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  • Professor Langdon Hammer: I imagine that you

  • all have images of Robert Frost and actual images in your mind

  • when you think of this poet.

  • He's a familiar face in American literature,

  • and I've gathered some of them that seemed representative.

  • This is Frost in old age, as an American bard from a

  • magazine. This is the Frost that you

  • probably know, as if he were born with white

  • hair, right? And a kind of,

  • well, kindly and monumental, and yet approachable figure

  • that is familiar from American school rooms.

  • Here's another image of that same guy, Robert Frost,

  • painted by Gardner Cox, reminding us of Frost as a kind

  • of link to nineteenth-century life, to rural Vermont.

  • Another image of Frost, this one from The Times,

  • just a little story: "President Hails Bond With

  • Frost" – that president would be John F.

  • Kennedy – "On TV He Extols Poet Who Calls New Frontier 'Age

  • of Poetry and Power.'" And perhaps you have seen

  • images of Frost reading his poem, "The Gift Outright," at

  • Kennedy's inauguration.

  • It was a kind of powerful moment in American culture where

  • the president allied himself with poetry in this way.

  • Oh, more pictures.

  • This is Frost with grandchildren,

  • Frost with his pet calves.

  • He was kind to animals, and a farmer.

  • This one I like. This is Frost with a stick,

  • or Frost with a branch.

  • You can think about that when you read "Birches."

  • This is Frost boyish, even in age,

  • Frost who also likes to play and even who looks just a little

  • bit, don't you think, malevolent?

  • All of these images would seem to make Frost not a modern poet

  • at all, not a modern poet in the sense that Eliot and Pound

  • established; that is, a difficult poet in

  • ways that I suggested last Wednesday, a poet resistant to

  • ordinary language and common frames of reference,

  • formally innovative, disorienting,

  • urbane, metropolitan.

  • I think of nineteenth-century art as being horizontal and

  • stretched out like agricultural life in New England.

  • And modernism is all about verticality, from a certain

  • angle. This was the Stieglitz picture,

  • City of Ambition, I showed you last Wednesday.

  • Another pairing, this wonderful landscape by

  • Martin Johnson Heade, and we could contrast it with

  • these images of Brooklyn Bridge by Walker Evans,

  • or even underneath the bridge.

  • The bridge seems to – a figure of crossingit seems

  • here to rise up and out of the city and the river.

  • This is Frost before he had white hair, Frost at 18,

  • which is, I believe, 1892 or so: boyish.

  • And his first book is entitled A Boy's Will;

  • A Boy's Will, Robert Frost.

  • This is a cover of the first edition that you can go over to

  • Beinecke and see.

  • When you open it up and look at the table of contents,

  • you see titles of poems, and underneath those titles are

  • little legends and moralizations.

  • "Into My Own" (title).

  • "Legend": "the youth is persuaded that he will be rather

  • more than less himself for having foresworn the world."

  • Or "Storm Fear": "he is afraid of his own

  • isolation." These are poems,

  • in other words, that come with little labels to

  • tell you what they mean and what they're about.

  • Modernism in Eliot and Pound is, in some ways,

  • founded on expatriation, on a kind of internationalism.

  • Frost's poetry seems resolutely American, or at any rate it

  • seems to be. There is, in fact,

  • another Frost, a modernist Frost,

  • a Frost that is, in fact,

  • as international as Pound and Eliot, who began his career,

  • in fact, beside them, as a London expatriate.

  • This is more of the table of contents.

  • You can see how it's laid out.

  • This is the Frost who published that book.

  • This is Frost at thirty-nine, Frost in a suit made by a

  • London tailor in London.

  • And when we go to the title page of A Boy's Will we

  • see that this New England poet publishes his first book,

  • in fact, in London in 1913, there on New Oxford Street.

  • Interesting. North of Boston,

  • a great book that follows A Boy's Will,

  • is a title that locates these poems in a specific place in

  • northern New England.

