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  1. #361
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    ESSAY
    And the Winner Is ... Pindar!
    Can any modern poet beat the world record Pindar set 25 centuries ago?
    BY STEPHANIE BURT

    You may not associate ambitious poetry with sports at all, much less with the Olympics, but Pindar certainly did. Perhaps the most-praised poet (besides Homer) in Greek antiquity, and one of the earliest poets for whom many complete poems survive, Pindar (5th century BCE) celebrated in his best-known work the victors in ancient Greek athletic festivals. We now call those poems his epinician odes (from epi, “upon,” and nike, victory): Pindar seems to have written each one on commission—the sponsor whose chariot won the chariot-race, or the family of a winning boxer, paid Pindar to compose verse about the event, which was then performed, with music and dancing.

    Each of Pindar’s epinician odes designates in its title the games, the winner, and the event (e.g., Olympian, Theron of Akragas, chariot race). The odes honor both the aristocratic winner and his family or city-state, often by retelling an apposite myth. Pindar declares in Olympian XI that athletic victories require appropriate poems (meligarues humnoi, honey-sweet hymns) as crops require rain: in Frank Nisetich’s elegant translation,



    Sometimes men need the winds most,
    at other times
    waters from the sky,
    rain descendants of the cloud.
    And when a man has triumphed
    and put his toil behind,
    it is time for melodious song
    to arise, laying
    the foundation of future glory,
    a sworn pledge securing proud success.

    For Olympian victors, such acclaim
    is laid in store
    without limit, and I
    am eager to tend it with my song.

    Sometimes modern Olympics are still tended with his song. The 1984 Los Angeles and 2004 Athens Olympics included classical scholars reciting Pindar, or reading their own commissioned “Pindaric” odes. Our term “athletics” comes from Greek games of the kind that Pindar praised, aethloi (competitions, or ordeals; the word can also denote battles) whose victors could take home an aethlon, a prize. Of all the games, Pindar said (and his audience would have agreed), the Olympics were most important: Olympian I begins, in Anthony Verity’s new rendition,

    Water is best,
    while gold gleams like blazing fire in the night,
    brightest amid a rich man’s wealth;
    but, my heart, if it is of games that you wish to sing,
    look no further than the sun; as there is no star
    that shines with more warmth by day from a clear sky,
    so we can speak of no greater contest than Olympia.

    Many epinician odes connect the present honor of athletic prizes with the honor and deeds of legendary heroes, especially those in the victor’s family tree.

    Pindar has long been a byword for lofty inspiration, for poetic difficulty, and for the supposed connection between them, as if a poet so close to the gods and their power must dwell far from ordinary human speech. Writing in ancient Rome, Horace declared Pindar one of a kind; to copy his effects, Horace continued (Odes, 2.4), would be like trying to imitate a flood. Around 1629, Ben Jonson composed the “Cary-Morison Ode,” the first English poem to imitate Pindar’s complex but regular three-part form. Many poets (though not Jonson) identified Pindar with wildness, irregularity, and mysterious, even supernatural, influence.

    Pindar’s language really is difficult, partly because his stanzas use words and sounds from many Greek dialects, rather than staying with one. The 17th-century poet Abraham Cowley called Pindaric composition “the noblest and highest kind of writing in verse,” even though he also claimed, “If a man should undertake to translate Pindar word for word, it would be thought that one Mad-man had translated another.” Cowley then translated Pindar anyway, and wrote his own elaborate “Pindaric” odes.


    In Pindar’s Footsteps

    20th-century poets, following Cowley, remembered Pindar as a poet of sublime victories over language, not as a poet of well-born athletes who wrestled and raced. The few exceptions to this rule are strongly ironic: Robert Pinsky’s resonant “Glory,” for example, or Delmore Schwartz’s “Exercise in Preparation for a Pindaric Ode to Carl Hubbell,” a self-mocking poem about the Brooklyn Dodgers’ decline. Robert Duncan’s vivid “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” takes up—as classical scholars now also take up—Pindar’s interest in the life of the state, in the virtues of rulers and politics: “This is magic,” Duncan says, then goes on to list American presidents (“Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower”) in whom no poetic magic lay. For Duncan, as for his 17th-century forebears, Pindar had something to do with majesty, history, and tradition, and with ancient ritual, but very little to do with athletic events.

    Modern poems about sports, on the other hand, forget Pindar, and many of them forget about victories too: perhaps from a sense of fairness, perhaps from the contrarian impulse endemic to modernism, the poets of the past century most often laud things and people who would not (without the poet’s attention) get the respect they deserve. A.E. Housman was also a classical scholar: his popular “To an Athlete Dying Young” (1896) is the exception that proves the rule, making a local boy’s recent triumph (“the time you won your town the race”) an occasion to remind us all that we will die. More recent poets who address sports tend to describe either losing teams, or else amateurs, who could use the recognition that poetry gives. Consider the ex-NFLer “Big Daddy Lipscomb” in Randall Jarrell’s 1965 poem about him, “who found football easy enough, life hard enough / To ... die of heroin”; consider the tennis players in Robert Hass’ “Old Dominion” (1979), “graceful from this distance” but stressed-out up close (the same poem laments the death of Jarrell).

    Poems about basketball and about ice skating (Mary Jo Salter’s “Sunday Skaters,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Slam, Dunk, & Hook,” Ed Hirsch’s “Fast Break,” Major Jackson’s “Hoops”) seem more likely than poems about other sports to emulate, in the suspensions and arcs of their own verse, the skillful motions that the athletes themselves undertake. Yet those same poems (including all four named above) also emphasize the amateur, impromptu nature of the contests that they portray. They emphasize, too, the fact that contests always end. For Salter (whose skaters are children), “It’s all / about time, about time!” For Jackson, “a sneaker’s a cave” and a playground dunk could be a prelude to oblivion. Modern poems that do show competitive victors come down hard on victory’s irony, on what the winners gave up in order to win: Donald Finkel’s “Interview with a Winner” begins “What was it like? / like losing” and continues “For what? / to do it again.” Elizabeth Alexander’s fine 12-part “Narrative: Ali” dwells mostly on Muhammad Ali’s setbacks away from the ring: “Olympic gold / can’t buy a black man / a Louisville hamburger / in nineteen-sixty.” After such slights “The People’s Champ,” “The Greatest,” must boast (“come and take me”) in order to keep back his own self-doubt.

    The critic Don Johnson, who wrote The Sporting Muse: A Critical Study of Poetry About Athletes and Athletics and edited the baseball-poetry book Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves, believes that each team sport implies its own poetic subject: American football means pain and injury. Baseball means nostalgia and inheritance from fathers (not mothers) to daughters and sons. Basketball, with its fluid moves, fast pace and high leaps, means escape, self-transcendence, stopped time. Ice hockey, as Johnson does not say, frequently means Canada (Randall Maggs would likely agree); poems about women’s sports usually invoke women’s solidarity, and focus (with recent exceptions) on amateur or noncompetitive events.

    What gets lost in many of these poems is the analogy that Pindar’s work implies, between technical excellence in one craft—the handling of a chariot, the running of a race, a serve, an assist—and technical or professional excellence in another: the handling of words. Jarrell used to make that analogy in conversation. Asked how he knew if a poet was any good, Jarrell used to respond (I paraphrase), “How do you know that Johnny Unitas is any good?”

    Pindar sometimes predicted that his odes would make victors’ names last: he was right, too. (Here we are, reading about Theron of Akragas.) Can anyone now alive imitate Pindar by writing memorable verse in a living language about an Olympic champion? Should a contemporary poet even try? No one now speaks, as a first language, Pindar’s Greek, and no public ceremony provides the occasion for complex versification that Pindar and his rival poets-for-hire enjoyed. Few Anglophone poets these days want to confer divine sanction on sporting triumphs, much less on the nation-states that the Olympics glorify.

    You might, however, say that modern doubts provide all the more reason to imitate Pindar, or at least to try, if we write about sports at all. Despite their obvious elements of chance (does the wind help or hinder the javelin-thrower? will that last three-pointer fall?), athletic competitions can seem like an oasis of justice in an unfair world; sports are one of the few parts of human life where we can see, and choose en masse to see, superior skill or effort (years of practice for individual events; months of learning to play as a team) receive an immediate, evident reward.

    If we are looking for modern poets who celebrate triumphs in sports, we can find them, but we may have to look in unexpected places. W.H. Auden said that poetry was the clear expression of mixed feelings. Modern poems about competitive sports, with their praise for losers and the amateurs, their ironies for the winners, fit that rubric; so does Geoffrey Hill’s long poem, The Triumph of Love (1998). His vast knowledge of the past seems at times to match his contempt for the present, and his poem found “Stunned words of victory less memorable / than those urged from defeat.” Yet Hill nonetheless found something to praise, and something to emulate, as he watched the Boston Marathon:

    how
    amazing it still is, the awaited name
    hailed through our streets, under the pale leafage,
    springing from the hierarchies of splendour
    and salutation, prodigious messengers
    with their own heralds and outriders—
    yes, look! the Kenyan runners, look, there they go!
    stippled with silver, shaking off the light
    garlands of sweat—

    Hill’s laudatory passage breaks off unfinished: one of the runners will win, and the race goes on.

    Originally Published: August 21st, 2008
    Stephanie (also Steph; formerly Stephen) Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor. In 2012, the New York Times called Burt “one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation.” Burt grew up around Washington, DC and earned a BA from Harvard and PhD from Yale. She has published four collections of poems: Advice...
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  2. #362
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    8 Reasons Why Poetry Is Good for the Soul
    Here's a guest post from KM Barkley, a writing coach and editor, in which he shares his eight reasons why poetry is good for the soul.
    GUEST COLUMNJUN 16, 2016
    Here’s a guest post from KM Barkley, a writing coach and editor from Lexington, Kentucky, in which he shares his eight reasons why poetry is good for the soul. If you have an idea for a guest post too, just send an e-mail to robert.brewer@fwcommunity.com with the subject line: Poetic Asides Guest Post.

    *****

    The Digital Age is booming. That means attentions are shrinking and focus is altering. With 140-character communication on Twitter, picture and visual postings on Pinterest, and classrooms shying away from difficult material in favor of easy reading and easy grades, poetry has become one of the most underutilized, and underestimated, mediums in modern culture.

    I think Phyllis Klein from Women’s Therapy Services said it best: “Turning to poetry, poetry gives rhythm to silence, light to darkness. In poetry we find the magic of metaphor, compactness of expression, use of the five senses, and simplicity or complexity of meaning in a few lines.”

    *****

    Re-create Your Poetry!

    Recreating_Poetry_Revise_Poems
    Revision doesn’t have to be a chore–something that should be done after the excitement of composing the first draft. Rather, it’s an extension of the creation process!

    In the 48-minute tutorial video Re-creating Poetry: How to Revise Poems, poets will be inspired with several ways to re-create their poems with the help of seven revision filters that they can turn to again and again.


    Click to continue.

    *****

    1. POETRY IS GOOD FOR DEVELOPMENTAL LEARNING
    In child education, children’s verbal and written skills are somewhat underdeveloped. Poetry helps by teaching in rhythm, stringing words together with a beat helps cognitive understanding of words and where they fit. Additionally, it teaches children the art of creative expression, which most found highly lacking in the new-age educational landscape. In essence, poetry gives them a great tool for developing one’s self.

    2. POETRY IS GOOD FOR DEVELOPING SKILLS
    Writing, speaking, and understanding can all be greatly influenced and nurtured by the use of poetry. Learning rules for writing, and then breaking them with poetry, can give writing alternative beauty. Speaking poetry aloud with its beat, rhythm, and rhyme can loosen the tongue and craft a firm foundation for verbal communication. Learning to understand poetry also gives the mental fortitude, as well as the drive, to understand written communication (an invaluable trait in business, from my perspective).

    3. POETRY HELPS IMPROVE IDEAS
    Have you ever sat there and not known what to write? Picking up poetry, reading through different excerpts from classic poets can blossom ideas you never knew existed. Reading and writing poetry makes you think of new ideas, but can also dramatically change the way you perceived old ones. It is a way to process experiences, visual descriptions, and emotions.

    4. POETRY IS THERAPEUTIC FOR THE WRITER
    Biblio/Poetry Therapy is a creative arts therapy using the written word to understand, and then communicate, feelings and thoughts. Poetry is typically short, but largely emotional. Writers get in touch with sentiments they might not have known they had until it was down on paper. Depression and anxiety are among the top two mental illnesses being treated with Biblio-therapy, and through poetry, one can start to understand the hindrances and blocks being formed around their mind. Expressing how one feels is difficult. I’ve found that poetry is one of the best outlets.


    5. POETRY IS THERAPEUTIC FOR THE READER
    For those who have a harder time expressing themselves, reading poetry can have a similar positive effect as writing it. Reading poetry allows one to see into the soul of another person, see what is weighing on their minds and on their hearts, and can open doors to feelings that are sometimes suppressed until that door is opened. Reading can shine a light on all those dark and hidden crevices of the heart and mind once thought permanently closed off to the world.

    *****

    The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms
    Play with poetic forms!

    Poetic forms are fun poetic games, and this digital guide collects more than 100 poetic forms, including more established poetic forms (like sestinas and sonnets) and newer invented forms (like golden shovels and fibs).

    Click to continue.

    *****

    6. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF WORDS THEMSELVES
    By design, poetry is broken into short, but strategic sentences. By doing so, writing and reading poetry makes one understand the significance of every single word and their placement. Sometimes, without a single word, it can change the entire rhythm and meaning of the poem itself. Writing poetry forces the person to consider, and reconsider, each piece and length of their verses. In poetry, words are magic, moods, depth, and difficult. One gains the utmost appreciation for them when handling delicate sentence structures provided in poetry pieces.

    7. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND PEOPLE
    One of the hardships of the current age is the ability to understand one another. Miscommunication and misunderstandings lead to mass amounts of frustration. Reading and writing poetry actually gives people the improved ability to understand others. From a writer’s prospective, you have to be able to convey the true nature of your writing to an unknown reader. That means diving deep into what parts you want them to understand, what you want them to feel, and what to take home with them that will resonate long after reading. For a reader of poetry, it gives you the patience to look into someone else’s mind and cultivate empathy for another person. Both conveying personal opinion and the ability to empathize are tantamount to respectable communication.

    8. POETRY HELPS YOU UNDERSTAND YOURSELF
    Ever felt out of place? Have you ever wondered why you are thinking or feeling a certain way? Ever been frustrated because your friends or partners couldn’t ever possibly understand you because you don’t even understand what is going through your head? I have found that the best way to grasp internal turmoil is to write poetry. It slows the world down around you. It streamlines your thoughts to short, direct sentences, while soothing the anxiety out of your body with the lyrical style. It makes you think. It puts a spotlight on what the issues might be and forces you to logically and methodically answer to it. Poetry can give you insights into yourself that you never knew existed but always wanted to understand. There is no greater sadness than not knowing one’s self-worth, but there is no greater power than complete understanding of one’s identity. Poetry can give you that power.

    *****

    KM Barkley
    KM Barkley

    KM Barkley is a writing coach and editor from Lexington, KY. He has written articles for professional corporate HR training and has edited novels as well as scripts and screenplays for The Art Institute of Houston. He is an active member of Writer’s Digest and The Warrior Forum.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  3. #363
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    POETS AND POEMS: MAURICE MANNING AND “RAILSPLITTER”
    BY GLYNN YOUNG



    Poet Maurice Manning has done something unusual for a poetry collection. He’s crawled inside the head of a famous historical figure and told stories about the man’s life from his own posthumous perspective.

