(emphasis is mine, natch)

POETRY CHRONICLE -- REVIEWS by Joel Brouwer
New York Times Book Review, April 26, 2009

WHAT GOES ON: Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009.
By Stephen Dunn, Norton, $24.95.

The speaker of Dunn’s recent poems is a regular guy cursed with an understanding of human nature more subtle than he’d prefer. A poem like “The Unsaid” succeeds not only because it nails its depiction of a couple stalled by miscommunication and reproach — “In the bedroom they undressed and dressed / and got into bed. The silence was what fills / a tunnel after a locomotive passes through” — but because the poem’s very existence squares its pathos: the speaker understands the problem perfectly but still can’t solve it. A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble — a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt — meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye. As is true of every other poet who ever lived, what’s best about Dunn is also what’s worst: in his case, a plainspoken, curlicue-­free lucidity (I actually want to say “wisdom,” but fear it makes Dunn sound square or folksy, faults he’s too sharp and wry to be accused of), which is a tonic in small doses but can cause numbness if consumed in quantity. “Please Understand” ends “I’ve never been able to tell / what’s worth more — what I want or what I have.” “What Men Want” ends “After the power to choose / a man wants the power to erase.” “Nature” ends, “Gray, then, was the only truth in the world.” I trust the poet’s every nuanced ambivalence but eventually find myself wishing — against my better instincts, and his — that he’d burn a house down or get baptized or anything else definitive and audacious.

ONE SECRET THING
By Sharon Olds, Knopf, $26.95.

Admirers of Olds’s poems will find more of them in this, her ninth collection. Olds selects intense moments from her family romance — usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both — and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality. The speaker of “Home Theater, 1955” spends the poem’s first nine lines — a full quarter of its total length — describing the skimpy animal-themed bedclothes she wore as a child, then tells the story of a night her father became so violent her sister had to call for police officers, one of whom the speaker remembers glancing at her bare legs. In its final lines, the poem switches in a blink from autobiography to myth: “Soon after our father had struck himself down, / there had risen up these bachelors / beside the sink and stove, and the tiny / mastodons, and bison, and elk, the / beasts on my front and back, began, / atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.” It’s a nifty move, but a pretty familiar one — Olds has been making it for almost 30 years — and in this book it’s too often too easy to see the epiphanies coming. When in the first lines of “Animal Dress” the poet’s daughter puts on her mother’s black sweater “with maroon creatures / knitted in,” you can tell you’re in for another Joseph Campbell moment in the poem’s final lines, and sure enough.

SESTETS
By Charles Wright, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.

Wright’s poems don’t bear down toward conclusions, they expand and evanesce as if in a valiant, impossible effort to comprehend and demonstrate Wittgenstein’s dictum that “the world is all that is the case.” Wright’s new collection of short poems is less a book unto itself than the next installment in a continuous poem he’s been writing for 40-odd years. “Description is expiation, / and not a place to hunker down in,” he writes. “It is a coming to terms with. / Or coming to terms without. / As though whatever we had to say could keep it real. / As though our words were flies, / and the dead meat kept reappearing.” These accounts of language as simultaneously a fond illusion and our only hope for a stable place to stake a claim on reality pose the problem Wright wisely resists pretending poetry can solve. Instead, he revels and finds a freedom in it: “Water remains immortal — / Poems can’t defile it, / the heron, immobile on one leg, / Stands in it, snipe stitch it, and heaven pillows its breast.” Trouble can arise when Wright’s open-endedness leads him to believe that any idea, no matter how ungainly or hackneyed, deserves a place in the poem, as in “Music for Midsummer’s Eve”: “Time is an untuned harmonium / That Muzaks our nights and days. / Sometimes it lasts for a little while, / sometimes it goes on forever.” I can swallow “Muzaks” with some effort, but those last two lines wouldn’t pass muster at Hallmark. Fortunately, few such clunkers disrupt Wright’s complex and contrary harmonies.

Joel Brouwer’s books of poems are “Exactly What Happened,” “Centuries” and, most recently, “And So.” He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Hello MaryAnn,

These are very interesting observations that require/deserve far more serious reflection and consideration than I can muster at any given moment. I will have to chew on this for sometime. I am chronically slow and founded-dumb when confronted with these kinds of observations that seem to roll off wiser and more articulate tongues. I know from experience that it's far easier for me to say nothing than anything worthwhile, especially when it comes to poetry and criticism. But I can't pass this post without feeling guilty for not responding in some way, even if it adds nothing to the discussion. I appreciate your keen poetic sensibility and marvel at what appears to me like inexhaustible energy. Let me say thank you, and, I'll get back to you later. :)

Elj

Hi Eljem,

Thanks for the kind words. Come back soon so we can discuss your statement --

Frost can end up producing a fine poem like "Design" that makes no scientific sense and fails in my view in the arena of "Ideas" but succeeds in spite of its "bad idea". I think it would be a far better poem if the core idea was as compelling as the language.

I'm not a big fan of Frost's, but I'm interested to hear what part of "Design" makes no scientific sense -- the moth-spider-flower part or the last part about "design."

MA

Hi, MaryAnn, Your posts here are a great illustration of something I have often heard teachers say: "Now back up your argument with facts."

As to the subject itself, I fail to see anything wrong with an artist having an identifiable style or a strong voice or a predominant theme. I mean, what would be the purpose of being filthy rich and having a Picasso hanging on one's wall if no one recognized it for what it was? People need to walk in, pause for a moment in stunned silence, and then say reverently, "Why, that's a Picasso!"

Just as McDonald's has it's arches, Emily Dickinson has her dashes.

The notion that there is a Designer, or perhaps multiple Designers, working behind, above, or outside the world micromanaging the universe, and that we can see the evidence of "His" handiwork by observing a certain ORDER in the universe is the argument for Intelligent Design. In this case Frost turns the same tortured reasoning around to suggest the existence of evil or darkness in the natural world.

What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small.


Elj

Eljem, in many of his poems, Frost expresses the idea that God (if there is a God) cannot be known through nature. So I’ll bet his use of the 18th + 19th C idea that there is a God and he can be ascertained by observing the design of nature that God put there is tongue in cheek. As if to say – “See, you think intelligent design is a rational, sure-fire way to prove the existence of a benevolent God, but it can also be used to prove that God permits evil.” And if that’s not bad enough, there’s the possibility that there isn’t even a Godly design, good or evil, in nature (“if design in such a thing so small”).

To me, it’s that last line that wrecks the poem. A few years ago, in preparation for teaching a course on Whitman, Dickinson and Frost, I read some essays on Frost (hadn’t done that since sometime in the last millennium). A couple of them noted that Frost has this bad habit of hedging his bets. For example, in “Birches,” he seems to conclude that since “ Earth’s the right place for love,” it would be better if we concentrated on “both going [high into the birches] and coming back.” But instead of ending the poem there, Frost hedges his bets by concluding instead with, “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” So which is it, Mr. Frost – we should be solitary swingers of birches, or we should return to earth and love other people?

Likewise, in “Design,” it almost seems as if the mood of horror finally realized in the next-to-last line is undercut by a mood of malicious humor in the last line – as if to say, “Oh, It’s not really the doings of an evil God; it’s just nature’s way.”

The critics who bring up this hedging say that without Frost’s strong commitment to his ideas, he can never be known as a major poet like, for instance, Eliot.

Other critics say that what appears as hedging is really skepticism, i.e. that Frost doesn’t want to come down heavily on one side or the other as a “true believer.” Those in this camp point to Dickinson, Shakespeare and W Stevens as other skeptics, all of whom are major poets.

What do you think, Eljem?

Hello MaryAnn,

I was afraid you might ask.

I confess that I have always viewed the poem from a straightforward and "serious" angle from the first time I read it till now. If what you suggest is true then I would have to agree with those critics that you mention. If the most skillful and,(in my opinion), most compelling part of the entire poem is really intended as a form of subtle sarcasm and that Frost is revealing his true intention and meaning only at the end and actually dissing the ideas and poetics he seems to have skillfully assembled, then why bother? This attitude belittles the effort and seems to defile the work.

I took a quick look at the time lines between Charles Darwin, and Frost.
It's clear that Frost was an admirer of Darwin and his theory of Evolution but it's also clear that he was and remained a dualist:

Stanlis, Peter J. Robert Frost: the Poet as Philosopher
American Midland Naturalist, The, April, 2008 by: Stephen Curley


"Frost saw metaphor as the springboard to understanding--it is for him the language of revelation"

".... Peter Stanlis, a retired humanities professor and leading authority on Edmund Burke, constructs a painstaking step-by-step argument--a corrective to Thompson's damning misapprehension--that reveals dualism behind Frost's every poem and utterance. First, Stanlis gives us some background in the history of ideas. Philosophical dualism, the dominant Western philosophy up to the Eighteenth Century, posits a reality consisting of matter and mind (Frost preferred to use the term "spirit" for the latter). Early Greeks were monists who saw reality as either matter or mind: for instance, Lucretius was a materialist; Plato, an idealist. Each strained to interpret all phenomena in terms of a single unifying theory. Then came Aristotle who regarded both matter and spirit as permanently in conflict and co-existent. Frost found Aristotle's outlook more congenial. The dualistic philosopher, Frost said, operates as an impartial judge who weighs conflicting claims from both sides of the case. Frost strived to maintain that balancing act in what he saw as a world of irreconcilable opposites: good-evil, justice-mercy, church-state, free will-necessity, objective-subjective, space-time and the like.

