In Which We Roast The Hell Out Of Robert Frost, Who Deserves It: Tales From The Slack

Robert Frost Eat It
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The popular imagination tends to compress and stretch time in a way that’s not entirely accurate. I often try to group Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau in my mind as if, somehow, they were contemporaries. Not even close! Thoreau was dead long before Frost was even born. It would be more accurate to group Frost and Pablo Neruda, as far as commonly known poets go, even if their poems aren’t quite overlapping. There’s just something extremely old New England about both Thoreau and Frost.

Frost even read a poem at JFK’s inaugural!

The dude lived a long, extremely tragic life, and produced some of the most impactful and resonant poems in all of American letters. To heap a final tragedy on the guy, maybe people keep misunderstanding him. Most famously, the poem “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost, which includes this little stanza:

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
People love quoting “Good fences make good neighbors,” even though the narrator of this particular poem (and Frost himself) seem to be making the opposite point.

Then, of course, there’s the poem “The Road Not Taken”, which set off Jason:

Frost 6

 

Frost 7

Frost 8

Frost 10

Frost 11

Frost 12

Damn, Paris Review, what’s next? Is April not actually the cruelest month?

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31 thoughts on “In Which We Roast The Hell Out Of Robert Frost, Who Deserves It: Tales From The Slack”

  3. Every Aussie knows there’s like, four poets:

    -Banjo Patterson

    -Henry Lawson

    – That bloke who wrote ‘Said Henrahan’

    – The rest

  4. You are bitching about the wrong poet – at least Frost is accessible and you can make of his words what you want (I like to think he often wrote ironically) Thoreau is the poet who should be getting bashed – his poems are impenetrable and difficult to read and I think most people who quote him haven’t read any of his poems. And his quiet woods -within a dozen yards of active train tracks and his mom came and did his laundry every week – wuss.

    1. Yeah, Thoreau makes me laugh because he pretended he was alone out in the woods while he living near everything and being utterly incapable of taking care of himself. He was a manchild that people took seriously somehow.

  6. I’m intrigued by this new Poetopian website.

    Poetry is taught so badly in the US. Half-literate English teachers, who
    1) were taught one meaning, can’t read between the lines, and force that limited meaning onto poor students like some sort of mathematical fact.
    2) believe poetry is only about emotion (be cause they can’t think critically themselves), and try to foist some sort of “passion” on students through rote memorization, and through “correcting” students when they just don’t care.

    Skip Frost and Thoreau and start with Milne, Ronald Dahl , maybe Lewis Carroll (yes, they’re British, not American, but they’re great fun poets) But get the kids enjoying it! Teach how to play with language in novel and funny ways, then work up to the stuffy boring poetry.

  7. Frost wrote normal, inoffensive pastorals. This is the Autopian. You need much weirder poets. But probably only short ones. I’m not going to suggest anyone go read Don Juan, Lord Byron’s 16,000 line satirical epic with an unreliable narrator.

    Get the stuff that thumbs its nose at structure. The poems that put their lines in weird places to make their point. Get some of the redaction/erasure poetry. The absolute nonsense that makes you feel like you don’t understand anything.

    Or, y’know, find some good car poetry.

  11. Two paths diverged in a yellow wood,
    And–sorry, there’s also a third path
    Being a city boy, I simply stood,
    Calculating as best I could
    Three choices with unknown math;

    Then turned myself away from there,
    Having perhaps no proper plan,
    For three choices I could not bear
    Though back home, I will swear
    I became a decisive man

    My city ass was made for streets
    But I write pastoral verse
    So I’ll put my pen to the sheets
    And suggest I made no retreats;
    My rural view is not a curse

    I write this now and know not why
    I write this with a certain sense
    I could spend time in yellow wood
    The forest seems a simple good
    But the city has made a difference

    (An alternate universe where Frost stuck to his city roots and also saw three paths. And was less strict in meter, because I am lazy.)

  12. Here’s the whole thing. And Torch is right. Two paths are the same, except for a bend in the undergrowth. But years later, the narrator knows he’ll be telling everyone, “I always knew which one was right!!” …even if it’s all a little bullshit.

    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.

  13. Fortunately, as an adult who no longer has to read it for class assignments I am free to pretend poetry does not exist. I even skip the poems and songs that sometimes get injected into novels because in my experience they never have any bearing on the story, they’re just the author showing off their poetic chops.

  14. Two roads, both alike in dignity

    In fair Woodland, where we lay our scene

    From ancient indecision break to new direction

    Where civil age makes civil aged unsure

    —

    In your face, Frosty 🙂

  15. It’s not bullshit – you just didn’t understand it. He made a choice between equal options, but in his old age he will tell people he took the road less travelled-by and lay the credit (or blame) for however his life turned out on that singular choice. It’s about self-deception and the impermanence of memory.

    (I’m purposefully engaging in the same self-deception by pretending that I always understood this poem. Thanks for pointing this out, Jason! This was a great eye-opener and I appreciate Frost all the more for finally seeing his point.)

    1. It’s also about his regret that he could not travel both. That one equivalent decision, may define the rest of his life.

      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:

      1. Yeah. I also think there are lots of times when options available basically look the same, but then, looking back on how “way leads to way” the choice really did make all the difference. But not in any way that was understood at the time.

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