    In Railsplitter: Poems, the historical figure is Abraham Lincoln. Manning explains that his affinities for Lincoln have been long-standing. “I grew up near his birthplace,” he writes in the preface, “and I live in the same county where his parents were married. My ancestors were early settlers of Kentucky. All my life I have had a sense of the world Lincoln came from, and meeting him through poetry has seemed, especially in recent years, inevitable.” He says his great-great-grandfather would boast that he voted for Lincoln twice.

    It was Lincoln who drew me to Manning’s collection. I came late to Lincoln, growing up in the South, with a family invested in the Civil War and its memory and re-invention. Lincoln was rarely spoken of, and when he was, it was not with admiration. When I was an adult, and working as a speechwriter, I discovered Lincoln first through his speeches, like the Second Inaugural Address and especially the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Once I discovered him, Lincoln became almost heroic, because he was, a plain-speaking frontier lawyer who led the United States through the most difficult period of its history.


    Abraham Lincoln

    In Manning’s poems, you find a Lincoln who sounds so authentic and realistic that you think the man himself must have written these first-person poems. It’s that realistic and compelling. In no chronological order, the poems consider scenes of boyhood, his years as a frontier lawyer, his own family, the Civil War period, and even his assassination at Ford’s Theatre in April 1865. Avoiding chronological order is important. Manning’s Lincoln understands and remembers his own life like we all do—with the stories we and others tell about ourselves; we don’t tell them in the order that they happened.

    The collection begins with the surprising “To a Chigger,” the mite long famous for aggravating and irritating people in woods, grasses, beds, and anywhere else people inhabit. Growing up on a farm and sleeping in hotel beds when he argued various legal cases, Lincoln would have been more than familiar with this pest. But then the collection moves on to consider language, the Wilmot Proviso, rumors about rearing his children, the Know-Nothings, Transcendentalism, his law partner William Herndon, the Civil War, his assassination, the poems he wrote (including the vulgar ones), the Civil War, reading Robert Burns, and more.

    The collection contains many poems that are moving, and they tend to be the ones that capture his struggles as a leader and the great loneliness he must have felt.

    The Winter of My Discontent

    That was 1862,
    and February was the depth,
    and yet the grief went deeper still,
    continuing as an endless valley,
    and I was walking down it alone.
    Death was everywhere a fog
    over the land, and in my house,
    I concluded, was where the fog began,
    I was alone, as I am now,
    to pronounce my soliloquies in the dark,
    and my thoughts did dive down.
    Am I a living ghost? What fate
    is now foreshadowed by this moment?
    How desperate must I be in this scene?
    What resolution must I make?
    To call for a horse? Where would I go?
    Something happens to time in despair.
    It ceases to divide, and yet
    division was my residence.
    So practicing soliloquies
    revealed my mind, and the absence of time
    gave me, strangely, time to practice.
    And I had a discerning audience,
    one who was familiar with my voice.


    Maurice Manning

    The title poem, “Railsplitter,” is the final poem, a meditation upon Lincoln’s death, his legacy, and the meaning of one’s life. Rarely have I been so moved by a poem.

    Manning has published six other poetry collections, including Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (2001), A Companion for Owls (2004), Bucolics (2007), The Common Man (2010), The Gone and the Going Away (2013), and One Man’s Dark (2017). A native of Kentucky, he attended Earlham College and the University of Alabama. After teaching at both DePauw and Indiana universities, he joined the faculty of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. His poems have appeared in numerous literary publications. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2011 for The Common Man and was named a Guggenheim Fellow that same year.

    Railsplitter is a collection for our divisive time. Like Lincoln, we live in a sharply divided country, and we’re not even sure if we want to continue living together. Lincoln, and Manning’s poems about him, remind us that the difficulties may seem insurmountable but that there is always hope, and we were born for such a time as this.

    Photo by Johan Neven, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young, author of the novels Dancing Priest, A Light Shining, Dancing King, and the newly published Dancing Prophet, and Poetry at Work.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  4. #364
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    Comparing "London" (William Blake) and "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3rd, 1802" (William Wordsworth)
    Topics: Poetry, Sonnet, Romanticism Pages: 5 (1853 words) Published: September 18, 2006
    William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and William Blake (1757-1827) were both romantic poets. Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in the late 18th Century. Blake and Wordsworth tended to write about the same things such as nature, people and structures, such as cities like London. Emotions also played a big part in romantic poems. Often poets would be inspired by a simple view and would write a masterpiece about it. For example, Wordsworth lived in the Lake District for most of his life and this inspired many of his poems.

    Romanticism is thought to have started in Germany and England in 1770s and by the early 1800s it had spread through most of Europe. Romanticism spread westward quickly and was greatly influenced by music and for many years it was used in concert halls. Today it is known as neoromanticism and is used in many things without the public even knowing. Even the soundtrack from Star Wars was based on the style of romanticism.

    Both poems are about London, but based around two very different opinions. Blake's poem describes London as hell on Earth, while Wordsworth's praises London as heaven on Earth. To more contrasting poems have never been written.

    In "London" the poem is written in the first person account (this could be Blake). The person notices the terrible living conditions and suffering life of Londoners who live by the Thames. The use of detracting language (weakness, hapless) drives his feelings of sympathy for the people. "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802" however is full of praise for London, but does not describe the people of London as it is written in the morning before the city has awoken for a new day. It describes the landscape and architecture of London as "majestic, bright and glimmering". Wordsworth says that London is the most beautiful place on Earth and anyone who would walk past without a glance would be "dead of soul". Blake, on the other hand, probably thinks that the people who live IN London are dead of soul. His London is a bleak city, torn apart by corruption in the royal family and the church. In lines 9 and 10 Blake links chimney-sweeps and the church through both contrast due to their wealth and also through a small likeness because both or unhappy. The chimney-sweep is extremely poor and has a terrible quality of life whereas the church has the opposite of this but has forsaken religion and Christ. No one can by happy when a city is like this.

    In Wordsworth's poem, the chimney-sweeps have been hard at work because "Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie...All bright and glittering in the smokeless sky"

    The skyline of the city captured Wordsworth heart and he fell in love with it. However he couldn't see past the buildings and look inside them. Blake did and that is why the two poems differ so greatly. Wordsworth saw the outer casing, but Blake delved deeper into the heart of the city and found out what it was really like under the outer garments.

    "London", being the harsher poem, conjures much more powerful images, the strongest probably being from line 8. "Mind-forged manacles". Here Blake implies that the important restrictions come from mental limitations, not physical ones that can be seen and touched. It also might suggest that the leaders of the city (Kings or mayors) might be controlling people through fear or that they are too bothered about being rich and having a good reputation than to care about the poor and needy and do something about it.

    The repetition of "every" (seven times in all) makes clear the extent of suffering in London. It is not just in isolated incident, or a few people dotted about all over the city, it is everyone connected with London. The whole society.
    Beauty, reality, truth-- all are seen differently depending upon the --eye of the beholder.
    The emotions of the specific author. In this case, a different picture painted by each poet.
    Could both poets be right? -Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    CULTURE
    Can Poetry Matter?
    Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more

    MAY 1991 ISSUE

    American poetry now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group. Little of the frenetic activity it generates ever reaches outside that closed group. As a class poets are not without cultural status. Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige. But as individual artists they are almost invisible.

    This article appears in the May 1991 issue.

    Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read.

    See More
    What makes the situation of contemporary poets particularly surprising is that it comes at a moment of unprecedented expansion for the art. There have never before been so many new books of poetry published, so many anthologies or literary magazines. Never has it been so easy to earn a living as a poet. There are now several thousand college-level jobs in teaching creative writing, and many more at the primary and secondary levels. Congress has even instituted the position of poet laureate, as have twenty-five states. One also finds a complex network of public subvention for poets, funded by federal, state, and local agencies, augmented by private support in the form of foundation fellowships, prizes, and subsidized retreats. There has also never before been so much published criticism about contemporary poetry; it fills dozens of literary newsletters and scholarly journals.


    The proliferation of new poetry and poetry programs is astounding by any historical measure. Just under a thousand new collections of verse are published each year, in addition to a myriad of new poems printed in magazines both small and large. No one knows how many poetry readings take place each year, but surely the total must run into the tens of thousands. And there are now about 200 graduate creative-writing programs in the United States, and more than a thousand undergraduate ones. With an average of ten poetry students in each graduate section, these programs alone will produce about 20,000 accredited professional poets over the next decade. From such statistics an observer might easily conclude that we live in the golden age of American poetry.

    But the poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Reputations are made and rewards distributed within the poetry subculture. To adapt Russell Jacoby's definition of contemporary academic renown from The Last Intellectuals, a "famous" poet now means someone famous only to other poets. But there are enough poets to make that local fame relatively meaningful. Not long ago, "only poets read poetry" was meant as damning criticism. Now it is a proven marketing strategy.

    The situation has become a paradox, a Zen riddle of cultural sociology. Over the past half century, as American poetry's specialist audience has steadily expanded, its general readership has declined. Moreover, the engines that have driven poetry's institutional success—the explosion of academic writing programs, the proliferation of subsidized magazines and presses, the emergence of a creative-writing career track, and the migration of American literary culture to the university—have unwittingly contributed to its disappearance from public view.

    To the average reader, the proposition that poetry's audience has declined may seem self-evident. It is symptomatic of the art's current isolation that within the subculture such notions are often rejected. Like chamber-of-commerce representatives from Parnassus, poetry boosters offer impressive recitations of the numerical growth of publications, programs, and professorships. Given the bullish statistics on poetry's material expansion, how does one demonstrate that its intellectual and spiritual influence has eroded? One cannot easily marshal numbers, but to any candid observer the evidence throughout the world of ideas and letters seems inescapable.

    Daily newspapers no longer review poetry. There is, in fact, little coverage of poetry or poets in the general press. From 1984 until this year the National Book Awards dropped poetry as a category. Leading critics rarely review it. In fact, virtually no one reviews it except other poets. Almost no popular collections of contemporary poetry are available except those, like the Norton Anthology, targeting an academic audience. It seems, in short, as if the large audience that still exists for quality fiction hardly notices poetry. A reader familiar with the novels of Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, or John Barth may not even recognize the names of Gwendolyn Brooks, Gary Snyder, and W. D. Snodgrass.

    One can see a microcosm of poetry's current position by studying its coverage in The New York Times. Virtually never reviewed in the daily edition, new poetry is intermittently discussed in the Sunday Book Review, but almost always in group reviews where three books are briefly considered together. Whereas a new novel or biography is reviewed on or around its publication date, a new collection by an important poet like Donald Hall or David Ignatow might wait up to a year for a notice. Or it might never be reviewed at all. Henry Taylor's The Flying Change was reviewed only after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. Rodney Jones's Transparent Gestures was reviewed months after it had won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah was not reviewed by the Times at all.

    Poetry reviewing is no better anywhere else, and generally it is much worse. The New York Times only reflects the opinion that although there is a great deal of poetry around, none of it matters very much to readers, publishers, or advertisers—to anyone, that is, except other poets. For most newspapers and magazines, poetry has become a literary commodity intended less to be read than to be noted with approval. Most editors run poems and poetry reviews the way a prosperous Montana rancher might keep a few buffalo around—not to eat the endangered creatures but to display them for tradition's sake.

    How Poetry Diminished
    Arguments about the decline of poetry's cultural importance are not new. In American letters they date back to the nineteenth century. But the modern debate might be said to have begun in 1934 when Edmund Wilson published the first version of his controversial essay "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" Surveying literary history, Wilson noted that verse's role had grown increasingly narrow since the eighteenth century. In particular, Romanticism's emphasis on intensity made poetry seem so "fleeting and quintessential" that eventually it dwindled into a mainly lyric medium. As verse—which had previously been a popular medium for narrative, satire, drama, even history and scientific speculation—retreated into lyric, prose usurped much of its cultural territory. Truly ambitious writers eventually had no choice but to write in prose. The future of great literature, Wilson speculated, belonged almost entirely to prose.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Interesting Literature

    LITERATURE
    The Best Poems of the 1920s
    The 1920s was a key decade in poetry: modernism really came to the fore, with a number of major poets adopting an increasingly experimental approach to form, rhyme, imagery, and subject matter. Below, we introduce and discuss some of the best and most notable poems from the 1920s.

    Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. We begin our pick of the best 1920s poems with a poem from 1920, which is very much a watershed poem: the US-born Pound described it as his ‘farewell to London’, before he moved to Europe and worked on his more ambitious long work, The Cantos. Mauberley sees Pound responding to the last few decades of English verse, his attempts to ‘make it new’, and various failed poetic projects such as the 1890s ‘Rhymers’ Club’. A difficult and allusive work, it’s well worth diving into and reading – though perhaps our introduction to the poem will help (click on the link above to read the first part; part II is also online).


    T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. In 1922, the American-born T. S. Eliot – who had settled in London in 1914 – produced this masterpiece of some 433 lines, incorporating numerous verse forms and taking in the post-war world from squalid encounters in bedsits to chatter in East End pubs. The allusions to nymphs, Tiresias, and Elizabethan England suggest at once a continuum with the past and a break with it: everything is simultaneously worse than it used to be, and yet the same as it ever was. In some ways, Eliot’s poem represents the end of civilisation as Shakespeare, Greek myth, and various holy texts go through the literary waste-disposal, regurgitated only as fragments. One of the high points of the modernist movement and one of the most important and influential poems of the twentieth century.

    Marianne Moore, ‘Marriage’. Published in 1923, a year after Eliot’s The Waste Land, ‘Marriage’ is a long(ish) poem by one of American modernism’s greatest poets. And like The Waste Land, Moore’s poem is allusive, taking in Shakespeare and the Bible as the poet explores the obligations and meaning of marriage (Moore herself never married). The poem is radical in both its form (modernist, free verse) and politics (we can label Moore’s treatment of marriage ‘feminist’).


    William Carlos Williams, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’. This 1923 poem should more properly be referred to as ‘XXII’, since it’s the 22nd poem to appear in Williams’s 1923 collection Spring and All, and the title ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is one retrospectively applied to the poem (not by the poet himself). One of the most famous examples of American imagism, the poem invites us to reflect upon the importance of something as simple as red wheelbarrow and some white chickens.

    Wallace Stevens, ‘Sunday Morning’. 1923 was the year Wallace Stevens’ landmark collection Harmonium was published. Stevens, like Williams, was an American modernist – and an American who stayed in America, rather than moving to England (as Eliot did). ‘Sunday Morning’ is about a woman who stays home on a Sunday morning in America, instead of going to church. Does this make her any less spiritual or religious than her neighbours?


    Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. Was 1923 the annus mirabilis for American poetry? 1922 may have been the high point of European modernism, with Eliot’s The Waste Land (written in London and Lausanne, although Eliot himself was American), James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room among some of the important works published in that year; but 1923 saw Frost, Stevens, and Williams all publish some of their most famous works. Here, Frost (pictured right) observes the ‘lovely, dark and deep’ woods as he travels home one night, in an altogether more Romantic scene than many of the other poems on this list.

    T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’. After he wrote The Waste Land, Eliot spent the next years working on a sort of follow-up poem whose form and language allude to that earlier poem in suggestive ways. Published in 1925, ‘The Hollow Men’ reflects the general malaise and sense of limbo that characterised the mid-1920s in Britain for many people: in the US many of the wealthiest may have been enjoying the Jazz Age, but post-war Britain was marked, for Eliot, by a loss of spiritual meaning and direction. ‘The Hollow Men’ brilliantly captures this.


