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Mar. 19th, 2011 02:33 am34. The Poetry of Robert Frost
Just couldn't stop once I started. Frost and Dickinson are two of the colors that mix to brown mud in my own verse attempts, the only two I consistently recognize there - but what can I say, I love them. They're what poetry is for me, when I try to touch it, though I'm closer to Stevens and Shelley in what I believe. Frost and Dickinson aren't quite about belief - how and where to take things. They're makers of experience; they bring the poles of inside and outside together, something explodes, and they ask isn't it just like that, isn't that just where they would really explode, where they made them explode in our heads. They're both ridiculously tactile. But I don't want to bring them too close together: Frost is a good child of Emerson, Thoreau, and Robinson when he forgets to forget to be, and does have his own distinct vision, including prescriptive elements. Dickinson does too, though phrased still more thoroughgoingly in negative terms, but is even more often being bad off in the woods.
But I wanted to distinguish them, so I'd better. Texture, then - with Dickinson we feel the textures she bounces off, at the same time the ones she finds she's herself made of in that contact. But Frost spreads the elements thick, he unrolls the ground, blows a sky, slaps up fire between his hands to sow some stars, digs down to water. Every poem gets its own bit of world. And put them together you feel you've been everywhere, or at least all up and down a lifetime in a little state. You also have to read him in bulk to get suspicious enough to see how much he's up to.
I forgot this unforgettable phrase, maybe the one rammed fullest with Frost: "The saddest thing in life / Is that the best thing in it should be courage."
How right is that.
Just couldn't stop once I started. Frost and Dickinson are two of the colors that mix to brown mud in my own verse attempts, the only two I consistently recognize there - but what can I say, I love them. They're what poetry is for me, when I try to touch it, though I'm closer to Stevens and Shelley in what I believe. Frost and Dickinson aren't quite about belief - how and where to take things. They're makers of experience; they bring the poles of inside and outside together, something explodes, and they ask isn't it just like that, isn't that just where they would really explode, where they made them explode in our heads. They're both ridiculously tactile. But I don't want to bring them too close together: Frost is a good child of Emerson, Thoreau, and Robinson when he forgets to forget to be, and does have his own distinct vision, including prescriptive elements. Dickinson does too, though phrased still more thoroughgoingly in negative terms, but is even more often being bad off in the woods.
But I wanted to distinguish them, so I'd better. Texture, then - with Dickinson we feel the textures she bounces off, at the same time the ones she finds she's herself made of in that contact. But Frost spreads the elements thick, he unrolls the ground, blows a sky, slaps up fire between his hands to sow some stars, digs down to water. Every poem gets its own bit of world. And put them together you feel you've been everywhere, or at least all up and down a lifetime in a little state. You also have to read him in bulk to get suspicious enough to see how much he's up to.
I forgot this unforgettable phrase, maybe the one rammed fullest with Frost: "The saddest thing in life / Is that the best thing in it should be courage."
How right is that.
