent on rationalizing his dislike of Frost that he misses his own point. To transcribe ordinary speech is to make your reader sift an awful lot of chaff for a very little wheat, and the "endeavor" that Winters acknowledges Frost making is to do the sifting. The great artist makes it seem spontaneous. Seem. Frost did, however, believe that the common folk possess and throw off sparks of wisdom, often without even knowing they do so; of course, the common folk he celebrates were a special sort, almost extinct, who had spent long hours alone with their own thoughts, had labored at simple but life-affirming tasks, and in many cases were better read (if less pretentious) than many highly educated people today.
I think Frost took seriously Wordsworth's idea that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility. It's the recollection in tranquility part that we tend to forget, perhaps because our world rarely allows tranquility for recollection. Notice how often Frost uses the past tense. His first two books begin with poems in the present tense ("Into My Own" in A Boy's Will, "The Pasture" in North of Boston), both of them about a longing for a time and place that allow contemplation, and then give over to poems about remembered experiences. I think most of his poetry has to be read as spoken by one who has had the time and the temperament to "wait to watch the water clear." Much of it, too, is about the world from which he willfully excluded himself, one that won't allow us such waiting.
Richard

[mandolin]

I'm not so sure the impulse to make poetry "appoximate conversation" is an American impluse. Wordsworth also wanted poetry to be in the language of "a man speaking to men." And it seem to me that free versers, looking for something to distinguish their work from prose, are more likely to deviate from ordinary language than are formalists -- at least once one gets past inversions for the sake of rhyme.

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Frost is the best student of Shakespeare I know, and you can see it in "West-running Brook" especially. The false dichotomy is based on a false premise, namely that Frost was a boob.

[Tim Murphy]

I think the impulse to recreate the music of common speech is common in the best modern poetry. Frost had an uncanny gift for it, but so did Yeats, Hardy and Burns. I constantly hear trimeter, ballad measure and pentameters spoken spontaneously by my neighbors of Scandinavian, German, or Anglo-Irish-Scottish descent, which delight my ear, succinctly express that wisdom of the "folk" to which Richard alludes, and provide punchlines for poems. Outside a little village near here is a sign which boasts "Home to 87 cheerful folks and one mean son-of-a-bitch." Hence,

Dakota Greeting

Frosted sign in a frozen ditch:
"Stranger, welcome to Oakes,
home to hundreds of friendly folks
and one mean son-of-a-bitch."

In this country if you keep what Sullivan calls the "earlids" open, you don't have to make up much.

[Alan Sullivan]

Cum'on, Richard. When you speak of "simple but life-affirming tasks," I picture an old hag hacking off a chicken's head. It ain't all bucolic.

Alan

[Richard Wakefield]

Alan, nobody said it was all bucolic. I like to imagine the looks the Duke got from his men in the forest of Arden when he proclaimed "Sweet are the uses of adversity" as they sat freezing their butts off. Romantic as it sounds, however, I believe Frost would hold that life in a cubicle is life divorced from much of what makes it meaningful; he believed we are not infinitely malleable and universally adaptable, that distancing ourselves from nature really does cost us something -- although he knew it gains us some other things as well. He's a pretty sound Emersonian in that way. Among the things we're losing, he said, is simply the basic rhythm of life. "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus" is a satire on a modern world that won't even let us live by the primordial rhythms of day and night. I'm pretty sure that part of his beef with free verse was that it was another erosion of the old rhythms.
Richard

[Christopher Mulrooney]

Alan Sullivan, you are a Philistine, or else your collar is too tight. Frost wrote the great California poem, too.