    Nancy Cunard, Parallax. Although not as famous as Moore, Cunard was another female modernist poet who wrote a long poem in the wake of Eliot’s The Waste Land – and, in Cunard’s case, she seems to have deliberately alluded to Eliot’s work in order to challenge his despairing and pessimistic view of modernity. Parallax was, like The Waste Land, published in Britain by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press (in 1925). Not all of Parallax is available online, but you can read an excerpt by following the link above and discover more about it here.

    Langston Hughes, ‘I, Too’. The finest poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes (1902-67) often writes about the lives of African Americans living in America, especially in New York, in the early twentieth century. In this poem from 1926, and with an allusive nod to Walt Whitman’s poem ‘I Hear America Singing’, Hughes – describing himself as the ‘darker brother’ – highlights the plight of black Americans at the time, having to eat separately from everyone else in the kitchen when guests arrive, but determined to strive and succeed in the ‘Land of the Free’.


    W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Written in September 1926 and published the following year, this poem is about growing older and feeling out of touch with the new generation superseding you, feeling surplus to requirements, waiting for death. Perhaps this is something to do with the age gap between Yeats – who concludes this list of significant 1920s poems but was the oldest of the poets listed here – and modernists like Eliot, Pound, and Moore, all of whom were born at least twenty years later. So Yeats’s thoughts of death and ageing in this poem are, perhaps, inevitable for a poet in his sixties when he wrote this powerful piece about one’s twilight years.
    I am quite familiar with all listed except- Nancy Cunard...
    Which just gave me today's poetry assignment.
    And with any luck maybe even a new find that will give inspiration for me to compose a new poem today.-Tyr
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    Just found this on Cunard-- Tyr

    Poem of the week: In the Studio by Nancy Cunard
    Superficially traditional, this 1923 sonnet on an artist and his model conceals some of the daring that made the author a groundbreaking modernist

    ‘Beget again / Fresh meaning on dead emblem’ … detail from Picasso’s 1930 lithograph Artist and Model.
    ‘Beget again / Fresh meaning on dead emblem’ … detail from Picasso’s 1930 lithograph Artist and Model. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
    Carol Rumens
    Mon 13 Feb 2017 05.05 EST

    27
    106
    In the Studio

    Is it March, spring, winter, autumn, twilight, noon
    Told in this distant sound of cuckoo clocks?
    Sunday it is – five lilies in a swoon
    Decay against your wall, aggressive flocks
    Of alley-starlings aggravate a mood.
    The rain drops pensively. ‘If one could paint,
    Combine the abstract with a certain rude
    Individual form, knot passion with restraint …
    If one could use the murk that fills a brain,
    Undo old symbols and beget again
    Fresh meaning on dead emblem … ’ so one lies
    Here timeless, while the lilies’ withering skin
    Attests the hours, and rain sweeps from the skies;
    The bird sits on the chimney, looking in.


    That Nancy Cunard’s poetic achievement had its own unpredictable rhythms is revealed in the 40-year stretch of work covered by Sandeep Parmar in her magnificent edition of Cunard’s Selected Poems. Her development as a modernist poet is more jagged than it might first look when comparing the often rhymed, often metrical, sometimes crepuscular verses of her first, 1921 collection, Outlaws, with the sweeping free verse and direct address of her Spanish civil war poems. She anticipates herself in some early poems, and, later, may revert to earlier styles. Content leads form: she makes her poems reflect what she witnesses, and if, sometimes, this presents formal problems, it also underlies some of her best experiments. Parmar approvingly notes “the shared high modernist aesthetics” of Cunard’s long poem of 1925, Parallax, and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, while finding that she adds a layer of influence from French surrealist poetry. French Symbolism, too, might be added to the poetic kaleidoscope – it flickers in this week’s poem.

    In the Studio comes from a particularly interesting section of Previously Unpublished or Uncollected Poems. Dated 1923, it’s almost traditional in form, yet the small innovations add up to a polished originality. The diction is tougher than in many of the Outlaws poems. The symbolism is offset by some brilliant observation: the five lilies may be “swooning” but we’re in no doubt of their state of decay against the painter’s wall. We see and hear those alliterative “aggressive flocks / Of alley-starlings” and can imagine exactly, gratingly, how they “aggravate a mood”. The atmosphere is fin-de-sičcle, perhaps, but grounded in the sitter’s distinct, time-haunted perspective. And, yes, the surrealist touch is intriguingly present in that opening question about the confusing message of the cuckoo clocks.

    The Paris studio where the poem is set is that of the painter (William) Eugene McCown. In her introduction, Parmar tells us that German troops “bayonetted her portrait by Eugene McCown” when they ransacked Cunard’s home: presumably, it was the same portrait.

    I must admit I prefer this poem to any “iconic” picture of Cunard I’ve ever seen. It’s cleverly, elegantly made, a harmonious chord progression of different nuances. With a sardonic yawn, the speaker rebuts both the narcissism of the model and the pretension of the artist, defusing the latter through fine-tuned mimicry. The artist’s speech is gently parodied but he’s allowed to say something fundamentally interesting, especially at the beginning: “If one could paint, / Combine the abstract with a certain rude / Individual form, knot passion with restraint … ” That extra beat allotted to the eighth line is beautifully judged. I like the unexpected couplet, too, as a more rambling and thoughtless note is struck in lines nine and 10. And the connection in the line “dead emblem … so one lies” forges a critique of artistic convention and the part of the woman’s passive body in it. The image of the bird (one of those alley-starlings?) brings vitality and curiosity in a deft “turn” right at the end.

    Cunard is probably remembered now chiefly for her Spanish civil war poems, such as To Eat Today and any new reader should get their measure. They are rough-edged but open up the terrain of what poetry in the 20th century finds it can do. Frontline political engagement is what drives such work. But Cunard was a literary activist too, and contributed importantly to modernism through her efforts on behalf of other writers. Her press, The Hours, was famously the first to publish Samuel Beckett. I think she understood the talents of other people better than her own were ever understood.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Clarity and Obscurity: The Essences of Classical & Modern Poetry

    By Adam Sedia|June 27th, 2019|Categories: Culture, Literature, Modernity, Poetry, Tradition
    As a sustained artistic school, modernism cannot endure. But classical art is eternal because the ideas it expresses are eternal. A resurrection of classical form does not represent a return to the past, real or imagined, but instead a return to sanity, a reorientation of the artistic eye back to its natural, fully human purpose and use.

    Classical and modern poetry are inarguably different. Indeed, modernism’s chief boast is its break with classicism and tradition more broadly. The difference is palpable in even the most cursory reading of a classical poem alongside a modernist one. Yet in what does the difference lie? It might be tempting to follow Justice Stewart’s famous maxim “I know it when I see it.” Of course we know the difference when we see it, but a fairly surface-level analysis of the two styles of poetry reveals what the difference is and why it is so.

    The first aspect immediately noticeable about a classical poem is its clarity of expression. The language might be lofty or florid or sensuous, but the meaning—the underlying truth the poet is conveying through his art—is never lost. By contrast, a modernist poem is notable at first for its opacity. Symbolism unique to the poet or even the poem, inexplicable without footnotes, pervades the work. And the language always speaks in riddles, conjuring many possible interpretations, none of them necessarily wrong.

    The divergence in opinion over clarity more fundamentally stems from a difference in worldviews. The classical poet operates under the presumption of truth. Poetry is merely a vehicle for expressing that truth, and a poem that is not clear in that expression is a failure. The modernist poet, by stark contrast, denies either the discoverability or the existence itself of any absolute truth. Truth then becomes subjective, identical to the perceptions of the observer. With the observer as the ultimate arbiter of truth, effect becomes paramount, and the success of a poem is determined by the power of the effect it has over the reader, regardless of the conclusions to which the reader arrives. Thus, in a modernist poem, the timbre, the nuance, the imagery of language is paramount, for they themselves contain, rather than convey, truth to the reader.

    Two poems that beautifully illustrate this divergence are Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” and Hart Crane’s “Voyages.” Similar in structure and vividness and grandeur of their imagery, they serve as perfect contrasts to analyze the use of poetic language by a classicist and by a modernist in contrast with each other. These, along with both classicist and modernist polemical writings, illustrate this fundamental difference over the nature of truth and its measurable stylistic effects.

    I.

    First, Shelley. Before examining his verse, it is worthwhile to consider what he himself considered the end of poetry to be. After all, what better benchmark to measure the success of his poem than the one he himself set out? In his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley divides the human mental processes into reason, or “the enumeration of quantities already known,” and imagination, or “the perception of the value of those quantities.”[1] Poetry is “the expression of the imagination.”[2] Thus, the language of poets “is vitally metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words, which represent them, become, through time, signs for portions or classes of thoughts instead of pictures of integral thoughts . . .”[3]

    For Shelley, “[a] poem is the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”[4] Whereas a story is merely “a catalogue of detached facts” related only through time, place, and causality, a poem “is the creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature, as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.”[5] Poetry thus captures the ideals themselves, rather than the forms observed.

    But poetry also acts in another “diviner” way: “[i]t awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought;” it “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”[6] In this way poetry precedes and is superior to moral law, for it “enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void for ever craves fresh food.”[7]

    Towards the end of his essay, Shelley lays down the role and function of poetry in human society. “The functions of poetry are two-fold,” he says; “by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order, which may be called the beautiful and the good.”[8] Poetry, then, is the “center and circumference of knowledge” and “comprehends all science,” and is most needed when “the accumulation of the materials of external life”—knowledge and perception—“exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature.”[9]

    Ambitious stuff—not surprising for a piece that famously ends by calling poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[10] But Shelley was not one for small thoughts. To him, poetry was no less than the revelation of truth more comprehensively than either science or ethics could achieve.

    To see Shelley put his poetic ideal into practice, his “Mont Blanc” provides one of the best examples of clarity of expression. The poem has become something of a war-horse for undergraduate classrooms, but this in no way diminishes its worth for study. Its sweeping, grandiose imagery captures the quintessence of the Romantic ideal of the sublime as beautiful, and renders the poem a perfect case study to observe clarity of expression even through a heavy surface layer of imagery.

    The first stanza begins:

    The everlasting universe of things
    Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
    Now dark — now glittering — now reflecting gloom —
    Now lending splendour . . .

    Here Shelley brings the reader from the broadest possible topic, “the everlasting universe of things,” unconstrained by place or even time, and frames it as thought within the mind of the observer. It is the human mind alone that contains the universe entire. Then he introduces the first metaphor:

    . . . where from secret springs
    The source of human thought its tribute brings
    Of waters, — with a sound but half its own,
    Such as a feeble brook will oft assume
    In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,
    Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,
    Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river
    Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

    The human mind, which contains the universe, is likened to a “feeble brook,” so frail amidst the titanic forces of mountains, waterfalls, and river rapids. Despite the intensity of the images, neither the metaphor nor the main idea is lost. Indeed, the imagery serves the metaphor, highlighting the brook’s feebleness among mightier forces of nature.

    Having set the mountain scene for the brook that represents the human mind, Shelley spends the first twenty-two lines of the second stanza immersing the reader in vivid description of the “awful scene” of raw, untamed, overpowering natural forces in the Arve Valley beneath Mont Blanc: the “giant brood of pines;” the “chainless winds;” the “earthly rainbows stretched across the sweep / Of the aethereal waterfall whose veil / Robes some unsculptured image.” Then Shelley returns to the human mind—his own, this time—reflecting on the awesome sight he just described:

    Seeking among the shadows that pass by⁠
    Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,
    Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast
    From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

    Here Shelley’s Platonism surfaces. He sees in the images before him mere “shadows” and seeks among them the “ghosts of all things that are,” not very subtly evoking Plato’s famous analogy of the shadows on the cave wall.

    In the third stanza, Shelley explores the Platonic ideal further, pondering the existence of the ideal beyond “[t]he veil of life and death.” Now halfway into the poem, Shelley introduces its main metaphor:

    Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,
    Mont Blanc appears, — still, snowy, and serene —
    Its subject mountains their unearthly forms
    Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between
    Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,
    Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread
    And wind among the accumulated steeps;
    A desert peopled by the storms alone,
    Save when the eagle brings some hunter’s bone,
    And the wolf tracks her there — how hideously
    Its shapes are heaped around! rude, bare, and high,
    Ghastly, and scarred, and riven.

    The imagery is awesome and frightening. The mountain, aloof above the clouds, serves as the metaphor for the Platonic ideals Shelley has just been pondering. At last Shelley addresses the mountain directly, calling on it (or, rather, the ideal it represents) to act upon the imperfections in the perceivable world:

    Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
    Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
    By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
    Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

    Again, even at the poetic climax, the most awe-inspiring images in a poem packed with awe-inspiring natural imagery, the poetic language serves only as a vehicle for expressing the metaphor of the mountain as representing the Platonic ideal.

    The fourth stanza descends from the serene, unreachable mountaintop to the chaotic scene beneath. Throughout the imagery is powerful and frightening: “glaciers creep / Like snakes that watch their prey;” the piled rocks resemble “A city of death . . . yet not a city, but a flood of ruin;” “Vast pines . . . branchless and shattered stand.” These images show the irresistible power of nature, amid which “The race / Of man flies far in dread, his work and dwelling / Vanish, like smoke before the tempest’s stream . . .” Thus, humanity is fleeting not only in comparison to the idealized, unreachable mountaintop, but also to the natural, if transient, forces of nature beneath.

    The fifth and final stanza concludes, “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there.” It ponders how high on the isolated peak the winds rush and the lightning flashes silently. And yet:

    . . . The secret Strength of things
    Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome
    Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!
    And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,
    If to the human mind’s imaginings
    Silence and solitude were vacancy?

    With that question, the immovable, eternal ideal represented by the mountaintop is framed within the mind of the creatures portrayed as miniscule and powerless only a few lines before. The power of the mountain rests only in the human mind’s ability to perceive it and grasp the ideal it represents in the poem.

    Throughout the poem, Shelley’s meaning is never lost. It is a philosophical lesson vividly, breathtakingly described. Nowhere is any imagery gratuitous. It serves only to support the metaphor. Be it the frailty of human nature and the human mind, the raw, overpowering grandeur of untamed nature, or the unreachable Platonic ideal, all the vivid description serves the point being made. Nowhere is the meaning vague or ambiguous. Indeed, the poem would be a failure otherwise. If Shelley is going to propound philosophy, it would ill serve him to make his readers guess at his meaning. Philosophy is, of course, the search for truth, and presumes the existence of a truth to discover.

    Shelley uses the poetic language not as a mask, but as a lens to reveal that truth. The imagery makes the ideas they convey come alive, phrased in concrete terms to which any reader can immediately relate. Rather than forcing the reader to guess at his meaning, Shelley reveals it more clearly and more powerfully through imagery with power and detail enough to conjure the emotions.

