robert

thanks for inviting me to this discussion.

i like the hardy poem, & always have, but must contend with a received opinion against it, transmitted by an english woman who told me it was shoved down her throat in english grade school, henceforth for her & many like her triggering the gag reflex.

do americans have anything of the kind? any fine poem we collectively hate?

my guess would be we don't — we aren't collectively close enough to any genuine example of the medium to resent it so fully.

but let me, if i may, switch from thomas hardy to robert frost, who is on my mind due to the coming inauguration, & the fact that the poet elizabeth alexander is preparing a piece for it. (do republican inaugs have poets? can't imagine.)

frost read at the kennedy inauguration. i remember the event as shown on television, the wind blowing his long white hair as he disposed of the poem he had written for the occasion — an extempore mess, reportedly — and instead read "the gift outright" generally accorded respect as frost poetry.

this summer at walden pond i heard college students reading favorite poems to each other, which was delightful. but when "the gift outright" came up, i asked if they wd let me pick a bone with it.

they agreed & i told them, hearing it again, my problem was it excluded native americans from its narrative, hammering again & again at the idea of a predetermined, divinely proclaimed, unity of europeans — us — with the land.

i am not easily pegged as politically correct.

and i like much of frost very much.

but the theme of "the gift outright" seems so misbegotten that it invalidates the poem for me.

with that off my chest i'm pleased to return to hardy.

harvey

More to come from me on this later, Harvey-- but for now, let me say you should read Robert Thomas in the thread Phil Schultz started here, entitled "Here's Hope . . . " on despair; and Erin Belieu in the thread Matthew Zapruder began, entitled "The Darkling Connection."

I wonder if RF's "The Road Not Taken" fits the "gagged down your throat." Someone I know once asked her 17 college freshman to write about a poem they hated, and explain why-- she was shocked when 7 or 8 of them all chose the same poem: the WC Williams red wheelbarrow.

funny, I just brought up "The Oven Bird" in another thread. Frost on the brain.

I think "The Road Not Taken" would definitely qualify as, if not the most disliked, definitely the most misunderstood American poem. Of course there is no difference between the two roads, and even if there might be, there is certainly no way of knowing. All those college essays.

I have also had the experience that students really dislike The Red Wheelbarrow. Of course that poem is in some ways harder to understand having been removed from its original context in Spring and All.

Though I also think that poem is a great one to teach. Everyone comes up with these crazy explanations for it, when in fact the whole poem is right there. What depends on a red wheelbarrow? So much!!