"On Frost and Eliot" by William Pritchard

William Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst College. He received his A.B. degree from Amherst and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. His teaching has focused on 20^th century poetry and fiction, but’s also taught on Shakespeare and major English writers from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. 

 

His books include Updike: America’s Man of Letters, English Papers: A Teaching Life, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. He writes reviews for such newspapers as the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Times Literary Supplement, and is both an advisory editor and essayist for the Hudson Review. 

Pritchard is, in short, a literary critic. And he’s collected his reviews, articles and essays on the two most influential poets of the 20^th century under the title of On Frost and Eliot. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Dream Song – poem by George MacDonald at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“October,” poem by Robert Frost – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The Birthplace,” poem by Robert Frost – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Jay Parini Has 16 Robert Frost Poems to Memorize

I had the benefit of having a non-stop string of excellent English teachers in middle and high school. In 8^th grade, Mrs. Leavell introduced us to Ernest Hemingway. Miss Roark in 9^th grade help a class of 35 boys discover Great Expectations, which turned out to be a great book for 14-year-old boys. Miss Campbell in 10^th grade helped us understand Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In 11^th grade, when Mrs. Prince wasn’t celebrating Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls (which she did not have us read), she’d rhapsodize about Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. And in 12^th grade, Miss Shorey guided 30 boys through the late 16^th century Spain of Don Quixote. 

As individual as they were, all my English teachers held one writer or poet in common esteem, the one considered the “American poet,” even when we studied world or English literature. This was the poet who, along with T.S. Eliot, all my teachers had studied when they were in middle and high school as well as college.

 

Robert Frost.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Chicago – poem by Carl Sandburg via Rabbit Rom Poetry.

 

Bend – poem by Jim Peterson at Good Life Review.

 

The Uncomfortable Art of Enjoying Poetry – Melissa Woodruff at Bandersnatch Books.

 

Poetry Prompt: Sink or Swim – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Cultivate – poem by Bethany Lee at Every Day Poems.

Saturday Good Reads

The description of America as a “city on a hill” has been around for a long time, or has it? Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition has the history of the phrase.

Aaron Earls at The Wardrobe Door argues that Christians must embrace the role of villain in the years to come, while Tim Challies describes a “model of determination.”

Some previously unreleased recordings of Robert Frost reciting his poems, an essay on the paintings of Rembrandt by Russ Ramsey at The Rabbit Room, wonderful photography, a fact check on Macbeth, and more.

By the way, the video of Robert Frost reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is not part of the previously unreleased recordings – it’s actually a coincidence that I scheduled it for the same week that the Penn story on Frost came out.

Life and Culture

An FAQ on America as a “City on a Hill” – Justin Taylor at The Gospel Coalition.

Getting Ready to Cycle the Glasshouse Mountains – Neil Ennis.

Why Readers See The Times as Liberal – Liz Spayd, New York Times.

Poetry

Tradition – James E. Allman Jr. at Curator Magazine.

A Word the Romans Used – Ned Balbo at First Things Magazine.

Give Me Poetry or Give Me Death – Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

Previously Unreleased Recordings of Robert Frost Reading His Poetry – University of Pennsylvania (the recordings themselves are here).

Faith

A Model of Determination – Tim Challies at Informing the Reforming.

Christians Must Embrace the Role of Villains – Aaron Earls at The Wardrobe Door.

10 Things You Should Know about Thomas Aquinas – Sam Storms at Enjoying Faith.

Art and Photography

Democratic Spaces – Kate Medley at Oxford American.

Summer Wildflowers – Tim Good at Pics, Poems, and Ponderings.

Echo Water – Jack Baumgartner at The School of the Transfer of Energy.

Art Stories: Connecting Mastery and Joy – Russ Ramsey at The Rabbit Room.

British Stuff

The Scottish Play and the Real Macbeth – Julian Harrison at the British Library.

Robert Frost reads “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Painting: The Artist’s Sister at a Window (1869), oil on canvas by Berthe Morisot; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Robert Frost and “The Road Not Taken”

In 1912, poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) and his family moved to England. His writing career was not happening in the United States, and a flip of a coin made the decision for England instead of Canada. He was in England for only a short time when a British publisher offered a contract. The resulting book caught the attention of a British poet and literary journalist, Edward Thomas, and Frost and Thomas became good friends.

They often took walks in the countryside together, and Frost was often amused by his friend’s indecision as to which walking route to take, and then to regret the one chosen. Frost later sent Thomas a poem, entitled “Two Roads,” which Frost thought of as a kind of joke about Thomas’s indecision and a parody on the romantic imagination. For his part, Thomas seemed not to realize it was meant as a joke, and took it quite seriously, as the exchange of letters between the two indicates.

Thomas eventually enlisted in the British Army, and died in 1917 in France. Today he’s known as one of the “World War I poets.” Frost went on to become, more than anyone else, the “American Poet.” And his poem, “Two Roads,” was renamed, and became “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps the best known American poem of the 20^th century, and perhaps the best known American poem, period.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Robert Frost about the time he wrote “The Road Not Taken.”

Poets and Poems: Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, and the Woods

One poet’s poem can serve as a commentary on another poet’s poem, allowing us insights into the minds of both.

After last week’s discussion at Tweetspeak Poetry on Robert Frost and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I started reading Wendell Berry’s recent collection, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems. One of the included poems, first published in 1979 and collected in The Timbered Choir in 1999, is untitled but generally known by its first line, “The bell calls in the town.”

I read a first line like that, and I’m immediately reminded of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (“His house in the village though”). As it turns out, both poems used the woods as an important element, perhaps the important element. Both use the idea of a journey or pilgrimage. And both offer a contrast between natural and man-made or man-created, faint as it might be in the Frost poem.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Jana Illnerova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

Poets and Poems: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

When I was in junior high and high school, there was one poem that had managed to find its way into all of the textbooks for American literature: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. I don’t think I ever heard from a teacher (or read in a textbook) anything about the context of the poem, but context didn’t matter. American poetry meant Robert Frost, and Robert Frost meant “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

If that poem alone wasn’t enough, a second Frost poem sealed the contract: “The Road Not Taken.” For tens of millions of Baby Boomers, Robert Frost, and these two poems in particular, were our first definition of poetry. (One American literature teacher I had in high school had us read Frost first, and then start at the chronological beginning.)

I don’t know if “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is still included in textbooks today; probably not, since it implies the existence of God and schools can be rather ruthless about such subjects. But it was an enormously influential poem, and even Frost considered it that way, having told fellow poet Louis Untermeyer (who was poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress in 1961) that the poem was “my best bid for remembrance.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

With Apologies to Mr. Frost

At TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is starting a new book discussion today – Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio. Today’s assignment: Read Part 1 (roughly the first 95 pages) and do as many of the exercises as possible.

There are enough writing exercises in Part 1 to keep a normal person busy for at least three months. The book is packed with simple and not-so-simple exercises you can do to help you with your writing. While the focus is poetry, the exercises actually apply to writing broadly.

I combined two of the exercises. I took the first line of a well known poem (it won’t be hard to guess which one) and imagined it going in another direction. That’s one exercise. The second: before I wrote the first word, I left the room. And I really left the room – going on a 20-mile bike ride along a trail that includes two longish stretches of woods. As I biked, I worked the first line into another first line, and then into the framework of a poem, and then into a rough draft of a poem. This was the result:

Post-Modern Man

Whose woods these are I do not know;

I vainly search for a village, though,

or even a single house but find

only woods, foreboding and forming

a filtered canopy over what may not

be a path through but only into.

With a touch of frost upon my face,

the proprietor, if he is, sends his minions

to effect the changing of the guard of leaves,

the red and the gold taking

the place of the green and fading.

I pause to rest against a tree,

and hear his whispers in my sleep,

and hear his whispers in my sleep.

“When I started to write poetry,” Addonizio says, “I had no idea how to begin to learn about it.” I had been reading poetry for more than 25 years before I thought of writing any poems myself. I didn’t think about learning to write poetry; I was reading poetry to help me become a better speechwriter. And yet those 25 years were a kind of learning time or preparation.

And then, in 2009, I started writing it. With a general sense of terror, I eventually posted a poem on this blog.

Like Addonzio, I’ve written a lot of bad poems, and some not-so-bad, and a few really good ones. And I’ve broadened the poetry I read, and now read as much contemporary poetry as I do poetry from the “canon.” The poetry I feel a particular affinity for is the poetry from the modern period, roughly 1900 to 1950 – poets like T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sara Teasdale and others. I suspect it has to do with the fact that these were the first poets I was taught in high school, and the poets who had most influenced my English and literature teachers.

Consider joining us with the discussion. Or simply stop by TweetSpeak and see what’s happening.