    Before moving to modernism, some additional words of classical polemics supply a worthy supplement to Shelley’s. An equally enthusiastic polemicist, Edgar Allan Poe echoes Shelley in his posthumously published essay, “The Poetic Principle.” Poe, after concluding that the ideal poem is short but not too short, addresses the function of poetry. Whereas Shelley’s human mind is dual, Poe’s is tripartite, divided between intellect, taste, and moral sense.[11] The intellect concerns itself with truth; taste with beauty; and moral sense with duty.[12] Regarding taste, “[a]n immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man, is thus, plainly, a sense of the Beautiful. This it is which administers to his delight in the manifold forms, and sounds, and odors, and sentiments amid which he exists.”[13]

    Mere reproduction of those sense-impressions, though “is not poetry.”[14]

    There is still a something in the distance which he has been unable to attain. We have still a thirst unquenchable . . . no mere appreciation of the Beauty before us – but a wild effort to reach the Beauty above. Inspired by an ecstatic prescience of the glories beyond the grave, we struggle, by multiform combinations among the things and thoughts of Time, to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone.[15]

    It is “the struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness” that “has given to the world all that which it . . . has ever been enabled at once to understand and to feel as poetic.”[16]

    In concluding, Poe summarizes his poetic principle as “strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty.”[17] And “the manifestation of the Principle is always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul” independent of passion or even truth.[18] Poe, however, is quick to hedge his exclusion of truth from the poetic principle: “if . . . through the attainment of a truth, we are led to perceive a harmony where none was apparent before, we experience, at once, the true poetical effect”—but the effect refers to the harmony perceived, not the truth itself “which merely served to render the harmony manifest.” [19]

    Thus, for Poe, as with Shelley, the principle upon which all poetry is founded is the revelation of a truth. But for Poe, revelation is not through a direct telling of the truth, as in prose, but a showing of it through a “harmony” or metaphor previously unrealized by the reader. Any of Poe’s works readily demonstrate his use of this principle. “The Bells,” with its stark imagery and oppressive repetition, is one example.

    Let us conclude the discussion of the classical approach with a statement from Keats in a letter to his friend, the poet John Hamilton Reynolds:

    Poetry should be great [and] unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject. – How beautiful are the retired flowers! [H]ow would they lose their beauty were they to throng into the highway crying out, “[A]dmire me I am a violet! [D]ote upon me I am a primrose!”[20]

    This simple statement of methodology stands in stark contrast to the sweeping, grandiose philosophizing of Shelley and Poe. With this simple, almost childlike statement, Keats more succinctly and perhaps better than either Shelley or Poe captures the essence of classical aesthetic: meaning is never subverted to the sensory delight of the imagery.

    II.

    If philosophy and rhetoric do not belong in poetry, all that remains is the raw emotional effect of the language itself. The modernist conception, which sees the effect of language as the true substance of poetry, leaves no room for philosophizing. Or rather, it makes its philosophy about the poem—and therefore external to the poem—rather than within the poem. In this way modernist poetry, which bills its opacity as depth, is actually superficial.

    To illustrate the modernist conception of poetry as superficial, few better examples are available than Hart Crane’s “Voyages.” While on its surface the poem might seem a poor comparison to Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” as its poems are indisputably love poems. To be sure, contemporary critics, mired in the dominance of sexual identity politics, tend to view Crane’s “Voyages” as primarily expressions of homosexual love. But Crane himself characterized them as primarily “sea poems” and only secondarily as “also love poems.”[21] The sweeping imagery Crane uses in portraying a subject as grand and universal to the human experience as the sea compares perfectly to Shelley’s equally sweeping description of a similarly grand and universal object of nature.

    Before turning to the poems themselves, it is once again worthwhile to examine polemics, this time modernist. “Voyages” emerged in the modernist milieu, and understanding modernism is essential to examining its language. Crane did not leave us with any sweeping polemic stating his conception of poetry as Shelley did, but he left voluminous correspondence that permits insight into his poetic ideals. There, Crane expressed his high regard of both Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.[22] Both Pound and Eliot, it so happens, were highly influential polemicists, and their arguments should provide some helpful insight into Crane’s ideals.

    In his short but tight 1913 essay, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” Pound begins by defining the poetic “image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”[23] The presentation of this emotional “complex,” in turn, “gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.”[24] To Pound, “[i]t is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.”[25]

    Pound advises poets, “Don’t be ‘viewy’—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays,” and “Consider the definiteness of Dante’s presentation, as compared with Milton’s rhetoric.”[26] Pound’s use of “viewy” is unclear. Though it would usually mean “showy” or “ostentatious,” he associates it instead with philosophy rather than the display of imagery he advocates. Given the primacy of the image in his conception, his preference for “presentation” over “rhetoric,” and his earlier definition of the image complex, it is not a difficult leap to conclude that Pound conceives of poetry not as the conveyance of a message so much as the conveyance of an emotional effect.

    T.S. Eliot’s profoundly influential 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” provides a much more detailed and eloquent articulation of the modernist approach to poetry. Though the essay’s primary focus is the relationship between the heritage of past literature and present poetry, its entire second section describes the purpose of poetry in Eliot’s modernist conception.

    For Eliot, the mature poet is a mere catalyst, a “finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” in the same way that platinum catalyzed the formation of sulfuric acid without itself being consumed.[27] The elements that the poet catalyzes are “emotions and feelings,” and their product, “[t]he effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it[,] is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art.”[28] This effect “may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result.”[29] Great poetry may even “be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely.”[30]

    On examining the greatest poetry, Eliot perceives “how completely any semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity’ misses the mark.”[31] Its greatness lies not in “the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.”[32] Even though poetry might “employ[ ] a definite emotion,” its “intensity . . . is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of.”[33] Providing the example of Keats, Eliot asserts, “The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.”[34]

    Eliot also rejects the Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” For Eliot, the poet does not recollect emotion, but collects experiences, using ordinary emotions and working them through poetry “to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”[36] In concluding, Eliot calls this emotion in art impersonal, and has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet.

    These two essays reveal the modernist conception of poetry as completely alien to that of Shelley, Poe, or Keats. However highly Eliot regarded those poets as part of the historical tradition he and his generation were to expand, his views of their art could not be more alien to theirs. For both him and Pound (and the rest of the modernists), the poem is not the conveyance of an underlying truth in a manner that delights—a concept, at least in English, stretching back to Sir Philip Sidney in the Renaissance—it is rather the conveyance of an effect on the reader. For Pound, the conveyance is a complex formed from the poetic image, and for Eliot it is a concentration of an impersonal experience that conjures a new emotion. But Eliot’s definition is only a more expansive view of Pound’s. The essence of both—the essence of modernism—is that poetry’s purpose is to convey an effect, not a truth. It works on, rather than speaks to, the reader.

    If “effect” is merely the emotional response of the reader to the language used, then poetry is but a cosmetic art, and a poet is but a writer who can string together a series of pretty-sounding words that conjure an image. That task requires no special skill. Like architecture or carpentry, true craftsmanship in poetry requires attention to structure and foundation, not merely color and ornament. And shoddy constructions and Potemkin villages never endure. True art lies in the essence of the work, not its impressions. This is yet another sense in which to read Keats’s famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”

    The language Crane uses in “Voyages” perfectly encapsulates modernism: poetry as the conveyance of effect rather than truth. The first poem paints a vivid picture of the grandeur of the sea: “fresh ruffles of the surf,” “[b]right striped urchins.” “The sun beats lightning on the waves, / The waves fold thunder on the sand.” But as soon as it leaves these images, it concludes with an exhortation to “brilliant kids”—“frisk with your dog” and “[f]ondle your shells and sticks”—along with a warning that “[t]he bottom of the sea is cruel.”

    The second poem follows the same pattern, beginning with a portrayal of the sea in sweeping images: “rimless flood, unfettered leewardings, / Samite sheeted;” the “undinal vast belly moonward bend[ing];” the “scrolls of silver snowy sentences;” and the striking simile “as the bells of San Salvador / Salute the crocus lustres of the stars / In these poinsettia meadows of her tides.” Here Crane likens the sea to a “great wink of eternity” and urges the lover to whom the poem is addressed to “hasten . . . – sleep, death, desire / Close round one instant in one floating flower.” Again, the poem ends with an address, this time as a double invocation, first to the “Seasons clear” to “bind us in time” and “awe,” then to the “minstrel galleons of Carib fire” to “bequeath us to no earthly shore.”

    Both of the first two poems contain striking imagery undeveloped in relation to any metaphor. Instead, they are atmospheric pieces serving essentially the same purpose twice: to portray the beauty and grandeur of the sea. The first presents the sea from the shore and the second on the high seas, but these images are just a backdrop for the true message of the poem, which is shouted at the end of each as a direct announcement. Finally, the essential message of poems, rather than being developed as an argument throughout the poem, is stated plainly in summary fashion at the end, as an exhortation and then as an invocation. Pretty descriptions followed by a blunt statement of prosaic literality, though, for however many fine turns of phrasing they contain, do not make poetry.

    The third poem is darker, hinting at death. It begins with an impression of the “tendered theme” of the lover “that light / Retrieves from sea plains where the sky / Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones.” Meanwhile, the narrator is separated in “ribboned water lanes . . . laved and scattered with no stroke,” to be “admitted through black swollen gates / That must arrest all distance otherwise”—an image of death under the waves, “Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments.” Moving from shore to sea, the third poem has now brought the reader under the water, to see “Light wrestling there incessantly with light, / Star kissing star through wave on wave . . . / Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn.” Here Crane mentions death explicitly, not as something to fear but something which “if shed, / presumes no carnage”—a calming transformation that the underwater calm evokes. As with the others, this poem closes with an invocation, this time directly to the lover: “Permit me voyage, love, into your hands . . .”

    The language of the fourth poem is much less concrete, as it is the most message-oriented rather than atmospheric, of the six poems. Here, the narrator sings the immortality of love between two mortals, the love “Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe / Chilled albatross’s white immutability),” that renders the narrator’s mortality “clay aflow immortally” to the lover. The only truly striking images given are the “Bright staves of flowers and quills” and the “Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes.” The rest of the language is remarkably abstract in comparison to the other five poems, at the same time that the poem’s message flows consistently through the poem. This is not coincidental. The fourth poem is the closest Crane comes to expounding on a theme, but he fails to do so with any unifying metaphor, instead speaking directly about the immortality of his love.

    What metaphor is lacking? Metaphor as a single underlying idea that unifies the sensory descriptions of the poem into a coherent whole. Metaphor is the meaning of a poem, in the classical sense. Without this unifying principle, “Voyages” as a whole appears as little more than a series of gaudy descriptions passing one after the other like floats in a Mardi Gras parade.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Default Why poetry is one of the most powerful forms of therapy


    Why poetry is one of the most powerful forms of therapy
    Bijal A Shah
    Bijal A Shah

    Apr 7, 2018·8 min read



    April is National Poetry Month and naturally a great time to explore the immense therapeutic powers of poetry. Reading and writing poetry both engage our senses along with our emotions, making the art form experiential and hugely effective in connecting with our minds.
    Both writing and reading poetry, through their expression of feelings and words have highly therapeutic effects on the mind.
    The structure of a poem favours brevity yet the best poems also capture succinct detail, making them incredibly powerful in getting a message across to the reader. Writing poetry requires the poet to be extremely disciplined with his choice of words and the number of words, to create a sharp and accurate snapshot of what he or she is feeling. This combination of brevity and detail gives the reader open access to the poet’s mind and enables the reader to truly connect with the poet.
    Writing poetry as therapy
    Writing poetry requires us to be open and honest about our feelings so that we can voice them through pen and paper, which is the first step to truly expressing ourselves.
    This acknowledgement of our innermost thoughts allows us to be true to ourselves and boosts our self-esteem (as beautifully explained by author Geri Giebel Chavis in Poetry and Story Therapy: The Healing Power of Creative Expression (Writing for Therapy or Personal Development) which I highly recommend).
    The best poetry is written when we are truly in the midst of our emotions and struggling to gain clarity. This is when the cathartic release of emotions to pen and then paper as an outlet calms us, gives us clarity and enables us to move forward.
    Poetry’s powerful healing qualities have been documented during both world wars and the American civil war: poems were read to soldiers to help them cope with trauma and the brutalities of war. In fact doctors would write poems for their patients, emotionally connecting with them. A striking example of this is John Keats who also trained as a doctor.
    Poetry has also been used by modern-day doctors and physicians at Yale University School of Medicine and University College London School of Medicine. Yale actually has a committee that maintains a required literary reading list which includes poetry. Poetry allows both the doctor and the patient to understand the emotions that the patient might be going through which adds another facet to their overall care.
    The use of poetry continues to grow as a recognised form of therapy. More and more psychotherapists across the US, UK and Europe continue to use poetry therapy as part of their practice. Globally the International Federation for Biblio / Poetry Therapy sets standards of excellence in the training and credentialing of practitioners in the field of biblio/poetry therapy, qualifying them to practice.

    Writing Confessional Poetry
    Writing confessional poetry specifically, which gives writers the opportunity to make a confession about something private or difficult is a great way to focus your mind, express your emotions and bring some clarity by writing down your feelings and thoughts in a poetic format.
    Often the best poems are written from the heart, raw, emotional and to the point. A mindful exercise, it truly is game-changing. After the poem is written there is a certain sense of calm as we no longer hold the burden of our confession. We feel lighter and relieved.
    You may initially struggle with starting a poem, however it does become easier with practice. The key is to let your thoughts wander and write what comes to mind. Do not hold back, let go and allow the emotions, words and images to unfold. Sometimes it is easier to write it all down and then piece it together using line breaks (pauses), restructuring paragraphs and sentences, pulling it together into a coherent form. A great book on writing poetry is The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio which includes helpful techniques, suggested themes, how to deal with self-doubt and writer’s block and the highs and lows of writing life.
    For me personally poetry has been a lifeline and literally a saving grace. Below I share a poem I wrote that is very personal to me and something I wanted to express to my own mother before it was too late:

    Mother’s Tribute
    Dear mother
    So much in my heart I want to express.
    At one I wanted to sleep next to you all night.
    At two I wanted to hold your hand and never let it go.
    At five, I wanted to share my daily stories from nursery.
    At ten, I wanted to hang out with my girlfriends.
    At twelve, I wanted to do my own thing.
    At sixteen, I kept secrets.
    At twenty, I had found my own. Life was busy managing social affairs.
    At twenty five, I was consumed with career ambitions, men and big life plans.
    At thirty, I was getting married and wanted you to celebrate in my joy.
    At thirty five, the grandkids had arrived. I felt what you felt when I was born.
    At forty, I missed you. Wished to see you more.
    At fifty my heart ached, for the pain you were suffering. I really missed you.
    At sixty, I was nostalgic, revering in my childhood memories of you and daddy.
    Dear mother, your presence makes life worthwhile.
    It blooms hope in every dark corner.
    It allows us to truly experience and give unconditional love.
    You make my soul feel warm.
    May our souls be entwined forever, knotted together.
    I normally write poetry when dealing with confusing situations or when dealing with loss or pain. It has really helped me during difficult transitions in my life such as dealing with illness, loved ones who were suffering, moving countries and losing people close to me. The transformation from difficult emotions to lighter ones, post writing, is one of the reasons that makes me reach for the pen every time. Here are some suggestions to get you started with your poem if you find yourself stuck.
    Name the emotion you are feeling and describe it in a four line stanza
    Talk about your fears
    Talk about your losses
    Talk about your dreams
    Focus on a powerful image and describe it
    Write about what inspires you.
    Hopefully these tips will help you get started.

    Reading poetry as therapy
    We are often drawn to a poem when we connect with the poet’s feelings, either feeling the same as the poet or empathising with him/her. It feels like a 2-way dialogue, where there is a sense of mutual understanding. In How to Read a Poem…: and Start A Poetry Circle, Molly Peacock makes a great observation that readers often feel a poem is about them because it captures exactly how they are feeling. This has a profound, almost cathartic impact on the reader.
    Reading poetry is apt for expressing emotions and perhaps the the reason why it has been so popular as therapy through the ages. Images and metaphors embedded within a poem in a rhythmic pattern create a similar effect to music: the poetic format enables the expression of emotion that might otherwise be hard to verbally express or may have felt too threatening to do so in a direct way.
    Reading poetry for stress relief, in particular, has been the most beneficial for my clients. One of my all-time favourite poems for stress relief is ‘Leisure’ by W H Davies:

    What is this life if, full of care,
    We have no time to stand and stare.
    No time to stand beneath the boughs
    And stare as long as sheep or cows.
    No time to see, when woods we pass,
    Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
    No time to see, in broad daylight,
    Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
    No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
    And watch her feet, how they can dance.
    No time to wait till her mouth can
    Enrich that smile her eyes began.
    A poor life this if, full of care,
    We have no time to stand and stare.
    What effect did the poem have on you? As we read the poem, it imposes a sense of calm; conjuring up images of spring time and happy-go-lucky wildlife, connecting with nature. The poem gives us a stark realisation of how quickly life passes us by and how sad it is when we are not truly living but just passing time. It nudges us to stop and reconsider our lives. The feelings of sadness and ‘emptiness’ that it provokes, makes us acknowledge the feelings held within us. It also encourages us to enjoy the present moment and be more mindful.

