Robert Frost

However a lot of smart people (ie Brodsky, Heaney, Maxwell) would have you believe he is secretly the great American poety of the twentieth century (mostly on the basis that he knew and trusted conventional form, in the face of all that free verse malarkey).

I have never really got much out of him, myself, mostly - but I guess Crane, Williams, Stevens, of his contemporaries, are more immediately impressive to young people. I should probably get round to re-reading him.

Why do you ask, Gareth?

I also like the fact this Frost's official biographer grew to loathe his subject - the v. opposite of 'Pale Fire'...

(haha okay I'll come back with some reasons when I'm less riled)

...I need sleep.

Then again, if you're not reading poetry (and literature in general) with an eye out for the puerile sex jokes, you're kinda missing the point of it all.

SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
 
This is naughty! "Upper boulders" and "two can pass abreast" with "ground-swell under it", etc., etc.!

To me, Frost was a good, solid, middle-rate poet. His most valuable quality is that he shows what a modern American poet working in traditional verse forms sounds like. In general, he sounds quite natural - more so than E.A. Robinson, who was perhaps Frost's nearest analogue among American poets. British poets have far more modern models along the line traditonal verse than Americans do. Frost is probably the most signifigant for this reason.

It is also important to note that Frost's "anthology poems" were among the few American poems of the 20th century read by large numbers of common Americans with both comprehension and pleasure. As a result, he is much envied by unread and unimportant poets, whose envy is a considerable factor in their spite against Frost.

his nature is violent, and destructive or in the least meloncholic, it may be a bit obvious, but its moving.

Two courtroom possibilities diverged...

Hilarious. As is this thread. Frost is STONE CLASSIC. It may, however, take not reading him long enough to forget him completely to see this. It's so hard to come to him fresh...

whose house this is we do not know
no one's home dude, c'mon let's go
he will not see us drinking beer
and hooking up and doing blow

The cops cruise in on little cat feet.

(Okay so that's Sandberg. Sorta.)

something there is that doesn't love a bong.

(i like frost but haven't read him much since high school so i don't have any kind of mature perspective on him. he does lend himself easily to preening high-school english teacher bullshit, dead poets society fantasies and the like, but it's not fair to hold that too much against him.)

I can recite all of 'stopping by woods...' in one breath.

Original manuscript:

http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/5269/robertfrostot3.jpg

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," he thundered, reciting the opening line of the first poem.

"This is where Frost is relevant. This is the irony of this whole thing. You come to a path in the woods where you can say, 'Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?' " he said. "Everything in life is choices."

Oh my gosh.

Why has this never been an option along any wooded path I have traveled?

i like frost but haven't read him much since high school so i don't have any kind of mature perspective on him.

If you can only remember a line or two, you're ready to read him again for the first time. He'll sound a little stuffy - he is a little stuffy, but also a lot more alive, and more spooky nor'east gothic, than you remember him. And you'll suddenly notice (which your teachers didn't mention) that he writes in the elegiac mode. Come to think of it, he might well be thought of as the American Arnold. (Or not - I haven't really thought that through.)

A couple fourteeners to get you in the mood, though don't sleep on the longer stuff e.g. The Witch Of Coos.

You can has declaration of intent: THE OVEN BIRD

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

You can has Tyger: DESIGN

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

re: "Design" it helps to know that heal-alls are blue...

I like the one about the butterfly and freshly cut grass in the morning

He wrote the best blank verse in the language -- lyrical yet truly demotic -- and is thus very far from stuffy. He's the one poet my students get.

Hmm... that opens a separate conversation on what qualities you expect of your blank verse. Could be an interesting one...

Also curious who your students don't get!

And so this is out soon.

Ever since, more sympathetic scholars have tried, with limited success, to counter Mr. Thompson’s portrait, which was echoed most recently in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Harper’s Magazine last fall, depicting Frost as repellent old man angrily rebutting a female interviewer’s charges of arrogance, racism and psychological brutality to his children.

But now, a new scholarly work may put an end to the “monster myth,” as Frost scholars call it, once and for all. Later this month, Harvard University Press will begin publishing “The Letters of Robert Frost,” a projected four-volume edition of all the poet’s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date.

“There’s been a kind of persistent sense of Frost as a hypocrite, as someone who showed one face to the public and another privately,” said Donald Sheehy, a professor at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, who edited the letters with Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen.

We hadnt done our homework once, the older brother and i, and we were given the punishment of having to learn "stopping by woods" and reciting the next day.

What i remember most, really, is the stern-eyed headmistress demanding why we hadnt done our allocated work. I shrugged, i aint no stool pigeon. The brother, who was going through a tough time at home from the age of seven onwards, felt compelled to give a fuller explanation and looked at his shoes, up into the glare and stammered "because im a bad person"

poem kills me now.

catholic guilt is strong in that story

do like me some robert frost despite american english teachers hating his popularity

brb gonna reread "Home Burial'

Sounds lime one to avoid tbh my frost realness quotient is low

?

he can't cope with any frost that is "too real" and so wants to avoid that poem is what I took from it.

read it earlier and it is pretty real right enough.

oh! OK. Makes sense.

Good synopsis

my dad had me learn the same poem. Out of that Lifelines anthology. Might have been something in the air at the time

More likely it was the easy availability to the one anthology tbf

one of the Frost poems I've memorized:

SOMETHING inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit, 5
She scores a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky. 10
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

Good discussion here too: TS Heavy Hitters Poll #3: Frost vs Stevens

Yeah i was looking for that originally but whatre you gonna do

the search engine less traveled by

:)

Whose words these are i thought i knew

The other detail i remember from that story above is that the first line was a misprint and it was "whose woods there are" which made fuckall sense but hey it was rote learning its not lime it had to compute.

having to learn the prologue to the canterbury tales was a little traumatic

i recited it in front of class alright but i remember having a conversation with the instructor a few days before

she thought it a good idea to tell me how no one could ever really understand chaucer or shakespeare, much less get the pronunciation, rhythm and rhyme right. those following days i spent hours and hours practising

the day came to recite the poem. i stood up in front of class and finished. she just gave me a really cold and short "thank you", as if she was whipping her dry tongue across her mouth. it had not been to her standard

she expected better of me, despite correcting the common mispronunciation -- a liaison -- she had warned us about

that summer i spent the nights binge drinking and reciting the prologue to my friends

chat gpt:
Here is a new poem inspired by the style of Robert Frost:

"The Road Not Taken"

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

But what if I had taken the other road,
The one so well-trodden and familiar?
Would my life be different now,
Or would the outcome be the same?

I'll never know, for I cannot go back
To choose the path I did not take.
All I can do is embrace the journey,
And make the most of every step I take.

I'm grateful for the road I took,
For it has led me to new horizons,
But I wonder what the other road would bring,
If only I had had the courage to explore.

Perhaps one day I'll find the answer,
But until then, I'll keep on walking,
Trusting that the road I choose
Will lead me to where I'm meant to be.