----------
>From: Kate Cone <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Imagism and Joyce
>Date: Wed, Mar 13, 2002, 3:46 PM
>

> Carrol:
>
> You're right -- Frost biographer Jay Parini says, "Robert Frost was a canny
> poet, given to sly self-parody and ironic implication, full of contempt for
> most of his contemporaries, and quite willing to mislead sentimental readers
> into thinking that they understood his poems."
>
> I "get" this about Frost. When I read North of Boston, many, MANY years
> after I'd been a loyal subject to Cummings, I thought, "...he was way ahead
> of  his time" -- putting dialog -- cuttingly believable dialog -- into
> meter. It's very exciting how many layers of meaning to his poetry there
> are, once you get beyond that damn pony shaking its bells in "Stopping by
> Woods." (which is a very sweet poem, I think, really). Parini reveals in
> Robert Frost: A Life that for decades Frost kept the source of that poem
> secret. When reading his work at Bowdoin College in the late '30's, a
> student asked him what made him write it. He said that he was on his way
> home (to his Derry farm) after having a load of eggs rejected by the H.P.
> Hood and Sons Dairy. It was Christmas time, and the money he was to get for
> the eggs was meant to buy gifts for his 4 children. The reason he's glad in
> the poem that the owner of the wood wasn't there to see him was that it was
> there he cried, and at that moment decided to sell his farm and go back to
> teaching.
>
> Kate

    Ah, but Frost must have known there was not that much difference
between chicken farming and academia. In both cases there is much cock
crowing and rooster posturing, frequent egg-laying, a stupid but inviolable
peck order mechanism, and the the chopping block for all those but the
toughest old indigestible birds.

    Exhibit

    "Kung said: Hui's mode of action was to seize the unwavering axis,
coming to an exact equity; he gripped it in his fist, and at once started
using it, careful as if he were watching his chicken-coop, and he never let
go or lost sight of it." Chung Yung

    Exhibit

    "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity." Yeats

Code Green here in Bumpkinland.

"You and I are human beings;mostpeople are snobs." E.E.Cummings
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Carrol Cox" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 13, 2002 1:36 PM
> Subject: Re: Imagism and Joyce
>
>
>> Kate Cone wrote:
>> >
>> > .... he actively
>> > maintained that persona throughout his career. Essentially, he "worked"
> that
>> > ten years in Derry, NH as a chicken farmer/teacher/poet for the next 40
> +
>> > years of his life. As Parini says in Some Necessary Angels, Frost's love
> for
>> > the limelight did in his poetry in the end.
>>
>> It's been 40 years or so since I read Frost closely or in bulk, but one
>> general impression at the time was that he held his readers
>> (particularly those who bought the "Yankee Farmer" scam) in contempt,
>> and that this showed in a number of poems in which he was virtually
>> parodying his own style -- peeking around the corner of the poem as it
>> were and saying, look at those fools who think this is for real. But his
>> best poems are, I think, very good indeed.
>>
>> Carrol
>>