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Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?
- alabastervlog 2y ago> He responded to my October 2022 email, explaining that he had “stopped writing much journalism as of 2015 so as to avoid distractions from a book project that I thought would take an almost unfathomably long time—two years or perhaps even three. Seven years later, I’m doing my best to polish the third draft.” One encounters this over and over again—even books that successfully get finished and published take far longer than expected, very consistently, and especially any involving research. Books (non-fiction in particular) written as series often also expand from, say, five planned volumes in the forward to the first edition of the first volume, to (say) a dozen. Reminds me of software estimation.
- ggm 2y agoVikram Seth. Massive advance for a "jump novel" on "a suitable boy" characters in modern times, breaks up with life partner, has total catastrophic writers block, book still "coming soon" a decade later. Also a poet. Said to pick his team at the agency from people who like poetry, working his prose.
- etc-hosts 2y agoNever knew about Vikram Seth before. He's coming up on beating Joseph Mitchell's 30 years of not finishing anything: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/01/joseph-mitchell-up-in-old-hotel https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/01/joseph-mitchel...
- mprovost 2y agoI really recommend his novel-in-verse "The Golden Gate". Such a literary accomplishment, and a real page-turner. Maybe it's hard to follow up when you have such an early success? Actually, I was introduced to it by Douglas Hofstadter, who in the same way has never been able to top GEB, which he wrote in his early 30s.
- dmoy 2y agoMy dad has been writing a specific non fiction book since forever (at the very least 25+ years, possibly longer?). It's not exactly the kind that can be finished. If you need to know about that specific topic, there's that one and like one other that goes into as much depth. He resurrected and nearly completely rewrote someone else's thing from mid 20th century era, which itself was a resurrection of an late 19th century era thing. But yes it's exactly as you describe - keeps expanding and updating. Near 6000 pages now?
- mysterydip 2y agoHas it been released and he's doing updated revision/editions, or has it still not been released?
- dmoy 2y agoOh, it got released like 20 years ago, and there's new editions with new volumes every N years, and constant updates to the older material as it goes out of date or needs newer references or whatever. It'll just never be done, it's not a thing that can really be finished
- lupire 2y ago> This has a lot to do with the fetishization of what’s difficult, And this reminds me of software development!
- jonahx 2y agoA nice quote by Plunkett from the interview: > There’s a cultural association between the time of exposure and the level of sophistication. You’d sound pretty vulgar if you said, Oh, yeah, I learned to play Bach when I was thirteen—that’s easy stuff. But people really do make pronouncements like that about literature. Someone I met a few years ago, a big poetry person, just could not believe that an adult would spend years of his life thinking about Robert Frost. To her it seemed like doing a Ph.D. in simple algebra. Also, article title is a rare exception to Betteridge's law.
- josefritzishere 2y agoGold star for Betteridge's law refernece.
- lupire 2y ago> Also, article title is a rare exception to Betteridge's law. Sort of. "Even" is a kind of sarcastic/negative word, so the question is asking "Robert Frost is a bad poet, right?"
- jonahx 2y agoHuh, nice observation. The suggestion implied by the question is false.
- nimish 2y agoHe had product market fit -- this entire site is premised on the same grounds as 'A Road Not Taken' so i mean come on
- Hizonner 2y agoNo, I think Frost has really gone downhill.
- lupire 2y agoLike Plunkett says of Frost, this interview is hilarious in its superficial simplicity covering a deeper indirect commentary. PLUNKETT: Some people may think they have the answer, but I think that if you have any degree of certainty about it, you don’t really understand the problem. I would say the same about reading Frost’s poetry. INTERVIEWER: That if you think you have the answer, you don’t have it? PLUNKETT: You don’t quite understand the problem.
- jll29 2y agoKevin Murphy's lecture on Frost is the best one I've ever heard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5140uJOUDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5140uJOUDE He first recaps the conventional view people have about Frost, then reads "The Road Not Taken", his most famous poem, and then completely takes Frost AND the poem AND THEN the public's misunderstanding of Frost apart. Don't get fooled by the bare visual appearance of Murphy, his empty blackboard (no PPT, no bs) - this lecture is a fantastic, suprising and deeply disturbing (regarding what is revealed about Frost and his public misappreciation). Simply priceless teaching - thank you, dear colleague. EDIT: If you ask ChatGPT for a "10-20 sentence interpretation of The Road Not Taken", it falls right into the trap that Murphy warns about.