  • It, too, is published in London, this time on Bloomsbury

  • Street. You don't really think of Frost

  • as part of Bloomsbury, do you?

  • But there he is, publishing his book in that

  • place, just like Prufrock,

  • also published on Bloomsbury Streetthis in 1917,

  • North of Boston in 1915.

  • You remember that table of contents page I showed you a

  • moment ago with the titles and the moralizations that Frost has

  • for A Boy's Will?

  • Well, here's the modernist table of contents of

  • Prufrock, and of course,

  • what would the legend for "The Love Song of J.

  • Alfred Prufrock" be?

  • "He wanders around in a melancholy way,

  • quoting Hamlet for..."

  • Well no, it--Eliot didn't do that.

  • When we look at the table of contents of this book,

  • which is North of Boston, well,

  • it looks a lot like Eliot's.

  • Those little tags that seemed to explain the poetry have

  • disappeared and instead we simply have the titles of these

  • very great poems: "Mending Wall,"

  • "The Death of the Hired Man," "The Mountain," "Home Burial."

  • There's something in Eliot's--the presentation of

  • Eliot's work and indeed in the work itself that is affronting,

  • resistant, impersonal.

  • And the typography, the presentation of the book is

  • part of that. It's part of Eliot's whole

  • aesthetic. But North of Boston,

  • well, you know, when we start looking at these

  • two books together, it seems to share some of the

  • properties of Eliot's book; and indeed the poems that we

  • find when we open that book also have things in common with

  • Eliot's. The other Frost,

  • not the simple, familiar, monumental Frost but

  • the Frost who is a modernist poet who begins writing in

  • London, is really quite as

  • cosmopolitan, quite as learned as Pound and

  • Eliot at this moment.

  • And yet he uses his learning differently.

  • He uses it very often by concealing it,

  • in fact. Well, let me turn from pictures

  • to text. On your handout today,

  • the handout number two, we have--well,

  • there are several quotations from Frost's letters,

  • and let's look at the first one first.

  • Frost says at the time that he's publishing A Boy's

  • Will, to a friend: You mustn't take me too

  • seriously if I now proceed to brag a bit about my exploits as

  • a poet. There is one qualifying fact

  • always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success

  • called "of esteem" and it butters no parsnips.

  • It means a success with a critical few who are supposed to

  • know. But really to arrive where I

  • can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get

  • outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in

  • their thousands. I may not be able to do that.

  • I believe in doing itdon't you doubt me there.

  • I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds.

  • I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the

  • way my quasi-friend Pound does.

  • I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I

  • could doif it were a thing I could do by taking thought.

  • [Frost to John Bartlett, November 1913]

  • Frost wishes to be so subtle as to seem altogether obvious.

  • It's not just that he seems obvious but is really subtle.

  • Rather, his subtlety shows itself in his deliberate

  • concealment of it, in the ways in which he masks

  • himself in obviousness.

  • The problems that Frost's poetry poses for us as readers

  • are not problems of reference.

  • They can't be solved by footnotes.

  • Compare the footnotes in the Frost poems to the footnotes in

  • The Norton that you find next to Eliot or Pound's poems.

  • The problems that Frost poses are problems of interpretation,

  • problems that provoke you to ask not, "what does he mean

  • exactly?" but "how does he mean that?"

  • Is he joking or is he serious?

  • Is there something on his mind that he's not saying?

  • The wonder of Frost is really in his tone, his way of saying

  • things without saying them in so many words.

  • Now, this guile of his, because that's what it entails,

  • this guile is something temperamental,

  • I think. It came naturally to him.

  • But it also reflects a specific literary situation.

  • The popular, old-fashioned Frost and the

  • elite, modern Frost--these roles point to a division in the

  • audiences for poetry that emerges clearly in this period.