    Another one of my favourite poems of all time is by Robert Frost called ‘The Road Not Taken’:

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    And be one traveler, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth;
    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And having perhaps the better claim
    Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
    Though as for that the passing there
    Had worn them really about the same,
    And both that morning equally lay
    In leaves no step had trodden black.
    Oh, I kept the first for another day!
    Yet knowing how way leads on to way
    I doubted if I should ever come back.
    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

    The poem resonates with us all — making life-changing decisions and when faced with two different choices, which one is the right one? Do we go down the safe path (taken by many others before us?) Or do we forge our own path, no matter how difficult this might be in the anticipation that a unique, independent choice might make life that much better. What are your thoughts about this poem?
    Tell us what you thought of the poems above and do share your writing/poems in the comment section below!
    A big hello and thank you for reading! Passionate about literature, psychology, and life I launched Book Therapy as an alternative form of therapy using the power of literature. I create reading lists/personalised book prescriptions based on your individual needs, this is my signature personalised reading service. My book recommendations have featured in The Guardian, NBC News and Marie Claire. You can also check out Book Therapy’s free reading lists and A- Z of book prescriptions (covering both fiction and non-fiction). These suggest books based on your existing life situation (e.g. anxiety, job change, relationship heartache) as well as interests (e.g memoir, historical fiction, non-fiction, crime etc). There’s also a Children’s A — Z of Book Prescriptions. Feel free to check out the blog for more literary gems. There’s also a post on my personal story of how I entered the world of bibliotherapy and book curation. And if you’d like to connect, email me at bijal@booktherapy.io or www.booktherapy.io.
    Book Therapy is a participant in the Amazon EU, US and Canada Associates Programme, an affiliate advertising programme designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca

    **********************************

    Finally Seeing The Truth And Embracing A Truth

    Such was a truth, a sad tale hidden well
    Its fires, flames from hottest depths of mind's hell
    A massive mountain of pain deep within
    Pealing layers to eat away 'neath skin
    But desolation and hurt you would not know
    For in those darken seeds you did not sow
    The waiting ground to raise the poison tree
    That gifts wicked fruits that fed such as she
    Alas! True, I now fear to reveal more
    For revelations will open more doors.

    Reality, in this accursed new world
    Vile poison on arrows her bow hurls
    And what of my own blindness and error
    That epic love that hath brought such terror?

    Such was a truth, a sad tale hidden well
    Its fires, flames from hottest depths of mind's hell
    A massive mountain of pain deep within
    Pealing layers to eat away 'neath skin.

    R.J. Lindley, 7-27-2021
    Dark Rhyme


    *****************

    The Revelation, The Prayer, The Plea

    O'heart dare to hope for soothing relief
    Quell this growing sorrow with belief
    Wake anew, wake a far, far truer path
    Let the coming light destroy the dark wrath
    And be gentle to the reformed soul
    For this world's evil took a heavy toll.

    R.J. Lindley, 7-27-2021
    Rhyme
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    ~ "This acknowledgement of our innermost thoughts allows us to be true to ourselves and boosts our self-esteem (as beautifully explained by author Geri Giebel Chavis in Poetry and Story Therapy:

    The Healing Power of Creative Expression (Writing for Therapy or Personal Development) which I highly recommend).



    The best poetry is written when we are truly in the midst of our emotions and struggling to gain clarity. This is when the cathartic release of emotions to pen and then paper as an outlet calms us, gives us clarity and enables us to move forward." ~







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    COLLECTION
    An Introduction to Modernism
    The monumental artistic movement that changed poetry forever.
    BY THE EDITORS
    Large Composition A with Black, Red, Gray, Yellow and Blue (Grande composizione A con nero, rosso, grigio, giallo e blu), by Piet Mondrian, 1919-1920, 20th Century, oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm
    Large Composition A by Piet Mondrian (Photo by Alessandro Vasari/Archivio Vasari/MONDADORI PORTFOLIO via Getty Images)
    “Poets in our civilization,” T.S. Eliot writes in a 1921 essay, “must be difficult.” Such difficulty, he believed, reflected the times: advanced industrialization transformed the West, Europe reeled from World War I, and the Bolshevik Revolution ignited Russia. Thinkers such as Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Einstein changed people’s understanding of history, economics, philosophy, science, psychology, physics, and even religion. “Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,” Eliot continues, and “this variety and complexity … must produce various and complex results.” With the inventions of everything from the automobile to the airplane, the vacuum cleaner to the incandescent lightbulb, the motion picture to the radio, and the bra to the zipper, people’s lives were changing with unprecedented speed. Many English-language artists, including poets, thought a new approach was needed to capture and comment on this new era, requiring innovation in their own work: the result was called Modernism, the largest, most significant movement of the early 20th century.

    Difficult, various, complex: these are often the very terms critics use to describe Modernist poetry in general. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is often seen as the acme of Modernist writing—so much so that William Carlos Williams later compared its publication in 1922 to “an atom bomb” dropped on the landscape of English-language poetry. The long, obscure poem exhibits many of the techniques associated with the movement: use of collage and disjunction, free verse, an unsentimental impersonality, and a dense web of references to both high and low culture. However, neither those gestures nor the poem’s apocalyptic atmosphere fully represents Modernist poetry, which is often, in its “variety and complexity,” difficult to read and to define.

    One of Modernism’s most famous slogans is a case study in its contradictions. For later critics, “make it new” became a shorthand for the movement’s goals, especially its obsession with artistic novelty. But the phrase, attributed to Ezra Pound, wasn’t well-known to the Modernists themselves and, ironically, wasn’t itself new. In fact, it’s an ancient, a translation of a translation: according to the Confucian texts Pound took the phrase from, it was once emblazoned on the bathtub of the first ruler of the Shang dynasty.

    For Pound, the it in “make it new” was perhaps not so much poetry as history. His magnum opus, The Cantos, is a case in point: it retells classical stories as it attempts to revitalize outmoded forms, such as accentual verse. Both a scholar and an agitator, Pound had a hand in many of Modernism’s decisive turns. In the 1910s, he dabbled in theories under the heading of futurism, and alongside H.D. and Amy Lowell, he founded Imagism, an early Modernist school crucial to the development of free verse. Pound’s friendships with W.B. Yeats and Eliot propelled both men toward the visionary, and Pound’s influence on dozens of writers helped define Modernism more than that of any other poet.

    Not every Modernist poet thought as Eliot and Pound did. Wallace Stevens, another giant of the era, saw contemporary upheavals in a less pessimistic light. His lavish philosophical poems explore how poetry might constitute a “supreme fiction” that could take the place of organized religion. And Hart Crane positioned his varied, ornate epic The Bridge as a direct challenge to The Wasteland in an expansive, Whitmanesque vein.

    Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade. Marianne Moore mixed “plain American which cats and dogs could read” with quotations from a huge range of sources, and measured her jagged lines by syllable instead of stress. Some poets discarded the line altogether. Gertrude Stein, one of the earliest Modernist innovators, wrote prose poems that sought to focus readers on the sonic and associative textures of words. And E.E. Cummings seized on the potential of the typewriter, using the space of the page, the parenthesis, and even the individual letter in radically new ways.

    Mina Loy also experimented with typography, but saw her male counterparts far eclipse her reputation. Her example raises questions about who is included in conversations about the movement. For instance: should Robert Frost, with his ear for both the vernacular and the iambic, be part of the story of Modernist poetry? Langston Hughes offers another limit case: is his blues prosody better understood as a Modernist achievement, or in the context of the Harlem Renaissance? What about such poets as César Vallejo and Anna Akhmatova, innovators outside the Anglo-American tradition? As with any far-reaching movement, individual artists rise above any particular tradition: not everyone’s work adheres to all the same principles nor does a movement’s output exhibit all the same styles and tendencies.

    Such questions are crucial but vexing; more certain is Modernism’s legacy. The movement’s most immediate heirs were the Objectivists, whose varied writings extended the work of the first-generation Modernists starting in the later 1920s and ‘30s. But the influence of the Modernists extends well into the postwar period. Charles Olson’s influential 1950 essay “Projective Verse” consciously aligned the Black Mountain School and the later San Francisco Renaissance with “the experiments of Cummings, Pound, and Williams,” but they would “make it new” by innovating their own poetics to address their different times and culture. The formidable effects of Modernism are also measurable by later reactions against them, the postwar turn towards Confessionalism in particular.

    The following selections of poets, poetics essays, poems, articles, poem guides, and audio recordings are intended as an introductory sample of the Poetry Foundation’s offerings on Modernism; they cannot be an exhaustive representation of the school’s many and varied aspects.

    POETS
    Ezra Pound
    T. S. Eliot
    William Carlos Williams
    William Butler Yeats
    Wallace Stevens
    Charles Olson
    Mina Loy
    E. E. Cummings
    Gertrude Stein
    Marianne Moore
    Hart Crane
    Basil Bunting
    POETICS ESSAYS
    Preface to Some Imagist Poets
    AMY LOWELL
    “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts”
    EZRA POUND
    The Poetry of the Present
    D. H. LAWRENCE
    Tradition and the Individual Talent
    T. S. ELIOT
    Hamlet
    T. S. ELIOT
    Composition as Explanation
    GERTRUDE STEIN
    Introduction to The Wedge
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
    The Poem as a Field of Action
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
    Projective Verse
    CHARLES OLSON
    SEMINAL POEMS
    The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
    T. S. ELIOT
    The Waste Land
    T. S. ELIOT
    In a Station of the Metro
    EZRA POUND
    Three Cantos
    EZRA POUND
    Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part I]
    EZRA POUND
    Sea Rose
    H. D.
    Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
    WALLACE STEVENS
    Sunday Morning
    WALLACE STEVENS
    Hugh Selwyn Mauberley [Part I]
    EZRA POUND
    Sea Rose
    H. D.
    Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
    WALLACE STEVENS
    Sunday Morning
    WALLACE STEVENS
    At Melville’s Tomb
    HART CRANE
    from The Bridge: To Brooklyn Bridge
    HART CRANE
    The Red Wheelbarrow
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
    To Elsie
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
    A Carafe, that is a Blind Glass
    GERTRUDE STEIN
    [anyone lived in a pretty how town]
    E. E. CUMMINGS
    The Second Coming
    WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
    Leda and the Swan
    WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
    Sailing to Byzantium
    WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
    The Wild Common
    D. H. LAWRENCE
    From "Paterson V"
    WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
    from Briggflatts: An Autobiography
    BASIL BUNTING
    ARTICLES
    Edward Thomas 101
    THE EDITORS
    E.E. Cummings 101
    THE EDITORS
    William Carlos Williams 101
    BENJAMIN VOIGT
    100 Years of Poetry: “In the Middle of Major Men”
    LIESL OLSON
    “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Turns 100
    THE EDITORS
    All Things Original and Strange
    GREGORY WOODS
    Significant Soil
    CHRISTINA DAVIS
    Willing to Be Reckless
    ANGE MLINKO
    Reading the Difficult
    PETER QUARTERMAIN
    The Modernist Journal Project: The Little Review, Blast, Coterie, The Owl, The Crisis, and more magazines for you to download (seriously)
    HARRIET STAFF
    POEM GUIDES
    Hart Crane: “Voyages”
    BRIAN REED
    Mina Loy: “Lunar Baedeker”
    JESSICA BURSTEIN
    Wallace Stevens: “Sunday Morning”
    AUSTIN ALLEN
    Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”
    AUSTIN ALLEN
    William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”
    CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER
    Gertrude Stein: “The house was just twinkling in the moon light”
    JOEL BROUWER
    William Carlos Williams: “To a Poor Old Woman”
    STEPHANIE BURT
    Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”
    KATHERINE ROBINSON
    Robert Frost: “Mending Wall”
    AUSTIN ALLEN
    Amy Lowell: “The Garden by Moonlight”
    D. A. POWELL
    Edna St. Vincent Millay: “Renascence”
    HANNAH BROOKS-MOTL
    AUDIO
    Gertrude Stein: Essential American Poets
    FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
    Wallace Stevens: Essential American Poets
    FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
    E.E. Cummings: Essential American Poets
    FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
    William Carlos Williams: Essential American Poets
    FROM ESSENTIAL AMERICAN POETS
    William Carlos Williams
    FROM POETRY LECTURES
    Langdon Hammer: American Perspectives
    FROM POETRY LECTURES
    Helen Vendler: American Perspectives
    FROM POETRY LECTURES
    The Waste Land: The App
    FROM POETRY OFF THE SHELF
    Robert Pinsky
    FROM POETRY LECTURES
    ONLINE RESOURCES
    Modernist Journals Project
    The Modernism Lab at Yale
    EdSITEment: Introduction to Modernist Poetry
    Becoming Modern: America in the 1920s



    *************************************

    "" Others sought a more decisive break with tradition. “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. For him, the new meant jarring enjambment, vernacular language, and an improvisational style—innovations fueled in part by innovations in the visual arts such as cubism and the readymade. Marianne Moore mixed “plain American which cats and dogs could read” with quotations from a huge range of sources, and measured her jagged lines by syllable instead of stress. Some poets discarded the line altogether. Gertrude Stein, one of the earliest Modernist innovators, wrote prose poems that sought to focus readers on the sonic and associative textures of words. And E.E. Cummings seized on the potential of the typewriter, using the space of the page, the parenthesis, and even the individual letter in radically new ways.""
    I adamantly reject that totally biased view- "" “Nothing is good save the new,” William Carlos Williams writes in the prologue to Kora in Hell. ""

    As it casts away the very historic foundation of poetry -pre-1900.
    Many of those comments are made by great modern poets but also have such bias, intense conceit and self -promotion that it is alarming and even to any with true knowledge, true appreciation of poetry such will be wholely rejected, imho..
    I admit my own bias against William Carlos Williams.
    As I have never seen in Williams poems the genius and the true heart of poetry...

    Seems to me that they that could not match the greats of the past chose to decry their magnificent talents and seek to stray far afield while calling that collection of rejection- fantastic new innovation..-Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Today is a day of giving thanks. Thanks for our lives and the wonderful blessings that it gives.
    Love, family, beauty , etc.
    Here is to wishing you one and all a -- Very Happy Thanksgiving Day....--Tyr




    Poems about gratitude, family, food, home, and giving thanks for the Thanksgiving holiday.


    Classic Poems for Thanksgiving

    “Thanksgiving Day” by Lydia Maria Child
    Over the river, and through the wood...

    “The Thanksgivings” by Harriet Maxwell Converse
    We who are here present thank the Great Spirit...

    “A Song for Merry Harvest” by Eliza Cook
    Bring forth the harp, and let us sweep its fullest, loudest string …

    “A Thanksgiving Poem” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
    The sun hath shed its kindly light…

    “Grace for a Child” by Robert Herrick
    Here, a little child I stand...