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- greenie_beans 2y agorobert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick up if you're an avid reader or english major.
- jldugger 2y ago> he's very dark and people have no clue. ... is The Road Not Taken a map to where he hid the bodies?
- greenie_beans 2y agohttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out
- ghaff 2y agoYep. I think I've told one or two people he wrote a poem along those lines and they basically didn't believe me. Audited a course by a really good English professor on American writers/poets of that general period and it was very memorable.
- zoeysmithe 2y agoINTERVIEWER Frost was an important early example of the way a poet could inhabit the university, in roles that many American poets depend on for their livelihood today—he was the original writer in residence, or visiting writer, or professor of the practice, that kind of thing. Yet he was so critical of higher education. How do you think about that tension? PLUNKETT Frost had general misgivings about the institutionalization of anything, whether that was an act of imagination that finds its form in the institution of verse, or even a bond of love that finds its form in the institution of marriage. He had a sense of misgiving about what’s lost in learning as it’s institutionalized in college. He occupies this funny role where he has these misgivings but he very much thinks that the institution is better than the utopian alternative. He’s a lapsed Romantic, where both the Romanticism and the lapse are important. He is able to imagine an ideal alternative to the way things are, while being critical of the kind of idealism that would demand that the world actually rise up to meet it.
- marko-k 2y agoHe's a brilliant poet, though often misunderstood. Skip Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and try Birches [1], A Tuft of Flowers [2], or the The Witch of Coös [3] instead. [1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches [2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flowers https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flo... [3] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=19&issue=4&page=2 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volum...
- djeastm 2y ago>Skip Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening No way, that's one of my favorites. I don't want to let pretension keep me from liking what I like.
- dentemple 2y agoSound out the syllables in _Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening_. That's where you'll find some of the depth that you might feel is lacking there. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woo... Even Frost's _specific choice of letters_, and how they're placed in the meter, supports the idea that death is coming soon for the reader. His consonants are more liquid and smooth in the first stanza ("whose", "village", "will", "th-"), with the few stop-sounding consonants getting softened either by another sound ("woods") or getting quickly passed over by the meter ("I think I know", "stopping here"). The consonance for these stop consonants then increases until the end, which is what makes the infamous line, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," stand out with such contrast. And with such precise use of sound in the poem, it's very likely not an accident that it ends with the full stop "p" in "sleep." Despite his protestations to the otherwise, this is the moment the speaker is stopping and drifting off to sleep/possibly dying.
- marko-k 2y agoI agree with everything you've said here. I've scanned it many times myself, and it's obviously brilliant. I probably just chose my words poorly. What I meant was that "Stopping by Woods" is so widely read that I wanted to share a few other poems that don't get as much attention.
- dkga 2y agoPerfect timing. Robert Frost is by far one of my favourite poems, which I do not say lightly as I love poetry - and I am not a native English speaker. I am now recording one of his poems and this read, and the additional info here in the comments such as Kevin Murphy‘s lecture is great material for me.
- archiepeach 2y agoHumble plug for my poetry app. When I was getting into poetry I was reading a lot of them online but found the majority of sites to have awful designs with garish ads that completely detracted from the poem. So I wrote a scraper which downloaded 40,000 poems that were in the public domain and rendered them in an iOS app with a beautiful design. Crafting individual profiles for all of the poets was painstaking and arduous, but the users seem to really enjoy the app so far. I do already have some AI analysis for arcane poems (but I don’t explicitly mention that it’s AI as I think apps should never say that - it doesn’t interest users, only investors). https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-poetry-corner/id1602552624 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-poetry-corner/id1602552624
- pimlottc 2y ago> I do already have some AI analysis for arcane poems (but I don’t explicitly mention that it’s AI as I think apps should never say that - it doesn’t interest users, only investors). I think it's dishonest not to mark AI-generated content, especially for commentary on something as personal and heartfelt as poetry. As a potential user, this definitely makes me less interested in what otherwise looks like a very nice app.