  • The Frost who writes a familiar, crafted lyric that

  • would have been easily recognizable as poetry,

  • that we could give a little tag to after its title;

  • well, contrast this with the poet of The Waste Land,

  • say, whose work would not have been recognizable to many

  • readers as poetry and indeed was not.

  • On one level Frost was--spoke for and to an audience trained

  • by the genteel poetry of late nineteenth-century America,

  • readers who loved Longfellow, the Fireside Poets,

  • poets who published in Victorian popular magazines and

  • wrote those gilt-embossed books that cultured families kept

  • behind glass bookcases and that you can still find at tag sales

  • on New England greens.

  • That's the obvious Frost, the one that the subtle Frost

  • in many ways constructed, aiming all the time not at a

  • general reader at all but at an elite reader of the new

  • tiny-circulation, Little Magazines where the work

  • of Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore and others were

  • first published; those magazines I showed you

  • last week, magazines like Broom or Blast or

  • Rogue or The Criterion.

  • There's duplicity in Frost's poetry, and there's a certain

  • doubleness in the figure that he projects as a poet.

  • I like to think of his obsession with double meanings,

  • which he has, as a way of responding to a

  • division in culture, between popular and elite

  • readers, a division that he saw as expressive of a division in

  • American culture between money and esteem,

  • business and art.

  • In that quotation I read for you a few moments ago,

  • Frost opposes two kinds of success: one of "esteem,"

  • that success with a critical few that "butters no parsnips"

  • You can see he brings in the kind of folksy term to,

  • well, to what? To disdain that kind of success

  • or put it in its place.

  • and on the other hand, a success with the general

  • reader who buys books in their thousands.

  • Frost wanted both.

  • The opposition is between poetry that makes money and

  • poetry that, precisely because it is good poetry as modern

  • poetry defines it, does not.

  • Notice that the latter kind of poetry, the good kind that

  • "butters no parsnips," is associated here with Frost's

  • "quasi-friend Pound."

  • Instead of butter, Pound writes "caviare" – kind

  • of a European thing, right?

  • Caviar. By contrast,

  • Frost is declaring his ambition to reach out to a large

  • audience. It is for Frost a frankly

  • economic ambition.

  • By becoming a poet for all sorts and kinds,

  • Frost intends, as he says, to arrive "where I

  • can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else..."

  • This is ambition for a career, but it's also a desire for

  • personal autonomy.

  • For Frost, poetry is invested with a longing for autonomy in,

  • well, both simple and complex senses.

  • He wants to use poetry to stand on his own two legs.

  • He sees it specificallyand this is importantas a form

  • of work that will allow him to be self-sufficient and

  • self-determining.

  • Frost was born in 1874 into a working family.

  • His father's death, when Frost was a boy,

  • represented, among other things,

  • an economic crisis for his family.

  • Frost's schooling was erratic.

  • This is impressive: he dropped out of both

  • Dartmouth and Harvard, and he did so to take laboring

  • jobs, each time enacting a conflict

  • between intellectual life and manual labor that would be a

  • persistent and central theme of his poetry.

  • He worked at all sorts of jobs: in factories,

  • at a mill, on a newspaper.

  • He was a schoolteacher, and of course he was a farmer,

  • too, when his grandfather gave him a farm to work,

  • which he did, for ten years in Derry,

  • New Hampshire. It's in fact at the end of this

  • period that Frost moved himself and his family to England,

  • in a last-ditch bid to make literary contacts and advance

  • his career as a poet.

  • It was first in England that Frost published the books that

  • established his reputation as the pasture poet of New England,

  • a poet whose authority seemed to rest on his being rooted in

  • his region. Once he returned to New England

  • in 1916, after North of Boston, success followed on

  • success. Poetry was a way for Frost out

  • of manual labor but it was also a form of work for Frost that

  • was opposed to manual labor.

  • It was an escape from it, a way of transcending it,

  • but also in many ways allied to itvaluable because it could

  • be a form of productive labor, something he could use to

  • "butter his parsnips."

  • These concerns that I'm laying out all inform his poetry.

  • They structure Frost's work as a poet and his ongoing inquiry

  • into that work. Frost poems perform a kind of

  • phenomenology of work, of labor.

  • They say what it is like to work at something.

  • In so doing, they are always also brooding

  • on what it is like to read and write poems.

  • This is the case with "Mowing," which is in your packet from

  • RIS, and is an example of one of these Frostian poems about work.

  • Let me read it for you.

  • There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

  • And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

  • What was it it whispered?

  • I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about

  • the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps,

  • about the lack of sound-- And that was why it whispered

  • and did not speak.

  • It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

  • Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

  • Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

  • To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

  • Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

  • (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green

  • snake. The fact is the sweetest dream

  • that labor knows.

  • My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

  • This is a monologue by a worker, a mower.

  • It is a sonnet, too.

  • It's a sort of song of a worker.

  • Notice that Frost is interested at once in the presence of a

  • sound, the sound of a solitary worker,

  • or, to be more precise, the sound of the tool of the

  • worker. The sound is the sign of his

  • work. And it raises a specifically

  • interpretive question: what is the message of the work

  • that the man does?

  • What is it saying?

  • What is its meaning?

  • "What was it it whispered?"

  • Beside this one of many tools in Frost, I asked you to pay

  • attention to tools in his poetry as you read it over the weekend.

  • To work in Frost is to use a tool.

  • Tools mediate the worker's relation to the world.

  • It's what the worker uses to do things and to make things.

  • Things are not "made up" in Frost, "not made up" in the

  • sense of imagined, called up out of thin air,

  • like fairies and elves.

  • Instead, things in Frost are "made" in the sense of

  • "constructed." They're the products of

  • specific acts, of the acts of a worker.

  • Think of other tools in those poems.

  • There's the spade in "Home Burial," the spade that's used

  • to bury the couple's little child.

  • I'll talk more about that poem next time.

  • There's the ladder to heaven in "After Apple-Picking."

  • It's a ladder used to ascend a tree, it's a kind of tool of

  • ascent that's a kind of a tool for getting fruit.

  • And then there's the terrible chainsaw in "Out,

  • Out --." In "Mowing," the scythe makes a

  • sound as it cuts, and that sound is delicate,

  • it's quiet, it whispers.

  • But cutting is something fearful and forceful;

  • it's a kind of controlled violence.

  • Frost takes it for granted that we will remember that the scythe

  • is a conventional image for time, which harvests all of us

  • in death. Time and deaththese are

  • the forces that the worker works against and tries to marshal in

  • the process of working his will in the world,

  • to make his way in it, to earn his living,

  • to stand on his own two feet.

  • But these forces are not something that the man controls

  • as a simple extension of himself.

  • Tools in Frost are tricky.

  • You have to learn how to use them.

  • They have in Frost a kind of independent, objective

  • existence. Remember "Out, Out--."

  • If you look on page 213 in your Norton,

  • well, I'll read from the middle of the poem.

  • A boy is out sawing: His sister stood beside

  • them [-- the group.

  • He's not alone, he's with others.] in her apron

  • To tell them "Supper."

  • At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what

  • supper meant, Leaped out at the boy's hand,

  • or seemed to leap-- He must have given the hand.

  • However it was, Neither refused the meeting.

  • But the hand! The boy's first outcry was a

  • rueful laugh, As he swung toward them holding

  • up the hand, Half in appeal,

  • but half as if to keep The life from spilling.

  • Then the boy saw all-- Since he was old enough to

  • know, big boy Doing a man's work,

  • though a child at heart-- He saw all spoiled.

  • "Don't let him cut my hand off-- The doctor, when he comes.

  • Don't let him, sister!"

  • So. But the hand was gone

  • already. And the boy dies.

  • It's an extraordinarily powerful poem.

