or in short "pushing the crumpled water up ahead" -- good GOD, man.
― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 01:00 (thirteen years ago) link
Frost was about 10x craftier than he looks at first blush. Stevens was more of the show horse. Stevens get read reverentially by college students and the occasional college professor. Frost gets read by a very odd assortment of people, many of whom mistake him for a sentimentalist like themselves, who makes snow globe scenes of New England for their knick-knack shelf (but he was no sentimentalist, no, not remotely).
I find Stevens to be urbane and witty company, very sly in a complicitous way, tipping the reader a wink. Frost just hammers away at his metal until it takes the shape of how he thinks, leaving just a few, hidden, jagged spurs he preferred to not file off.
I voted Frost.
― Aimless, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 01:10 (thirteen years ago) link
I can't explain Stevens' impact on me: those impassive tercets; the ghostly rhythms comprised of beautifully timed exoticisms and monosyllables; the conservative man's fascinations with colors, sights, and sounds just beyond him but poeticized in these hilarious, often moving friezes; the stateliness of his best poems, how they march to a perfect release. He's a poet to grow old with.
btw Stevens' collected letters are among the most beautiful ever written, and are essential to understanding him.
I've talked about Frost before: I treasure an anthology my mom bought for my thirteenth birthday, after I fell in love with "The Cow in Apple Time," "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and the other classics. If there's one poet who should be taught to children wary of poetry, Frost is it. Then, as they get older, they can appreciate a darkness as all-encompassing as Stevens'. My students always get him.
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 01:13 (thirteen years ago) link
and, man, "required, as necessity requires" -- perfect, PERFECT.
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 01:14 (thirteen years ago) link
http://www.kwls.org/lit/kwls_blog/2009/04/post_11.cfmFrost and Stevens at the Casa Marina Hotel in Key West, ca. 1940:
"The trouble with you, Robert, is that you write about– subjects." "The trouble with you, Wallace, is that you write about– bric-a-brac."
They both had a good point. I vote for Frost. He just had/has so many great poems-- for me: Aquainted with the Night, Desert Places, Provide, Provide, Neither Out Far Nor In Deep, Stopping By Woods, Directive, After Apple Picking.Stevens had a great ear, a great sense of the line, and had poems that "make you think." He just didn't have hardly any poems that made me feel -- much
― donald nitchie, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 03:01 (thirteen years ago) link
Not even the later, wintry poems?
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 03:09 (thirteen years ago) link
That's really where he breaks through, but "Sunday Morning" is a thing of beauty:
She hears, upon that water without sound,A voice that cries, ``The tomb in PalestineIs not the porch of spirits lingering.It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.''We live in an old chaos of the sun,Or an old dependency of day and night,Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,Of that wide water, inescapable.Deer walk upon our mountains, and quailWhistle about us their spontaneous cries;Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;And, in the isolation of the sky,At evening, casual flocks of pigeons makeAmbiguous undulations as they sink,Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 03:10 (thirteen years ago) link
sad that Stevens is going to lose...there's a poem, I don't remember which one, but it compares the sun to Walt Whitman, which is probably one of my favorite tropes of all everything...
― demons a. real (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 07:31 (thirteen years ago) link
agree with this and voting Stevens. In some poems I feel like Stevens is instructing the reader to be more like Frost then Stevens himself i.e. remaining a neutral viewer of the world, avoiding the personification and abstraction he sometimes engages in. Or maybe its how someone should read Frost, without oversimplifying his images into boring symbols.
― bnw, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 08:08 (thirteen years ago) link
Top stuff, and chimes with and articulates very much my more or less limited reading of him. (Going through the Collected Poems at the moment).
― Hide the prickforks (GamalielRatsey), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 11:15 (thirteen years ago) link
Easy vote for Stevens. I think I've said enough about the limits of my Frost appreciation on a couple of other threads, and Stevens (with Moore, Bishop nearby) is my favourite US poet of the century. Constantly return to him - things that puzzle me, or seem like a thrown-away odd image or lexical/sonic trick on early readings become serious, clearer & haunting as I come back to them. Great summary from Lord Soto.
― tetrahedron of space (woof), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:08 (thirteen years ago) link
Certainly if iconoclasts are your thing, you're going to have much more time for Stevens than for Frost, who works within The Tradition.