    “A Thank-Offering” by Ella Higginson
    Lord God, the winter has been sweet and brief …

    “Thanksgiving Turkey” by George Parsons Lathrop
    Valleys lay in sunny vapor…

    “The Harvest Moon” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
    It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes...

    “Thanksgiving” by James Whitcomb Riley
    Let us be thankful—not only because…

    “The Pumpkin” by John Greenleaf Whittier
    Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun...

    “Thanksgiving” by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
    We walk on starry fields of white…

    *************

    A Thanksgiving Poem
    ----Paul Laurence Dunbar - 1872-1906


    The sun hath shed its kindly light,
    Our harvesting is gladly o’er
    Our fields have felt no killing blight,
    Our bins are filled with goodly store.

    From pestilence, fire, flood, and sword
    We have been spared by thy decree,
    And now with humble hearts, O Lord,
    We come to pay our thanks to thee.

    We feel that had our merits been
    The measure of thy gifts to us,
    We erring children, born of sin,
    Might not now be rejoicing thus.

    No deed of our hath brought us grace;
    When thou were nigh our sight was dull,
    We hid in trembling from thy face,
    But thou, O God, wert merciful.

    Thy mighty hand o’er all the land
    Hath still been open to bestow
    Those blessings which our wants demand
    From heaven, whence all blessings flow.

    Thou hast, with ever watchful eye,
    Looked down on us with holy care,
    And from thy storehouse in the sky
    Hast scattered plenty everywhere.

    Then lift we up our songs of praise
    To thee, O Father, good and kind;
    To thee we consecrate our days;
    Be thine the temple of each mind.

    With incense sweet our thanks ascend;
    Before thy works our powers pall;
    Though we should strive years without end,
    We could not thank thee for them all.

    This poem is in the public domain.


    ***********************

    Thanksgiving
    Ella Wheeler Wilcox - 1850-1919

    We walk on starry fields of white
    And do not see the daisies;
    For blessings common in our sight
    We rarely offer praises.
    We sigh for some supreme delight
    To crown our lives with splendor,
    And quite ignore our daily store
    Of pleasures sweet and tender.

    Our cares are bold and push their way
    Upon our thought and feeling.
    They hand about us all the day,
    Our time from pleasure stealing.
    So unobtrusive many a joy
    We pass by and forget it,
    But worry strives to own our lives,
    And conquers if we let it.

    There’s not a day in all the year
    But holds some hidden pleasure,
    And looking back, joys oft appear
    To brim the past’s wide measure.
    But blessings are like friends, I hold,
    Who love and labor near us.
    We ought to raise our notes of praise
    While living hearts can hear us.

    Full many a blessing wears the guise
    Of worry or of trouble;
    Far-seeing is the soul, and wise,
    Who knows the mask is double.
    But he who has the faith and strength
    To thank his God for sorrow
    Has found a joy without alloy
    To gladden every morrow.

    We ought to make the moments notes
    Of happy, glad Thanksgiving;
    The hours and days a silent phrase
    Of music we are living.
    And so the theme should swell and grow
    As weeks and months pass o’er us,
    And rise sublime at this good time,
    A grand Thanksgiving chorus.

    This poem is in the public domain.

    ************************

    Grace for a Child
    Robert Herrick - 1591-1674



    Here, a little child I stand,
    Heaving up my either hand:
    Cold as paddocks though they be,
    Here I lift them up to Thee,
    For a benison to fall
    On our meat, and on us all. Amen.
    This poem is in the public domain.


    *******************************

    Thanksgiving Turkey
    George Parsons Lathrop - 1851-1898



    Valleys lay in sunny vapor,
    And a radiance mild was shed
    From each tree that like a taper
    At a feast stood. Then we said,
    "Our feast, too, shall soon be spread,
    Of good Thanksgiving turkey."

    And already still November
    Drapes her snowy table here.
    Fetch a log, then; coax the ember;
    Fill your hearts with old-time cheer;
    Heaven be thanked for one more year,
    And our Thanksgiving turkey!

    Welcome, brothers—all our party
    Gathered in the homestead old!
    Shake the snow off and with hearty
    Hand-shakes drive away the cold;
    Else your plate you'll hardly hold
    Of good Thanksgiving turkey.

    When the skies are sad and murky,
    'Tis a cheerful thing to meet
    Round this homely roast of turkey—
    Pilgrims, pausing just to greet,
    Then, with earnest grace, to eat
    A new Thanksgiving turkey.

    And the merry feast is freighted
    With its meanings true and deep.
    Those we've loved and those we've hated,
    All, to-day, the rite will keep,
    All, to-day, their dishes heap
    With plump Thanksgiving turkey.

    But how many hearts must tingle
    Now with mournful memories!
    In the festal wine shall mingle
    Unseen tears, perhaps from eyes
    That look beyond the board where lies
    Our plain Thanksgiving turkey.

    See around us, drawing nearer,
    Those faint yearning shapes of air—
    Friends than whom earth holds none dearer
    No—alas! they are not there:
    Have they, then, forgot to share
    Our good Thanksgiving turkey?

    Some have gone away and tarried
    Strangely long by some strange wave;
    Some have turned to foes; we carried
    Some unto the pine-girt grave:
    They'll come no more so joyous-brave
    To take Thanksgiving turkey.

    Nay, repine not. Let our laughter
    Leap like firelight up again.
    Soon we touch the wide Hereafter,
    Snow-field yet untrod of men:
    Shall we meet once more—and when?—
    To eat Thanksgiving turkey.

    This poem is in the public domain.

    *************************

    A Thank-Offering
    Ella Higginson - 1861-1940



    Lord God, the winter has been sweet and brief
    In this fair land;
    For us the budded willow and the leaf,
    The peaceful strand.

    For us the silver nights and golden days,
    The violet mist;
    The pearly clouds pierced with vibrating rays
    Of amethyst.

    At evening, every wave of our blue sea
    Hollowed to hold
    A fragment of the sunset’s mystery—
    A fleck of gold.

    The crimson haze is on the alder trees
    In places lush;
    Already sings with sweet and lyric ease
    The western thrush.

    Lord God, for some of us the days and years
    Have bitter been;
    For some of us the burden and the tears,
    The gnawing sin.

    For some of us, O God, the scanty store,
    The failing bin;
    For some of us the gray wolf at the door,
    The red, within!

    But to the hungry Thou hast given meat,
    Hast clothed the cold;
    And Thou hast given courage strong and sweet
    To the sad and old.

    And so we thank Thee, Thou most tender God,
    For the leaf and flower;
    For the tempered winds, and quickening, velvet sod,
    And the gracious shower.

    Yea, generous God, we thank Thee for this land
    Where all are fed,
    Where at the doors no freezing beggars stand,
    Pleading for bread.

    This poem was published in When the Birds Go North Again (The Macmillan Company, 1898). It is in the public domain.
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 11-25-2021 at 07:28 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

  15. #373
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    You Â’re Probably Misreading Robert FrostÂ’s Most Famous Poem
    On the Many Tricks and Contradictions of "The Road Not Taken"

    By David Orr
    August 18, 2016
    My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all
    set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.
    Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my
    blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people
    would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark.
    Forward, you understand, and in the dark.

    FROST TO LEONIDAS W. PAYNE JR., November 1, 1927

    * * * *

    “The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” under the title “Two Roads.” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by ThomasÂ’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposiÂ*tion for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a genÂ*tle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’”

    That wasnÂ’t what occurred. Instead, Thomas sent Frost an admiring note in which it was evident that he had asÂ*sumed the poemÂ’s speaker was a version of Frost, and that the final line was meant to be read as generations of high school valedictorians have assumed. The sequence of their correspondence on the poem is a miniature version of the confusion “The Road Not Taken” would provoke in millions of subsequent readers:

    1. Frost sends the poem to Thomas, with no clarifyÂ*ing text, in March or April of 1915.

    2. Thomas responds shortly thereafter in a letter now evidently lost but referred to in later correÂ*spondence, calling the poem “staggering” but missing FrostÂ’s intention.

    3. Frost responds in a letter (the date is unclear) to ask Thomas for further comment on the poem, hoping to hear that Thomas understood that it was at least in part addressing his own behavior.

    4. Thomas responds in a letter dated June 13, 1915, explaining that “the simple words and unemphatic rhythms were not such as I was accustomed to expect great things, things I like, from. It stagÂ*gered me to think that perhaps I had always missed what made poetry poetry.” ItÂ’s still clear that Thomas doesnÂ’t quite understand the poemÂ’s stance or FrostÂ’s “joke” at his expense.


    5. Frost writes back on June 26, 1915: “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh [in line 16] was a mock sigh, hypoÂ*critical for the fun of the I donÂ’t suppose I was ever sorry for anyÂ* thing I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.”

    6. Thomas responds on July 11, 1915: “You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake . . . I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”

    Edward Thomas was one of the keenest literary thinkers of his time, and the poem was meant to capture aspects of his own personality and past. Yet even Thomas needed explicit instructions—indeed, six entire letters—in order to appreciate the series of double games played in “The Road Not Taken.” That misperception galled Frost. As Thompson writes, Frost “could never bear to tell the truth about the failure of this lyric to perform as he intended it. Instead, he frequently told an idealized version of the story” in which, for instance, Thomas said, “What are you trying to do with me?” or “What are you doing with my character?” One can understand FrostÂ’s unhappiness, considering that the poem was misunderstood by one of his own early biographers, ElizÂ*abeth Shepley Sergeant (“Thomas, all his life, lived on the deeply isolated, lonely and subjective ‘way less travelled byÂ’ which Frost had chosen in youth”), and also by the eminent poet-critic Robert Graves, who came to the somewhat baffling conclusion that the poem had to do with FrostÂ’s “agonized decision” not to enlist in the British army. (There is no evidence that Frost ever contemplated doing so, in agony or otherwise.) Lyrics that are especially lucid and accessible are sometimes described as “critic-Â*proof”; “The Road Not Taken”—at least in its first few decades—came close to being readerÂ*-proof.

    * * * *

    The difficulty with “The Road Not Taken” starts, apÂ*propriately enough, with its title. Recall the poemÂ’s concluÂ*sion: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” These are not only the poemÂ’s bestÂ*-known lines, but the ones that capture what most readers take to be its central image: a lonely path that we take at great risk, possibly for great reward. So vivid is that image that many readers simply assume that the poem is called “The Road Less Traveled.” SearchÂ* engine data indicates that searches for “Frost” and “Road Less Traveled” (or “Travelled”) are extremely common, and even acÂ*complished critics routinely refer to the poem by its most famous line. For example, in an otherwise penetrating essay on FrostÂ’s ability to say two things at once, Kathryn Schulz, the book reviewer for New York magazine, mistakenly calls the poem “The Road Less Traveled” and then, in an irony Frost might have savored, describes it as “not-very-Frosty.”


    Because the poem isnÂ’t “The Road Less Traveled.” ItÂ’s “The Road Not Taken.” And the road not taken, of course, is the road one didnÂ’t take—which means that the title passes over the “less traveled” road the speaker claims to have folÂ*lowed in order to foreground the road he never tried. The title isnÂ’t about what he did; itÂ’s about what he didnÂ’t do. Or is it? The more one thinks about it, the more difficult it beÂ* comes to be sure who is doing what and why. As the scholar Mark Richardson puts it:

    Which road, after all, is the road “not taken”? Is it the one the speaker takes, which, according to his last description of it, is “less travelled”—that is to say, not taken by others? Or does the title refer to the supposÂ*edly better-Â*travelled road that the speaker himself fails to take? Precisely who is not doing the taking?

    We know that Frost originally titled the poem “Two Roads,” so renaming it “The Road Not Taken” was a matter of deliberation, not whim. Frost wanted readers to ask the questions Richardson asks.

    More than that, he wanted to juxtapose two visions—two possible poems, you might say—at the very beginning of his lyric. The first is the poem that readers think of as “The Road Less Traveled,” in which the speaker is quietly conÂ* gratulating himself for taking an uncommon path (that is, a path not taken by others). The second is the parodic poem that Frost himself claimed to have originally had in mind, in which the dominant tone is one of selfÂ*-dramatizing regret (over the path not taken by the speaker). These two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible. If this is what Frost meant to do, then itÂ’s reasonable to wonder if, as Thomas suggested, he may have outsmarted himself in addition to casual readers.

    But this depends on what you think “The Road Not Taken” is trying to say. If you believe the poem is meant to take a position on will, agency, the nature of choice, and so forth—as the majority of readers have assumed—then it can seem unsatisfying (at best “a kind of joke,” as Schulz puts it). But if you think of the poem not as stating various viewpoints but rather as performing them, setting them beside and against one another, then a very different reading emerges. Here itÂ’s helpful, as is so often the case, to call upon a 19th-Â*century logician. In The Elements of Logic, Richard Whately describes the fallacy of substitution like so:


    Two distinct objects may, by being dexterously preÂ*sented, again and again in quick succession, to the mind of a cursory reader, be so associated together in his thoughts, as to be conceived capable . . . of being actually combined in practice. The fallacious belief thus induced bears a striking resemblance to the optiÂ*cal illusion effected by that ingenious and philosophiÂ*cal toy called the Thaumatrope; in which two objects painted on opposite sides of a card,—for instance a man, and a horse,—a bird, and a cage,—are, by a quick rotatory motion, made to impress the eye in combination, so as to form one picture, of the man on the horseÂ’s back, the bird in the cage, etc.

    What is fallacious in an argument can be mesmerizing in a poem. “The Road Not Taken” acts as a kind of thaumatrope, rotating its two opposed visions so that they seem at times to merge. And that merging is produced not by a careful blendÂ* ing of the two—a union—but by “rapid and frequent transiÂ*tion,” as Whately puts it. The title itself is a small but potent engine that drives us first toward one untaken road and then immediately back to the other, producing a vision in which we appear somehow on both roads, or neither.

    * * * *

    That sense of movement is critical to the manner in which the poem unfolds. We are continually being “reset” as we move through the stanzas, with the poem pivoting from one reading to the other so quickly that it’s easy to miss the transitions. This is true even of its first line. Here’s how the poem begins:

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    And be one traveler, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .

    The most significant word in the stanza—and perhaps the most overlooked yet essential word in the poem—is “roads.” Frost could, after all, have said two “paths” or “trails” or “tracks” and conveyed nearly the same concept. Yet, as the scholar George Monteiro observes:

    Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word “roads.” . . . In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, “Two paths diverged in a yellow wood,” Frost reacted with such feeling—“Two roads!”—that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word “roads” and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost reÂ*cited the poem all right, but, as his friend rememÂ*bered, “he didnÂ’t let me get away with ‘two paths!’”


    What is gained by “roads”? Primarily two things. First, a road, unlike a path, is necessarily manÂ*made. Dante may have found his life similarly changed “in a dark wood,” but Frost takes things a step further by placing his speaker in a setting that combines the natural world with civilization—yes, the traveler is alone in a forest, but whichever way he goes, he follows a course built by other people, one that will be taken, in turn, by still other people long after he has passed. The act of choosing may be solitary, but the context in which it occurs is not. Second, as Wendell Berry puts it, a path differs from a road in that it “obeys the natural conÂ* tours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” A road is an assertion of will, not an accommodation. So the speakerÂ’s deÂ*cision, when it comes, whatever it is, will be an act of will that can occur only within the bounds of another such act—a way of looking at the world that simultaneously undercuts and strengthens the idea of individual choice.