  • This saw, rather than whispering, snarls and rattles.

  • Ultimately, it takes the life of the worker.

  • It reminds the worker that it has the power of death,

  • the force that the worker only accesses through the tool.

  • Although Frost's tools give the worker a way to impose his will

  • on the world, the tool is part of the object

  • world and it declares here brutally and cruelly that the

  • worker's will is limited and subject to the tools he uses.

  • In "Mowing," the poem's lines are like sweeps of the scythe as

  • it lays down rows of swale.

  • Frost wants us to think about that.

  • He wants us to see the row, the harvested rows as being

  • like lines of verse.

  • It's an ancient association from classical poetry.

  • The word "swale" is interesting.

  • You hear in it the s and the w,

  • the two key sounds of this poem, which are the sounds of

  • the whispering scythe.

  • Frost loves verbal sounds and he loves to play with their

  • metaphorical associations.

  • He invites us to hear the sweep of the scythe in those s

  • sounds themselves, I think, and maybe even to hear

  • the workers huff and puff, his rhythmic exhalation in the

  • w's, which alternate and interact

  • with those s's.

  • The whisper of the scythe then.

  • This is what the poem is all about.

  • The whisper is not, Frost specifies,

  • a "dream of the gift of idle hours."

  • Poetry is not, that is to say,

  • a leisure class activity.

  • Frost is writing against the Romantic idea that poetry is

  • written in repose, received passively as

  • inspiration. Poetry, in Frost,

  • is action, not a matter, as Wordsworth would say,

  • of emotion recollected in tranquility.

  • Frost is also here specifically writing against the early poetry

  • of Yeats, which you'll read next week,

  • poetry that finds reality exactly in "dream," and that has

  • plenty of fairies and elves in it.

  • Frost is not after "easy gold" but rather hard-earned wages.

  • "Dream": here Frost implies that it is something,

  • "dream" is something more than the truth.

  • He has that phrase, "Anything more than the truth

  • would have seemed too weak / to the earnest love that laid the

  • swale in rows." That's an interesting phrase,

  • "more than the truth."

  • Why not "less"? Why isn't "dream" less than the

  • truth? Frost has made a suggestive

  • choice of words. Truth is something less than

  • dream, in Frost. Truth is life-sized.

  • To get down to it, you have to cut away what is

  • not true, what is inflated, beside the point,

  • excess, ornament.

  • The truth is something that you get down to.

  • The truth is a reduction, a simplification.

  • It is what is fit for the earnest love that is working for

  • truth. "Love": this is a crucial word

  • in Frost. You don't think of Frost as a

  • love poet. There are love poems in Frost.

  • And yet even apart from those there are many poems that use

  • that word "love," often in crucial places in the poems.

  • In fact, love and desire are really at the center of Frost's

  • poetry. So far, I've been stressing a

  • kind of anti-Romantic side of Frost, how he seems to be

  • saying, "Nothing but the facts, please."

  • "But the fact," he says in that next to last line,

  • "is the sweetest dream" of labor, and it is earnest love

  • that is doing this cutting.

  • Labor loves; labor dreams.

  • When we look carefully at this poem, in fact,

  • the distinction that Frost seems to make between fact and

  • dream starts to give way.

  • Let me go back to the sound of this work.

  • "What was it it whispered?"

  • Note Frost's use of words like "something" and "perhaps."

  • These are words you're not supposed to use in poems or in

  • even writing about poems.

  • In Frost, there is here this explicit, deliberate,

  • calculated vagueness, a withholding of certainty that

  • allows a range of possible meanings to be entertained,

  • held open. It's a rhetorical and

  • conceptual move that I think is analogous to the whispering of

  • the scythe. What I mean is that this tool

  • doesn't speak loudly; it whispers,

  • and you have to lean forward to hear it.

  • The same is true with the poem, with any Frost poemexcept

  • that line 13 seems to violate that, it seems to violate that

  • principle. "The fact is the sweetest dream

  • that labor knows."

