TS: Auden vs. Frost

Respect for Frost but Auden always and forever. But I'll come back to this.

Frost is funnier and graver than Auden and also excelled at light verse. In short, everything at which Auden excelled (lightness, flexibility of meter) Frost could do. But I do love at least a dozen Auden poems.

During another Frost poll a few years ago, I said I was amazed that despite being a favorite I don't fuck with Frost's popularity and oddness and humor make him deservedly huge.

That was garbled, but you know what I mean.

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

"musée des beaux arts" > "out, out --"

taking nothing from frost, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" and "September 1, 1939" put it over the top for auden

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

That last quatrain is among my favorites ever.

I'll raise you:

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place's name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Ok, back at work, time to post sporadic ill-formed thoughts in this thread.

There's a showiness or brilliance – a kind of flash – to Auden that seems to needle one sort of quite serious literary Britishness (Orwell, Leavis, even John Carey). He gets taken as unserious, facile or slightly untrustworthy (even while they're admiring him).*

This is absolutely one of the things I like best about him – readable, funny, unboring, full of surprises. The ridiculous dictionary words ('the baltering torrent shrunk to a soodling thread'), the syntactical stops and turns (and wrenches, early on), odd epithets, and the pure delight in form.

On the form thing, I think re: Alfred upthread – 'everything at which Auden excelled (lightness, flexibility of meter) Frost could do' – there's a big gap between being able to do it, and it being constitutive or something like an end in itself. I don't know Frost well – are there things like Letter to Lord Byron in there? It's not that I don't think that Frost could do a 1000-line verse autobiography in Rhyme Royal, it's more that it strikes Auden as a good or pleasing or interesting thing to do. I the 'fuck it - let's do a sestina' attitude descends into dismal jocularity or stuffiness for almost everyone, but fecundity of his early talent sat perfectly with a promiscuous love of form.

& that flash turns over time into something that's like a real aesthetic – so 'The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning' or 'In Praise of Limestone' for that made explicit.

He's not really like a lot of other Major 20th Century Eng Lang poets in some regards, especially later on and in longer poems – he lectures, he tells you stuff, he doesn't hang around on particulars (over-using abstractions and plurals even while telling you that it's all about the concrete, touch of the 18th-century there and elsewhere). God he's wrong or weird about a lot of stuff, but I like hanging with him.

(& when the posturing and didacticism come together – incredible).

Recently I've been mostly reading the poetry of the later 30s and after, but I think the earlier stuff is actually the greatest – strange lyrics, extraordinary British landscapes (urban and rural), fragmentary adventure narratives, finding a language that can be Hardy as well as Eliot.

There's some stuff about class and confidence that I may come back to later, probably ends up with some navel-criticising on my love for him.

*some of the biography feeds into this – going to America in WWII was a black mark to one generation, & that fitted w/ some homophobia iirc..

oh, and on The Fall of Rome – I remember a conversation about it with one good friend who has that ambivalent-about-Auden British streak, and he was basically, 'yes, it's brilliant but don't you think it's a bit of a trick?'.

(cannot remember my answer, but I hope it was roughly 'I see what you mean but no')

t's more that it strikes Auden as a good or pleasing or interesting thing to do. I the 'fuck it - let's do a sestina' attitude descends into dismal jocularity or stuffiness for almost everyone

Frost did this all the time though

fair cop - I was going off fairly shallow impression/memory, since most of what I like in him is blank verse tbh. But I haven't read that widely and should have checked. It does seem to me different still – Auden's front-and-centre love of the game of verse – it's like game vs craft or something. I'd have to think more.

I hope I'm not picking on you. Remember, Frost was a best-selling poet in the United States; you don't sell hundreds of thousands of books in mid twentieth century America by writing austere blank verse. His popularity rests on how he sheathes darkness in playful modes.

Both obviously

xp

ha, no not at all, I was thinking fuzzily. I'm still a bit sceptical tbh – like I think there's a qualitative difference between Auden's formal breadth and what feel likes formal focus in what I've read of Frost. It might actually come down to Auden's musical side (songs, ballad forms, 30s pop lyric ('You're my cup of tea'), libretti etc etc) but also maybe his facility with pastiche, which Jarrell has better than me:

Look into his book at random: there will be, on the first fifty or sixty pages, blues; calypso songs; nursery rhymes; imitations of sagas, of Gilbert and sullivan, of Henry James, of Greek choruses, of Lord Byron, riding, Graves, Joyce, skelton, eliot, yeats, Brecht, Perse, rilke

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

where's a hoos to weigh in on this

I love Auden but he's second tier compared to Frost. I struggled to make a musical analogy but I can't: while I can compare Auden's coquettish, glancing approach to several musicians, I can't think of an analogue to Frost's grave, funny, colloquial tone.

plus, Auden has more failed or blah poems than Frost.

I think Auden does gravitas better than Frost, generally, but Frost...he's like the Chic organization. There may be better poets who were writing at the same time, scaling greater heights, but when you stack all his hits up you say, Jesus Christ, that right there was a giant and every last one of these top-tier poems is instantly memorable, vivid, both deeply felt and thick with craft but not so much that it gets in the way

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This poll happened as I was out wilderness trekking, so I missed it. I side with Lord Sotosyn here. Frost wrote some stuff that is simply exquisite. Both poets excelled at their craft, but I find Frost's subject matter to be more fundamental and humane as opposed to Auden's consistent bent toward sophistication, keeping a certain distance from the fundamentals.

To really get who Frost was, you need to dig around in his Collected Poems and read the non-hits & the longer poems that don't get any airtime. The voice in those lesser poems is still strong and sharp. Auden's lesser poems don't compare well to Frost's.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/