Dunno about this - feel like Stevens is an end or rejuvenation of intellectual Romanticism, the Coleridge -> Shelley aesthetics & imagination tradition, with a kind of continental filter (so takes in symbolism & imagism, but is already somewhere beyond that in the best of Harmonium.) Like he's really unusual, but I don't feel like he's iconoclastic I guess (but just thinking aloud, because yes, no disagreement that Frost sits in The Tradition more easily).
― tetrahedron of space (woof), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:15 (thirteen years ago) link
Stevens is definitely a Romantic-capital-R. "Credences of Summer" and "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" play with Romantic tropes.
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:29 (thirteen years ago) link
Lots of Shelley in "Credences of Summer," for instance.
Also: Stevens came up with the most awesome, OTM titles in the history of poetry (he really used to keep a notebook filled with them). Sometimes the titles are better than the poems. Here's one where it isn't the case:
"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad"
The time of year has grown indifferent.Mildew of summer and the deepening snowAre both alike in the routine I know:I am too dumbly in my being pent.
The wind attendant on the solsticesBlows on the shutters of the metropoles,Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tollsThe grand ideas of the villages.
The malady of the quotidian . . .Perhaps if summer ever came to restAnd lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressedThrough days like oceans in obsidian
Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;Perhaps, if winter once could penetrateThrough all its purples to the final slate,Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;
One might in turn become less diffident,Out of such mildew plucking neater mouldAnd spouting new orations of the cold.One might. One might. But time will not relent
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 12:31 (thirteen years ago) link
Stevens
― horseshoe, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 13:05 (thirteen years ago) link
here we go:
In the far South the sun of autumn is passingLike Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,The worlds that were and will be, death and day.Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.
― demons a. real (Drugs A. Money), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 14:07 (thirteen years ago) link
(I mean, that passage is sovereign, despite the unfortunate title.)
And Keats! "To Autumn"!
― alimosina, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 14:11 (thirteen years ago) link
Beat me to it.
Oh, that's definitely one from Harmonium. Can't place the title though.
xpost
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 14:12 (thirteen years ago) link
I appreciate those comparisons of Stevens to Shelley, and Keats—that actually helps me appreciate him more. I always assumed Frost was influenced by Hardy, and Yeats, and Browning, more than those other two. One other difference between the two, for me, is their humor; Frost makes me giggle with his cynicism, while Stevens seems more whimsical, even absurdist sometimes.
― donald nitchie, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 14:26 (thirteen years ago) link
Stevens is more droll ("One might. One might. But time will not relent.")
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 14:35 (thirteen years ago) link
xpost: That last stanza of Sunday Morning is gorgeous. I always get kind of lost in the middle of that poem, though
― donald nitchie, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 15:03 (thirteen years ago) link
Yeah, SM drifts in the middle. Part of the problem is the poem's published form is very different from its original sequence (the second stanza was originally the last, for instance).
― balls and adieu (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 15:10 (thirteen years ago) link
gotta be stevens
― max, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 15:23 (thirteen years ago) link
Frost/Stevens
― gato busca pleitos (Eazy), Tuesday, 27 July 2010 17:50 (thirteen years ago) link
If the question was, who was more influential, I think it has turned out to be Stevens
― donald nitchie, Tuesday, 27 July 2010 17:59 (thirteen years ago) link
SM is where Stevens first became Stevens. Nobody knows what happened. War is declared on God (what are you supposed to be doing on Sunday morning but aren't?) and the birds appear.
"The Plain Sense of Things" gets me every time. Without that rat coming out it would be too cold to bear.
― alimosina, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:20 (thirteen years ago) link
this is absolutely true - how happy are you with the present condition of poetry becomes the question then
― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:22 (thirteen years ago) link
at which point we will have a proper lit-fight on our hands
― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:23 (thirteen years ago) link
aw man later this week I will give this some serious reading/thought
― corn piece in mouffetard (acoleuthic), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:29 (thirteen years ago) link
I don't know about proper, more like unfortunate and lazy.
― bnw, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:35 (thirteen years ago) link
?
― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:40 (thirteen years ago) link
unless you're a person who doesn't think poetry has its ups & downs like any other genre I guess
― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:41 (thirteen years ago) link
had a Russian teacher in high school who would, on occasion, do something like look out the window and notice it was starting to become winter or something and then would just go "you know, this reminds me of a poem by Robert Frost" and then recite the entire thing from memory
― markers, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:43 (thirteen years ago) link
love that guy
― markers, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:44 (thirteen years ago) link
sorry aero, wary of blanket dismissals, have sat through too many
― bnw, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:44 (thirteen years ago) link
oh I don't blanket dismiss all poetry being written at present, nothing like that there's a lot of people working I like, I'll read anything wave books puts out usually with pleasure & I think we have in Norman Dubie something of a really oddball national treasure who doesn't get talked about nearly enough. but I do think some of the more alienating aspects of modernism & its various legacies, the directions the form went throughout the 20th century - i.e., the influences that took hold, among which Stevens ranks high; the things about Stevens against which Frost in his general clarity tends to stand - are the things about which people have disagreements, which are generally fun & even healthy
― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 03:49 (thirteen years ago) link
^^^ Do the Russians love Frost? Nabokov did.
― alimosina, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 14:40 (thirteen years ago) link
I know Joseph Brodsky loved Frost. Stevens, not as much
― donald nitchie, Wednesday, 28 July 2010 15:35 (thirteen years ago) link
I've always had the impression that Stevens did not really have much appeal outside of English-speaking countries--see also: Wordsworth.
― demons a. real (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 28 July 2010 19:24 (thirteen years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.
― System, Tuesday, 3 August 2010 23:01 (thirteen years ago) link
Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.
― System, Wednesday, 4 August 2010 23:01 (thirteen years ago) link
Stevens wins; Alfred gives up.
― demons a. real (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 11 August 2010 17:16 (thirteen years ago) link
When presented with a situation where numerous explanations are equally plausable, it is wise to choose the most charitable among them. Alfred may have been the victim of a bad haircut and consequently is ashamed to show his face around here until it grows out.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 11 August 2010 17:39 (thirteen years ago) link
Wait till you see my beard.
― Gucci Mane hermeneuticist (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 11 August 2010 17:45 (thirteen years ago) link
LOL sorry Alfred, I didn't mean to be uncharitable...
― demons a. real (Drugs A. Money), Wednesday, 11 August 2010 18:33 (thirteen years ago) link
Really digging this description of Triton/the sea from The Comedian as the Letter C
... Triton incomplicate with thatWhich made him Triton, nothing left of him,Except in faint memorial gesturings,That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,Here, something in the rise and fall of windThat seemed hallucinating horn, and here,A sunken voice, both of rememberingAnd of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.
Wonderful depiction of a God, for a start, and a wonderful description of the sea (that remembering and forgetfulness in alternate strain, descriptive of the hush and flood of the ocean).
― Pork Pius V (GamalielRatsey), Thursday, 7 October 2010 09:00 (thirteen years ago) link
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbsAlways wrong to the light, so never seeingDeeper down in the well than where the waterGives me back in a shining surface pictureMe myself in the summer heaven godlikeLooking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.Water came to rebuke the too clear water.One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a rippleShook whatever it was lay there at bottom,Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 28 April 2012 20:00 (twelve years ago) link
The one moonlight, in the simple-colored night,Like a plain poet revolving in his mindThe sameness of his various universe,Shines on the mere objectiveness of things..It is as if being was to be observed,As if, among the possible purposesOf what one sees, the purpose that comes first,The surface, is the purpose to be seen,.The property of the moon, what it evokes.It is to disclose the essential presence, say,Of a mountain, expanded and elevated almostInto a sense, an object the less; or else.To disclose in the figure waiting on the roadAn object the more, an undetermined formBetween the slouchings of a gunman and a lover,A gesture in the dark, a fear one feels.In the great vistas of night air, that takes this form,In the arbors that are as if of Saturn-star.So, then, this warm, wide, weatherless quietudeIs active with a power, an inherent life,.In spite of the mere objectiveness of things,Like a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking-glass,A change of color in the plain poet's mind,Night and silence disturbed by an interior sound..The one moonlight, the various universe, intendedSo much just to be seen --- a purpose, emptyPerhaps, absurd perhaps, but at least a purpose,Certain and ever more fresh. Ah! Certain, for sure...
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 31 January 2020 15:43 (four years ago) link
Head says Stevens, heart says Frost on this. Today, I think I'd go Stevens, but happy to have both.
I'd not read 'For Once' before. I love it. If it hadn't been in that format (and not in the thread, obviously) I might have mistaken it for Larkin.
― Ngolo Cantwell (Chinaski), Sunday, 16 February 2020 14:30 (four years ago) link