  • Well, here Frost seems to be spelling things out,

  • making a declaration, making a statement,

  • saying what the fact is, and seeming to celebrate the

  • literal: "the fact is the sweetest dream that labor

  • knows." Importantly,

  • though, that's not the last thing the poem says.

  • What difference would it make had Frost, as he could have,

  • I suppose, reversed the order of lines 13 and 14?

  • Line 13 stands out, as if almost--as if out of the

  • poem, as if out of time, as a kind of fact or truth,

  • a fixed principle that is stated in a kind of eternal

  • present – "the fact is" – like no other sentence in this

  • poem. Had Frost decided to end the

  • poem there, he would have said, or seemed to be saying,

  • "This is what it's all about."

  • It would be like one of those morals following the titles of

  • his poem. But in fact,

  • he doesn't end there.

  • He doesn't make so clear a declaration.

  • Line 14 returns us to the work of mowing.

  • "My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make" returns us

  • to the work of mowing and the work of reading and

  • interpretation and deciphering.

  • The poem ends with an image of process, and not of product,

  • an image of the process of labor.

  • The implication is that it is the same way for the poet who

  • lays his words in rows, in those rows of swale that are

  • his lines of verse.

  • The hay, that is, well, what?

  • The payoff, what the poem is all about, what mowing is all

  • about. The hay isn't handed over to

  • you. It's rather "leftto make."

  • That's a rich phrase.

  • What Frost gives you here and elsewhere is a poetry that

  • leaves its meanings to make, all the time.

  • Frost's poetry is engaged in construing, constructing,

  • constituting facts, which means it doesn't give us

  • the truth as if it were a product,

  • a fashioned object; rather, it gives us a process,

  • an act of fashioning, an act that is involved with

  • dreams and desire and with love.

  • Facts are made and not found in Frost's poetry of work.

  • And this is to say that the process by which facts are made

  • is, well, it's like work and is therefore, well,

  • it's something daily, ordinary, ongoing;

  • and for these reasons incapable of completion.

  • It's something that we have to do over and over again,

  • that is, making up the world.

  • "Poetry is a response to the daily necessity of getting the

  • world right." Stevens said that,

  • but Frost could have said it, too.

  • Meaning in Frost poems, as in the world that they

  • evoke, has to be interpreted every day.

  • It has to be in that sense worked for again and again.

  • Well, let me use this poem as a way into now talking about sound

  • in more actual, more literal ways in Frost's

  • poetry and to begin with you to think a little bit about meter,

  • in fact, and what Frost does with it.

  • Let me go back to the handout where we've got more passages

  • from Frost's letters, and in particular what Frost

  • has to say about something he calls "the sound of sense";

  • although he says in that first quotation that,

  • well, he doesn't like to brag.

  • I alone of English writers have consciously set

  • myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

  • [This is an ambitious guy.] Now, it is possible to have

  • sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is

  • supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the

  • sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland,

  • which makes anything but dull reading).

  • [This is a wonderful metaphor.] The best place to get the

  • abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts

  • off the words....

  • [Understand what Frost means?

  • He wants us to think about how we could understand what people

  • are saying without taking in the words that they're using,

  • simply by catching the tones and rhythms of their exchanges.

  • ... The sound of sense, then.

  • You get that. It is the abstract vitality of

  • our speech. It is pure soundpure form.

  • One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an

  • artist. But remember we are still

  • talking merely of the raw material of poetry.

  • An ear and an appetite for these sounds of sense is the

  • first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse.

  • But if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by

  • skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their

  • irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.

  • Verse in which there is nothing but the beat of the metre

  • furnished by the accents of the polysyllabic words we call

  • doggerel. Verse is not that.

  • Neither is it the sound of sense alone.

  • It is the resultant from those two.

  • There are only two or three metres that are worth anything.