    This doubled effect continues in the poemÂ’s second and third lines, which summarize the dilemma around which “The Road Not Taken” is constructed: “And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler . . .” Frost often likes to use repetition and its cousin, redundancy, to suggest the complex contours of seemingly simple concepts. In this case, we have what seems like the most straightforward proposiÂ*tion imaginable: If a road forks, a single person canÂ’t “travel both” branches. But the concept is oddly extended to include the observation that one canÂ’t “travel both” and “be one travÂ*eler,” which seems superfluous. After all, Frost might more easily and obviously have written the stanza like so (emphaÂ*sis mine):

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    To where they ended, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .

    What, then, is the difference between saying one canÂ’t “travel both” roads and saying one canÂ’t “travel both / And be one traveler”? And why does Frost think that difference worth preserving? One way to address these questions is to think about what the speaker is actually suggesting heÂ’s “sorry” about. He isnÂ’t, for instance, sorry that he wonÂ’t see whatÂ’s at the end of each road. (If he were, it would make more sense to use the modified version above.) Rather, heÂ’s sorry he lacks the capability to see whatÂ’s at the end of each road—heÂ’s objecting not to the outcome of the principle that you canÂ’t be two places at once, but to the principle itself. HeÂ’s resisting the idea of a universe in which his selfhood is limited, in part by being subject to choices. (Compare this to the case of a person who regrets that he canÂ’t travel through time not beÂ* cause he wishes he could, say, attend the premiere of Hamlet, but simply because he wants to experience time travel.)

    This assumes, of course, that the speaker regrets that he canÂ’t travel both roads simultaneously. But what if he instead means that it would be impossible to “travel both / And be one traveler” even if he returned later to take the second road? As Robert Faggen puts it, the suggestion here is that “experience alters the traveler”: The act of choosing changes the person making the choice. This point will be quietly reÂ*inforced two stanzas later, when the speaker says that “knowÂ* ing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back”—the doubt is not only that he might return again to the same physical spot, but that he could return to the crossroads as the same person, the same “I,” who left it. This reading of the poem is subtly different from, and bolder than, the idea that existence is merely subject to the need to make decisions. If we canÂ’t persist unchanged through any one choice, then every choice becomes a matter of existential significance—after all, we arenÂ’t merely deciding to go left or right; weÂ’re transforming our very selves. At the same time, however, if each choice changes the self, then at some point the “self” in question becomes nothing more than a series of accumulated actions, many of them extremely minor. FrostÂ’s peculiar addition—“And be one traveler”—consequently both elevates and reduces the idea of the chooser while at the same time both elevating and reducing the choice. The thauÂ*matrope spins, the roads blur and merge.


    * * * *

    This is only the first stanza of “The Road Not Taken,” and already its lines seem papered over with potential interpretations, some more plausible than others, but none of which can be discarded. One can see why Thomas said he found the poem “staggering.” But then Frost takes things a step furÂ*ther. Having sketched the speaker and his potential choice in all their entangled ambiguity, he undermines the idea that there is really a choice to be made at all:

    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And having perhaps the better claim,
    Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
    Though as for that the passing there
    Had worn them really about the same,

    And both that morning equally lay
    In leaves no step had trodden black.

    The speaker wants to see the paths as different (one has “perÂ*haps the better claim”) but admits that the distinctions, if they even exist, are minute (“the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”). The sameness of the roads will later be revised in the story the speaker says heÂ’ll be telling “ages and ages hence”—as he famously observes, heÂ’ll claim to have taken “the one less traveled by.”

    Two things are worth pausing over in these stanzas. First, why is the physical appearance of the roads mentioned in the first place? We typically worry more about where roads go than what they look like. (Here again itÂ’s worth contrasting “road” with “path” or “trail,” neither of which implies a desÂ*tination as strongly as “road.”) So if all Frost intended was to parody a kind of romantic longing for missed opportunities, wouldnÂ’t it be more effective to imply that the roads reached the same location? As in:

    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And making perhaps the better case,
    Because it seemed to lead elsewhere,
    Though at dayÂ’s end each traveler there
    Would finish in the selfsame place.

    Second, if youÂ’re determined to make the appearance of the roads the central issue, why make that appearance solely a function of how much travel each road had received? Why not talk about how one road was sunnier or wider or stonier or steeper? “I took the one less traveled by” is often assumed to mean “I took the more difficult road,” but this isnÂ’t necesÂ*sarily true in either a literal or metaphorical sense. In scenic areas, after all, the less traveled paths are usually the least interesting and challenging (think of an emergency-Â*vehicle access road in a state park), and if we imagine “roads” as reÂ*ferring to “life choices,” the array of decisions that are “less traveled” yet both easy and potentially harmful is nearly endÂ* less (drug abuse, tax evasion, and so on). So if the idea was to suggest that the speaker wants to perceive his chosen road as not just lonely, but demanding, why not make a more direct statement that would lead to a more direct conclusion, like:


    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
    I took the one that dared me to try.

    These lines are bad, admittedly, but not much worse at first glance than the poemÂ’s actual concluding lines, which inÂ*volve the addition of an apparently superfluous preposition—“by”—that is almost always omitted when the poemÂ’s crowning statement is invoked. (ThereÂ’s a reason M. Scott PeckÂ’s bestseller is called The Road Less Traveled rather than The Road Less Traveled By.)

    So whatÂ’s going on here? Again, itÂ’s helpful to imagine “The Road Not Taken” as consisting of alternate glimpses of two unwritten poems, one the common misconception, the other the parody Frost sometimes claimed to have intended. Every time the poem threatens to clarify as one or the other, it resists, moving instead into an uncertain in-Â*between space in which both are faintly apparent, like overlapping ghosts. This is relatively easy to see with respect to the “naive” readÂ*ing of “The Road Not Taken” as a hymn to stoic individualÂ*ism. Had Frost wanted to write that poem, it would indeed have been titled “The Road Less Traveled,” and it might have gone something like this:

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    To where they ended, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth;

    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And posing perhaps the greater test,
    Because it was narrow and wanted wear,
    Rising so steeply into thinning air
    That a man would struggle just to rest,

    While the other offered room to play
    Or stand at ease along the track.
    I took the lonelier road that day,
    And knowing how way leads on to way,
    I doubted if I should ever come back.

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
    I took the one that dared me to try,
    And that has made all the difference.

    I make no claims for the elegance of this version, but it does have all the elements generally attributed to the actual “Road Not Taken”: an emphasis on solitary challenge, a tone of weary yet quietly confident resignation (what a skeptic would call selfÂ* congratulation), and a plain choice between obviously different options. It would have been easy for Frost to write this poem.

    Yet thatÂ’s not what he did. But neither did he write the parody that “The Road Not Taken” is widely considered to be among more sophisticated readers (or at least more careÂ*ful readers). Frost had a barbed, nimble wit, and he would have had no trouble skewering romantic dithering more pointedly if that was all he had in mind. Such a poem might have been called “Two Roads” and gone like so:


    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
    And sorry I could not travel both
    To where they ended, long I stood
    And looked down one as far as I could
    To where it bent in the undergrowth;

    Then took the other, as just as fair,
    And making perhaps the better case,
    Because it seemed to lead elsewhere,
    Though at dayÂ’s end each traveler there
    Would finish in the selfsame place,

    For both, I learned, were arms that lay
    Around the wood and met in one track.
    And whichever one I took that day
    Would lead itself to the other way
    And send me forward to take me back.

    Still, I shall be claiming with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
    I took the one on the left-hand side,
    And that has made all the difference.

    One of the essential elements of a parody is that it is recogÂ*nized as such: A parody that is too obscure has failed its basic purpose. In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost passes up several opportunities to make his “joke” more explicit, most notably by failing to give the roads a shared destination rather than simply a similar condition of wear. (And even that similarity is qualified, because it depends on the speakerÂ’s perception, not his actual knowledge—after all, having failed to take the first road, he canÂ’t be sure how traveled it is or isnÂ’t, beyond his immediate line of sight.) The usual interpretation of “The Road Not Taken” is almost certainly wrong, but the idea that the poem is a parody doesnÂ’t seem exactly right, either.

    * * * *

    And this brings us to the final stanza—more particularly, it brings us to one of the most carefully placed words in this delicately balanced arrangement. That word is “sigh”:

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence . . .

    Frost mentions the sigh several times in his remarks about “The Road Not Taken,” and while those comments are often oblique, itÂ’s evident that he considered the word “sigh” esÂ*sential to understanding the poem. It is “a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing,” he told Edward Thomas in 1915. It is “absolutely saving,” he told an audience at the Bread Loaf Conference half a century later. According to Lawrance Thompson, he would sometimes claim during public readings that a young girl had asked him about the sigh, and that he considered this a very good question—an anecdote that (in ThompsonÂ’s view) was meant to encourage the audience to appreciate the poemÂ’s intricacy.

    But why would it? After all, a sigh fits both of the usual readings of the poem, and therefore doesnÂ’t seem likely to make either of them more interesting. If we give the poem its popular, naive interpretation, then the sigh is one of tired yet self-Â*assured acceptance bordering on satisfaction: The speaker has taken the hard road, faced obstacles, lost things along the way, regrets, heÂ’s had a few—and yet heÂ’s ended up in a better, stronger place. ItÂ’s a sigh of hardÂ*-won maturity or tedious faux humility, depending on how you look at it. By contrast, if we think of the poem as an ironic commentary on romantic selfÂ*-absorption, then the sigh signals straightforÂ*ward regret: The speaker is genuinely troubled by the consequences of every small choice he makes, and his preoccupation with his own decisions renders him slightly ridiculous.

    But neither of these explanations for the sigh seems espeÂ*cially obscure, let alone “absolutely saving.” Perhaps thatÂ’s because both of them glide past a key point: The sigh hasnÂ’t yet occurred. Recall the final stanza:

    I shall be telling this with a sigh
    Somewhere ages and ages hence:
    Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
    I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference.

    The speaker isnÂ’t “telling this with a sigh” now; heÂ’s sayÂ* ing that heÂ’ll be sighing “ages and ages hence.” He knows himself well enough—or thinks he does—to predict how heÂ’ll feel about the consequences of his choice in the future. But if he actually knows himself this well, then itÂ’s reasonÂ* able to ask whether he would, in fact, behave in the way heÂ’s suggesting. Which is to say that the speaker isnÂ’t necessarily the kind of person who sighs while explaining that many years ago he took the less traveled road; rather, heÂ’s the kind of person who thinks he would sigh while telling us this story. HeÂ’s assuming that heÂ’ll do something that will strike others as either selfÂ*-congratulatory or paralyzingly anxious.


    ItÂ’s a small difference, but as with so many small differÂ*ences in “The Road Not Taken,” it matters a great deal. BeÂ*cause it allows us to feel affectionate compassion toward the speaker, whom itÂ’s now possible to view less as a boaster or a neurotic than as a person who is perhaps excessively critical of his own perceived failings. This feature of the poem goes strangely unremarked in most commentary, and even when itÂ’s noted, it tends to be folded into one of the two standard interpretations. Writing in The New Yorker, for instance, the critic Dan Chiasson declares that the sigh represents “a later version of the self that this current version, though moving steadily in its direction, finds pitiable,” and he declares the poem to be a “cunning nugget of nihilism.” But oneÂ’s selfÂ* image is only rarely accurate in the moment, let alone as a predictor of future behavior, and the poem itself provides no reason to conclude the speaker is “moving steadily” toward anything. WeÂ’re no more bound to take his view of himself at face value than we are to believe Emma Bovary or Willy Loman.

    ItÂ’s important to remember that while “The Road Not Taken” isnÂ’t strictly “about” Edward Thomas, it was, at least, strongly associated with Thomas by Frost. And as the scholar Katherine Kearns rightly notes, Frost “by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas.” Indeed, “FrostÂ’s protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than ‘anyone in England or anywhere else in the world.’” If you admire someone more than anyone “anyÂ* where else in the world,” you probably arenÂ’t going to link that person with a poem whose speaker comes off as either obnoxious or enfeebled. But you might well connect him with an exquisitely sensitive and self-Â*aware speaker who thinks of himself—probably incorrectly—as fundamentally weak, and likely to behave in ways that will cause others to lose patience. “But you know already how I waver,” Thomas wrote to Frost in early 1914, and “on what wavering things I deÂ*pend.” This is the figure who emerges between the two more common interpretations of “The Road Not Taken,” and his doubting yet ardent sensibility is the secret warmth of the poem. This is what is, or can be, “absolutely saving.”

    * * * *

    Poetry has always oscillated between guardedness and fervor. The effusions of Dylan Thomas give way to the iroÂ*nies of Philip Larkin; the reticence of Elizabeth Bishop yields to the frenzy of Sylvia Plath; the closed becomes open; the hot grows cold. In this system of binaries, Frost has genÂ*erally been regarded as not merely guarded, but practically encircled by battlements. In part this is a matter of temperaÂ*ment: His refusal to commit to positions can seem princiÂ*pled, in a roundabout way, but also evasive in a manner that PoundÂ’s Cantos, for all their difficulty, are not. There is a sense that, like Thomas Hardy, Frost sometimes saw himself as more allied with the impersonal forces often depicted in his poems than with the human characters those forces so frequently overwhelm. He isnÂ’t warm. He doesnÂ’t tell us what heÂ’s thinking. His poetry doesnÂ’t advertise its ambitions. “He presents,” declares the introductory note on Frost in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “an example of reserve or holding back in genre, diction, theme, and even philosophy, which is impressive but also, as seen after his death by a generation bent on extravagance, cautious.”

    “Cautious”: not a word Frost would have liked. In his perÂ*sonal life, he was anything but, as is demonstrated by his nearly monomaniacal courtship of his wife, to say nothing of his decision to move to England at age 38 on the basis of a coin toss. (He was much bolder in this regard than almost all of his modernist peers.) And the word seems equally inapplicable to his strongest writing, which is audacious in its willingness to engage multiple audiences (and be judged by them), as well as in its determination to disÂ*play its technical wizardry in a way that was certain to be initially underestimated. It takes tremendous nerve to be willing to look as if you donÂ’t know what youÂ’re doing, when in fact youÂ’re a master of the activity in question. Even in 1915, for example, it was far from “cautious” for an ambiÂ*tious poet to open his first book by deliberately rhyming “trees” with “breeze,” a pairing so legendarily banal that it had been famously singled out for derision by Alexander Pope 200 years earlier. True, Frost became tremenÂ*dously successful by writing in the way he did, but success in a tricky venture doesnÂ’t make the venture itself any less risky.


    Yet if the word “cautious” is wrong, itÂ’s interestingly wrong. “The Road Not Taken” seems to be about the diffiÂ*culty of decision making but is itself strangely reluctant to resolve. It keeps us in the woods, at the crossroads, unsure whether the speaker is actually even making a choice, and then ends not with the decision itself but with a claim about the future that seems unreliable. There is, in this sense, no road that “The Road Not Taken” fails to take. Is that desire to cover all possibilities “cautious”? Here itÂ’s useful to turn to another poem from FrostÂ’s early career, “Reluctance.” That poem ends:

    Ah, when to the heart of man
    Was it ever less than a treason
    To go with the drift of things,
    To yield with a grace to reason,
    And bow and accept the end
    Of a love or a season?

    The conclusion of the poem is a protest against conclusions—an argument, you might say, for delay. But itÂ’s not an argument for caution, even though caution and delay are intertwined. After all, a stubborn sensibility also delays. A playful sensibility delays. An arrogant sensibility deÂ*lays, because it wonÂ’t be rushed. And while Frost can claim the greatest selfÂ*-penned epitaph in the history of EnglishÂ* language poetry—I HAD A LOVERÂ’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD—it would have been no less accurate for his stone to have read STUBBORN, PLAYFUL, AND ARROGANT. Or even HE NEVER HURRIED. “The Road Not Taken” isnÂ’t a poem that radiates this sort of confidence, obviously. But there is an overlap between its hesitations and evasions and the extent to which Frost, as a poet, simply doesnÂ’t like to leave the page. Here is Frost from an interview with The Paris Review in 1960, talking about the act of writing:

    The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don’t critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why don’t they talk about that? Scoring. You’ve got to score.