By the end of the Nineteenth Century science had emerged as the approach that would eventually lead to understanding everything. Frost, a die-hard humanist, countered claims made for the all-inclusiveness of science, which he categorized as "merely one of the humanities." He often quoted the dictum of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that in order to enter a work of art one had first to willingly suspend disbelief. In other words, faith is prerequisite to understanding: we believe in order to understand. In that sense, said Frost, "Art is closer to religion than it is to science, because it is necessary to believe in a subject or situation in order to understand it, and not make rational understanding the basis of belief." Frost agreed with C.P. Snow that science and humanities were two cultures. Science describes physical phenomena; it cannot create normative principles in ethics, aesthetics or religion. Science and religion are two contrary ways to understand reality. In the end any apparent contradiction, when properly considered, between true religion and true science will disappear.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Darwin's evolution. Frost called evolution "a very brilliant metaphor"--high praise from a poet who believed that all sound thinking is metaphorical. His own exploration of reality through story may also help explain why Frost much preferred the narrative version in Voyage of the Beagle to the more theoretical version in Origin of Species. As a poet, Frost saw metaphor as the springboard to understanding--it is for him the language of revelation. (Darwin once said that after a lifetime of thinking about science he had lost his taste for reading poetry, which had given him so much pleasure in his youth; Frost found that admission unspeakably sad.) The problem lies not with Darwin's theory but its abuse in the hands of smaller minded people like Tyndall, Spencer, Wells--and most especially--T. H. Huxley who molded science into a golden calf or god to be worshipped. Frost denigrated Huxley's uncritical faith in the absolute power of science as "scientism." Despite what Huxley claimed, Darwin was not a social Darwinist, nor did he emphasize progress of the species. According to Frost, human beings do not progress in any fundamental sense: technology, though it ameliorates conditions, makes it no easier for us to be decent, uphold our integrity and attain salvation. Frost objected to purely mechanical evolution; in fact he objected to anything that purports to explain all of reality in a single unified theory. The metaphorical complexity of Frost's dualism in regard to evolution may be seen in his half-humorous statement that "God made man out of prepared mud"

It seems likely that Frost is trying to make a serious philosophical point using the the extended metaphor of "assorted characters of death and blight...like the ingredients of a witches broth" to make it. My vote says he is dead serious and believes in a dualistic world where good and evil battle it out.



Eljem

Let me come to the defense of Frost, who is (needless to say) a mentor of mine.

Simple answer to MA's question about "Birches": the swinger of birches, but once they get too high, returns to earth. Like a prophet goes off into the wilderness and returns transformed into a more loving human. Their time away teaches them "earth's the right place for love." Frost is a dualist in that he often presents conflicting viewpoints in his poems: as in Mending Wall, Home Burial, and Birches - but in the last it is more subtle, as the dual impulses are in the same speaker: the drive for solitude vs. the drive for companionship.

"Design" can be read as Frost mocking the idea of "intelligent design": if it were true, God could not be exonerated of all the "evil" we find in the universe. Though what "apalls" us is not evil in itself ("There is no good or bad but thinking makes it so" - Hamlet), so it is us projecting evil onto natural events. And likewise by implication, projecting a God as well, whom we (for some reason) like to find "not guilty" of those natural acts we find apalling. This forces a choice: either you believe in an uncomforting God that is capable of evil (and commits it often) or you believe there is no evil. And thus no God or an amoral God. Neither of which is comforting. Frost's motive (if he has one) to to take away your comfortable notion of a comforting God. Which he does quite effectively (in my opinion).

Of all the (many) books I've read on Frost, the best is "Frost and the Challenge of Darwin" by Robert Faggan. Recommend reading it if you are truly interested in bettering your handle on Frost.

CM

Cutter, I'm glad you joined the discussion, since you've been studying Frost longer than I have.

I particularly like your comment, "Frost's motive (if he has one) to to take away your comfortable notion of a comforting God." It's of a piece with the narrator in "Directive who says he is a guide "who only has at heart your getting lost."

Eljem, I really enjoyed reading a scientist's approach to Frost . (I hope I haven't mischaracterized the author of the essay you posted.)

Thanks to Mr.McCool and MarryAnn for the helpful tips and interesting exposition.

Elj

Thank you, CutterMcCool and MaryAnn for the closer considerations.

The questions raised are layered and complex and it's easy to take a wrong turn even with the best of intentions. I find myself less certain of Frost's motives than when I joined this discussion and that fostering a condition of uncertainty maybe the most accurate representation of Frost's intentions and state of mind. Certainly, he cannot be authentic or convincing unless he is himself uncertain and believes this himself.