  • We depend for variety on the infinite play of accents,

  • in the sound of sense.

  • [Frost to John Bartlett, July 1913]

  • Frost's "sound of sense," the abstract vitality of our speech.

  • It has to do exactly with how people say what they say.

  • These are dimensions of communication that I've been

  • identifying in "Mowing" with the whisper of the scythe,

  • that is, a tone of meaning or a way of meaning.

  • "The sound of sense."

  • It represents common and vernacular elements of speech.

  • The sounds of sense are all part of language in use,

  • which people are using to do things with.

  • But, Frost stresses, poetry is not only that;

  • it's something more.

  • It's the sound of sense, as he says, brokenand

  • that's another interesting metaphorit's broken,

  • he says, skillfully across the beat of the meter.

  • Meter is something regular; it's a fixed scheme;

  • it's inflexible, as Frost conceives of it here.

  • The speaking voice, by contrast,

  • is something idiosyncratic, irregular, particular.

  • In the second quotation, or rather the last on the page

  • but the second one about the subject, Frost says:

  • My versification seems to bother people more than I should

  • have expected [because he seemed to ears tutored in

  • nineteenth-century norms to have a kind of rough and irregular

  • metric]--I suppose because I have been so long accustomed to

  • thinking of it in my own private way.

  • It is as simple as this: there are the very regular

  • pre-established accent and measure of blank verse [blank

  • verse, that is--and I'll explain

  • it--unrhymed iambic pentameter]; and there are the very

  • irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation.

  • I am never more pleased than when I can get these into

  • strained relation.

  • [Frost wants to create a sound effect of strained relation in

  • his poetry, a strained relation between speech and meter.]

  • I like to [and again the same word]

  • drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first

  • comb and then break stumbling on the shingle [and now I'm writing

  • a poem, it seems].

  • That's all [he says,] but it's no mere figure of

  • speech though one can make figures enough about it [and in

  • fact, you can see Frost doing that in

  • his poetry very often].

  • Frost to John Cournos, July 1914]

  • "Strained relation," this tension between speech and

  • pattern, suggests the tension between all sorts of contending

  • forces in Frost: the vernacular and the

  • literary, the concrete and the abstract;

  • flux, fixity; the individual will and

  • material fact. The special sound of Frost's

  • poems result from the tensions between these pairs of opposing

  • forces as they are embodied in his language.

  • To approach this, you'll need to know a little

  • bit about meter. In fact, a rough grasp on

  • traditional English meter is essential to Frost and it's also

  • important to other poets we'll readto Stevens,

  • say, or to Crane, or to Auden or Bishop.

  • Obviously, these are poets who work usually in quite

  • traditional meters.

  • And yet, it's also important for reading Pound and for

  • reading Eliot and for reading Moore,

  • who sound the way they do partly because they make a point

  • of not writing pentameter, the meter that Frost often,

  • but not always, chooses.

  • How many of you know what iambic pentameter is?

  • Don't be shy. Okay.

  • I'm going to spend a little bit of time at the beginning of

  • class next time talking about it and working with you a little

  • bit as we read Frost and in particular we can use the poem

  • "Birches" to do that.

  • Don't be distressed if you're unfamiliar with it.

  • Knowing what iambic pentameter is, is not a gift of birth,

  • but rather something that comes through a little bit of

  • practice, which means we have to work at

  • it a little bit. And I will, in order to enable

  • you to do that, give you a--or actually ask the

  • TFs in section to hand out a meter exercise that you can do

  • for next week. When you leave today,

  • I would like to collect cards, just to figure out how many of

  • us there are, and as I say,

  • on Wednesday, between the online registration

  • and our work on it in class, we should be able to get our

  • sections ordered.

  • So, see you on Wednesday.

Professor Langdon Hammer: I imagine that you

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B1 中級

2.羅伯特-弗羅斯特 (2. Robert Frost)

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    阿多賓 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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