    Poetry is frequently (endlessly, tediously) compared to muÂ*sic, but only rarely does one see it compared to ice hockey. Yet here is Frost—“YouÂ’ve got to score”—doing exactly that. This is of a piece with his famous quip that writing free verse is “like playing tennis without a net,” a bon mot that is probably more interesting for its underlying metaphor (poets, those sedentary creatures, are like sportsmen) than for its actual claim. There is a sinewy, keyed-Â*up athletiÂ*cism to FrostÂ’s writing and, like all great athletes, heÂ’s relucÂ*tant to leave the field, which is, after all, the place heÂ’s most fully himself. Consider the end of his great love poem “To Earthward”:


    When stiff and sore and scarred
    I take away my hand
    From leaning on it hard
    In grass and sand,

    The hurt is not enough:
    I long for weight and strength
    To feel the earth as rough
    To all my length.

    Yes, these stanzas are about the hunger for sensation. But they’re also about delay: Frost wants to feel the friction of love through the “length” of his body, but also to the “length” of his days, and through the “length” of the poem. Not just more touch, but more time.

    And here is where Robert Frost and Edward Thomas (or FrostÂ’s idea of Thomas) are perhaps not so different. “The Road Not Taken” gives us several variations on the standard dilemmas associated with the romantic sensibility: How can one transcend oneÂ’s self (“travel both”) while still remaining oneself (“And be one traveler”)? How can one ever arrive anywhere if one is constantly reaching for something purer (“the one less traveled by”)? What is the difference between the stories we tell about ourselves and the actuality of our inner lives? In the moment of choosing—the moment of delay—all answers to these questions remain equally possiÂ*ble. But when a choice is made, other possibilities are foreÂ* closed, which leads to what Frost describes as “crying over what might have been.” So the romantic embraces delay (“long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could”) because it postpones the inevitable loss. He hesitates like a candle flame wavers: hot but fragile, already wrapped in the smoke that will signal its extinction.

    Both Frost and the speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” then, are attracted to the idea of prolonging the moment of decision making (achieving a “momentary stay against conÂ* fusion,” as Frost would put it in a different context). The difference between them is one of attitude and degree. The speaker—and, by extension, FrostÂ’s conception of Thomas—is afraid of what heÂ’ll lose when the process of choosing ends, so he pauses over nearly any choice. Frost is afraid of losing the process itself, so he pauses over a decision that might reÂ*sult in genuine resolution—that might result, for instance, in a poem that is conclusive and immobile. He wants the ball to pass through the hoop, only to return to his hands, because for Frost the process—the continuation, the endless creation of endless roads—is everything. “No one,” he writes, “can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.” You donÂ’t just have to score; you have to keep scoring.

    * * * *

    But no game can continue forever. FrostÂ’s fascination with delay allows him to understand the romantic sensibility, to sympathize with its fear of closure, even if its preoccupaÂ*tions arenÂ’t his own. And this understanding lets him create his own version of romantic yearning. This being Frost, of course, that yearning has very little in it of the “sigh” from “The Road Not Taken,” or the overt regret that animates it. But it has a road, and the consequences of that road. Here is the beginning of “Directive,” from 1946, which is usually considered to be FrostÂ’s last great poem:
    >>>>>>>>>>>>>

    *************************

    Did Not Poet Frost Bemoan That Road Not Taken

    I raced into unknown and rage filled path
    Soul aflamed, heart eating its plentiful wrath
    Can one so lost ever again see saving light
    Or heal when their soul is stricken by such dark blight
    Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
    In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

    Mind hellbent on destroying my cowardly foe
    There lay dark-traps hidden under night's heavy snow
    And ever constant curse of world's vicious blows
    Are we but puppets in some sad and tragic show
    Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
    In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

    Stumbling I fell headfirst into that darkset pit
    Perhaps a just reward for my outrageous fit
    I that had foolishly yielded to insane rage
    Acting as a child not a mature man my age
    Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
    In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

    Woe be he that impulsively runs forth to fight
    Much worse, if into the unknown in dark of night
    I survived was by luck, or else hand of fate
    Mercy was given me before it was too late
    Did not poet Frost bemoan that road not taken
    In truth rage against wisdom we have forsaken?

    Robert J. Lindley, 12-2-2021
    Rhyme

    ********************************
    Composed this morn for this posting here at this site--Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 12-02-2021 at 11:02 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Modern Poetry Is Much Different Than It Used To Be
    By Emma Doherty, July 24th 2017



    Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Edgar Allan Poe. These are the names that typically come to mind whenever the subject of poetry is brought up.

    However, poetry has changed so much in the last century alone that it is almost near impossible to compare any poetry of the late 1900s and 2000s to any of that pre nineteenth century poetry.

    In order to understand postmodern poetry we must first understand the history of poetry leading up to this point.

    Seventeenth century poetry is what is known as metaphysical poetry. Metaphysical poetry can be seen with the frequent use of paradoxes, the juxtaposition of complexity and subtlety of thought, among other devices.


    William Shakespeare is plausibly the most common poet of this era, and arguably of all time. Granted the title The Bard, Shakespeare’s legacy is still being discussed in literature classes today due to his ineffable ability to produce lyrical and rhythmic lines (including his well famed iambic pentameter) that transcend translation through various languages and times, as well as his ability to relate his poems and plays to those of all social classes of the time, kings and peasants alike.

    Much of Shakespeare’s influences came from current events leading to various forms of social commentary which would have been deeply frowned upon if he had merely stated his discretions directly. Poets today still strive to achieve his fame, if not his eloquence of verse alone.

    Eighteenth century poetry is what is typically referred to as classical poetry. The early eighteenth century saw the birth of Romanticism, which included poets like William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and although surprisingly dark in his poetic nature, Edgar Allan Poe.

    Expanding on the questionable Romantic nature of Poe’s work, he elicits the characteristics of classical Gothic Romantic poetry including the fact that he draws deeply upon the balance between the delicate nature of life, and love lost, cleverly in an untraditional manner that sets him apart from other Romantics.

    Classical poetry is defined by its emphasis upon form and meter. Something that has been left behind in the evolution toward postmodern poetry.

    Classical poets of the eighteenth century strove to epitomize the delicate balance between passionate emotions and intellect, while maintaining a steady flow of thought rather than utilizing enjambments to separate schools of thought.

    Almost simultaneously, the transcendentalism or naturalist movement came about as a sub-movement of the Romantic Era. Two of the most well known transcendentalists that claimed fame in this era were Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.


    Typical characteristics of transcendental poetry consist of the use of writing to somewhat communicate with nature in search of answers to life’s hardships, or to create rich metaphors by utilizing the tangible aspects of nature such as trees, leaves, and rivers to contrast the fragility of life itself.

    The naturalistic approach continues somewhat in postmodern poetry, although significantly less than that of the transcendentalist era.

    Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman came into their active poetry years (even though Dickinson’s poetry was published posthumously) during the late end of the Romanticism period toward the latter half of the eighteenth century, where the transition to realism was just starting out.

    Whitman and Dickinson alike created a mystifying intrigue to readers of their complex poems everywhere. Whitman specifically, combines the elements of both Romantic as well as Realist poetry in his piece ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.’

    Including the emphasis of passion, perseverance, and the cycle of life and death which would fit perfectly in the Romantic era, but he also uses free verse form to compose his 206 line and rather long poem into three separate yet synchronous poems.

    Dickinson, on the other hand, is the mother of American free verse, as Dickinson is the father, but that is where their similarities end. Whitman formalizes his free verse into long, densely detailed sentences that often called Americans to action, and gave them a voice in times of hardship and the fear of potential turmoil that plagued the nation after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

    Dickinson, on the other hand, writes short, obscure, and vague lines that come across as sporadic due to her recurring use of enjambment.


    Dickinson’s poetry is exceptionally similar to that of postmodern poets, specifically the short metaphorical use of imagery to vaguely portray the hardships that afflict the nation.

    Lots of Dickinson’s poetry dwells on the negativities and inevitabilities of life, most notably death. Poetry critics have drawn upon Dickinson’s near obsession with death, many diagnosing her as depressed.

    Although we may never know for certain, modern feminists have discredited this idea. They have instead proposed that Dickinson was a feminist even before the term was widely modernized.

    Many critics would not doubt that Dickinson used her poems as her own form of social commentary of women’s roles in the nineteenth century, and that depression may have been a side effect of women’s oppression.


    Covert feminist poetry during the nineteenth century, was not all that uncommon. Charlotte Perkins Gilman is renowned for her own commentary on women’s roles in her famed short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’

    Feminists of this era chose to maintain their covert and obscure nature of their writings in order to avoid being sent to asylums or outcast from communities for going against the societal norms.

    As the centuries have changed, feminist poetry has become increasingly popular, now it is used as a way to state directly what is wrong with our society rather than having to write covertly as it was in the past.
    Twentieth century poets emerged with vengeance, spreading their empowering words like wildfire that fueled the nation in times of change, providing roots for equality movements to grow out of.

    Twentieth century poets often began retelling events of their past, putting a modern spin on them by tying them to current events. Maya Angelou is seen as one of the leading contemporary writers.

    Her soulful, ballad-like poetry inspired greatly by Dr. Martin Luther King helped her use her own gift of verse to inspire civil rights activist movements long before the Black Lives Matter movement came about.

    However, her poetry isn’t specifically aimed at any group in particular, which makes her such a renowned poet. Her poetry was relatable to everyone, but specifically minority groups, most notably African Americans and women.


    Her most famous poems ‘Still I Rise’ and ‘Caged Bird,’ personify overcoming obstacles that have made Angelou into a beacon of hope and inspiration.

    Another twentieth century celebrated poet is feminist icon Margaret Atwood. Like Angelou, Atwood channels her talents into lyrical verse.

    Atwood’s take on contemporary poetry is based largely on myths, legends, and fairy tales which set her apart from other contemporary poets. Her poetry also comments largely on the “Prozac Nation” we now live in, specifically in her poem ‘A Sad Child.’

    Poetry that directly touches base on depression and other mental illness, specifically in women, is what feeds postmodern poetry of the twenty-first century.

    Finally, we have reached the era of postmodern or twenty first century poetry. Postmodern poetry is an intriguing combination of some of the most fundamental elements of poetry from each era, while taking on unique traits that make the postmodern era distinctly its own.

    Twenty-first century poetry often takes shape in fragmented sentences, with a heavy use of enjambment, without strict forms of punctuation, grammatical or syntactical rules, and rarely any distinct rhyme scheme.


    Much like the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe or Emily Dickinson, postmodern poetry often takes shape in dark, dramatic forms, often recounting events where things went horribly wrong or things the poet or speaker wish they have said or done differently.

    Contemporary poetry also takes on many characteristics of the Romantic era including the balance between passionate emotions and intellect, but maintains its own heavy use of free verse form from the nineteenth century.

    However, the free verse form that much of twenty-first century poetry takes upon either a dissociated take on the ideals presented, or a direct first person, almost letter like approach to writing poetry, using pronouns to directly make the reader feel as if they are either the receiving audience or the writer/speaker themselves.

    Influences of twenty-first century free verse poetry include the newfound freedom for all genders and all races to express themselves on a common medium.

    Poetry has given us a voice and a creative outlet to express ourselves when doing so in other ways may be difficult.
    Postmodern poetry includes the New York Times bestselling book Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, as well as works by R.H. Sin. Postmodern poetry often touches upon the fact that suffering and pain are inevitable, but also should and can be used as fuel to better yourself and come out stronger than before.

    Overall, the riveting changes of different centuries of styles, culture, movements, feelings, and societies have shaped everything we know, even down to what we now know as contemporary poetry. Thought Catalog Logo Mark
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    POETRY
    ROMANTIC POETS IN THE MODERN AGE

    ------by Raquel Dionísio Abrantes June 18, 2020

    All historical and artistic events have something crucial to tell us. Through them, we understand the development of the world. One of them is the artistic, philosophical, and intellectual movement called Romanticism, referring to the birth of a new set of ideas. It began in Western Europe between the late 18th and 19th centuries in the work of poets, artists, and philosophers understood as a reaction to the modern world. The Romantic Movement emphasizes the importance of individual subjectivity and emotional sensitivity. For Romantic souls, imagination rather than reason is the most important creative ability.



    Romanticism is present in artistic manifestations such as literature, music, and painting. This movement also manifests itself in the following way:



    Celebration of the individual – Romantics praise the triumphs of the misunderstood outcast;



    Strong emotions and senses – Romantics feel that knowledge is gained through intuition and not by deduction;



    Importance of imagination – Romantics exalt the imagination as a supreme faculty to create;



    Admiration of nature – Romantics are profound lovers of nature, and they bring the natural world into their works. They reject the rationalization of nature elevated by the former thinkers of the Enlightenment period.

    Although its expression is dissolved these days, its characteristics can be glimpsed in some poems of poets of the modern age. Here are four poems that feature the moody love, the connection with nature, the celebration of self, and the loss of Romanticism.




    “BE THE ONE” BY LANG LEAV
    You couldn’t be the one – the one to love her.

    She dazzled you, but your eyes could never get used to

    the light. So you remained clothed in shadow, and you

    ignored the hand that reached for you.

    You ignored your own heart.

    And that is why you couldn’t be the one.

    She wasn’t just the moon; she was the whole sky, but

    you couldn’t see beyond the stratosphere.

    Your souls loved each other as much as any two souls

    could possibly love –

    but you couldn’t be the one.



    “CORPSE FLOWER”
    ------ BY VANESSA ANGÉLICA VILLARREAL

    Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone.

    The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spine

    and built you on a dark day. You are still missing

    some parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shells

    in your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal’s yolk, live seawater,

    my trenza, a piece of my son’s umbilical cord, and still you don’t return.

    A failure fragrant as magic. Ascend the spirit into the design.

    My particular chiron: the record that your perfect feet ever graced

    this earth. Homing signal adrift among stars, our tender impossible longing.

    What have I made of your sacrifice. This bone: it is myself.



    “TAKE THIS AS YOUR SIGN”
    ------BY NIKITA GILL

    When will you stop being afraid

    of everything you can be.

    I have never seen the sky, nor the earth

    wear their flaws like they are apologies,

    Instead they defiantly present them as

    their truth, take it or leave it, it is up to you.

    When will you realise that you can still grow

    forests from the scorched earth of your soul

    Remind yourself that the moon even with

    her scars is still the fairest of them all

    It’s the light she gives to the world that

    matters in the end, the calm of her heart

    When will you understand that

    those broken parts of you have learned

    How to sing more elegant songs

    than the loveliest of songbirds.

    Everything around you is asking you

    to set yourself free, become everything

    that you do not think you can be.



    “TOKEN LOSS”
    --------BY KAY RYAN

    To the dragon
    any loss is
    total. His rest
    is disrupted
    if a single
    jewel encrusted
    goblet has
    been stolen.
    The circle
    of himself
    in the nest
    of his gold
    has been
    broken. No
    loss is toke
    My view is that modern poetry attempts to remove the solid foundation of poetry that the famous/historic masters gave us.
    By rejecting the gold in that treasure vault and replacing it with the concept that anything written with high enough emotion rates
    as high as or even higher than the works of the great masters of old.
    To which I must say-- "poppycock and pig ears"....

    Some of us are not blind and see the abject ignorance and shallow nature of these modern, so-called poetry experts/elitists.. --Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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