Motto: “No ideas but in things.”
A colleague begs to differ: “A poet of some local interest, perhaps.”—Eliot. “Anti-poetic.”—Wallace Stevens.
Favorite colors: Blue, yellow, tan.
Latest books read: Keats, Pound’s Cantos, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
“The Red Wheelbarrow”
The prestige Williams (for extra credit):
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned
Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
a sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places
inhabited by hordes
heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
since their movements
are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)
No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—
since the world it opens is always a place
formerly
unsuspected. A
world lost,
a world unsuspected
beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness
from Paterson, Book 2 (“Sunday in the Park”), Section 2 ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)
Profile: The one who got stuck being popular with readers outside college English departments … but not just the “miles-to-go-before-I-sleep” poet; as one critic said, “sees the skull beneath the flesh” … born in California, where he spent his boyhood: The New England accent just a bit of a fraud … re-created, in his poems, the rhythms of actual speech, the actions of ordinary men … “got” nature, tradition, and anxiety … his tone sad, wry, and a little narcissistic … eventually carved out an elder-statesman role for himself in official American culture … isolation, limitation, and extinction were favorite themes … said to have been a creep to his wife and son (who committed suicide) … for better or worse, hard not to memorize.
Motto: “We play the words as we find them.”
A colleague begs to differ: “His work is full (or said to be full) of humanity.”—Wallace Stevens.
Favorite colors: Teal blue, slate gray, blood red.
Latest books read: The King James Bible, Thoreau’s Walden, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Frost:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
“Nothing Gold Can Stay”
The prestige Frost (for extra credit):
…Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad….
from “Directive” WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)
Profile: With Yeats and Eliot, billed as a great “imaginative force” in modern poetry … self-effacing insurance executive who spent a lifetime at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, writing poetry nights and weekends … didn’t travel in literary circles (and was on a first-name basis with almost no other writers); did, however, manage to get into a famous fistfight with Ernest Hemingway while vacationing in Key West … believed in “the essential gaudiness of poetry” … his own verse marked by flair, self-mockery, virtuoso touches, aggressive art-for-art’s-sakeishness … in it, he portrayed himself as the aesthete, the dandy, the hedonist … held that, since religion could no longer satisfy people, poetry would have to … had the sensuousness and brilliance of a Keats (cf, as the critics do, Frost’s “Wordsworthian plainness”).
Motto: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.”
A colleague begs to differ: “A bric-a-brac poet.”—Robert Frost.
Favorite colors: Vermilion, chartreuse, wine.
Latest books read: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the poetry of Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Yeats, Henri Bergson’s On Laughter.
The easy (and eminently quotable) Stevens:
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground.