TS: Auden vs. Frost

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

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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

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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/