It is a new vantage point for me in regards to Frost and the DESIGN poem. I confess that I have Frost comfortably filed in my brain as an extraordinary craftsman and talented word-smith but as a lesser deity in the pantheon of major poets. It's difficult enough to see things as they actually are even when they are staring me in the face; how much more difficult then to get into the mind of a complex and, by widely accepted standards, brilliant dead man and say something accurate about his motives. The idea that Frost, like most human beings, could have been uncertain about the nature of good and evil and their connection to the natural world and by extension to human beings is certainly possible and on some level highly likely. But I find this viewpoint, as the driving motive behind the poem, unsatisfying on so many levels. Perhaps that says more about me than the intention of the poet.

I like to think of Frost as committed to a certain ideal and uncertainty as the centerpiece is not it. What appeals more to my gut is the notion that Frost was a careful and close observer of nature and that he 'painted' in that style. I want to believe that Frost saw in nature "charmed force" or "prepared mud" and was not a materialist or conflicted about this. While this point of view brings Frost closer to the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin than popular Intelliigent Design proponents it is still a far cry from clear. Maybe this "uncommitted" theme is at the heart of some of the criticism that MaryAnn refers to. I have not studied Frost nearly enough to be able to say with any authority if this is true. I will take a closer look at some of my favorite Frost poems to see if I can find the kind of 'commitment' or lack that this discussion has raised.

Thank you both for your thoughts and efforts.

Elj.

(Slate insists I keep my posts short, so this will be in 2 parts)

Eljem, here's a possible backstory --

In the 1930s and 1940s, modern poetry was taking off in all sorts of new ways, but Frost kept writing in the same, old-fashioned way. As a result, he was disparaged as a regional nature poet.

Then the poet and noted critic Randall Jarrell wrote some influential essays pointing out Frost's darker, skeptical side. Frost became rehabilitated as a more serious poet, someone to be reckoned with.

(The same is true of Emily Dickinson when more of her poetry became available in the 1950s.)

When I went to high school sometime in last Ice Age, English teachers taught a very harmless Dickinson and Frost (and ignored Whitman completely). So thinking about all three of them in a new light has not been easy for me. But ever since I studied those three more a few years ago for the class I taught, I've come to like Dickinson and Whitman more and Frost less.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from a discussion zbigley and I had about Frost while I was reading new essays. (zbig is now getting his Ph.D. in Medieval English)

MA -- Consider also that Frost wrote his poems not in his own voice, but from the point of view of a hardworking, realistic Yankee farmer. Such distancing can be a form of self-protection. The narrator said it, not me, the author.

Ultimately, such hedging, such self-protection is an evasion. It is a way for Frost to avoid a full commitment to whatever his words may imply. If one admires this, one may call it balance – as Frost did. If one has no taste for it, one may call Frost a “spiritual drifter” – as poet and critic Yvor Winters once did.

Many critics feel that Frost is lacking in seriousness, profundity and commitment. And as a result, they are doubtful that he can be called a major poet. At the conclusion of “The Waste Land,” the emotional weight and certainty of Eliot’s words produce an almost religious feeling in the reader. Frost’s poems rarely produce the same effect.

Does this mean that Frost was a minor poet? Looking at it from Frost’s point of view, he might have said that the wisdom of his poetry lies not so much in what he says as in the way he says it. He keeps his balance, not coming down on one side or the other of arguments that cannot be settled. In other words, if Frost did not take his ideas “seriously,” he did take seriously what he had to teach about the way we should take ideas. Whether or not this deserves such terms as “profound” and “commitment,” each reader may decide.

This much can be said. Other major writers of the 20th century – Eliot, Joyce, Yeats, Lawrence – were committed to beliefs, but how valid were their beliefs? If Frost was skeptical, he is also one of the few significant writers of the 20th century whose work seems consistently to preserve sanity of mind.

Zbig replies --

As for Frost, whether he is "major" or "minor," your critique gets to a more interesting distinction in the end, the skeptic versus the true believer, the fanatic. Frost has such a folksy reputation, it's a little surprising to actually read the poems and find that he's a confirmed skeptic. As to that narrator, I like his self-description in "Directive": a guide "who only has at heart your getting lost."

In this he falls into the Dickinson tradition rather than the Whitman. Like Dickinson, like Stevens, Frost is out to trouble what you think you know. The Whitmans, Eliots, Pounds, even the Yeatses of the world are out to lead you to the great certainty that they alone have glimpsed.

Now, what does it say about me that I find the skeptical position the more ethically viable, but my favorite poets tend to be in the latter camp?

More skeptics: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Goethe, the French symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, etc,) Dickinson, Frost, Stevens

More true believers: Dante, George Herbert, John Donne, GM Hopkins, RM Rilke, the English romantics (Blake, Shelly, Keats, etc, Whitman) Nietzsche