The punch line, Orr reveals, is that the road “less traveled by” apparently wasn’t: worn down by passersby “really about the same,” both roads “that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Take these lines literally, and the speaker’s sonorous conclusion-“I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference”-sounds less like measured stock-taking than an after-the-fact justification. Or you know its moves, its progression of steps forth and looks back, the way you half remember a joke: a man walks into a yellow wood, two roads diverge, he chooses “the one less traveled by,” that makes all the difference, America-brand individualism wins again. Orr says it anyway, finding the poem’s deep cultural seepage in Ford commercials, rap lyrics, journalistic clichés, “one of the foundational texts of modern self-help” ( The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth), and over four hundred books “on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse.” (Orr overlooks the prevalence of the phrase “the road less traveled” in America’s sex columns his arguments suffer accordingly.) Whether or not you’ve actively tried to memorize this poem, you likely have its best-known phrases stored in your vocabulary. Orr’s Frost evolves into an unmanageable poet, but he starts off as something simple: the author of “The Road Not Taken,” a poem whose ubiquity goes without saying. Orr has written the rare book on poetry that does not discriminate between audiences: newcomers and experts, Americans and Belgians, This Frost or the Other Frost, you or me or Orr. (This is Orr’s metaphor: in its introduction, Beautiful & Pointless analogizes modern poetry with Belgium, a beautiful and pointless country.)īut Orr’s new book is far subtler, stranger, and more subversive than his last, a how-to that admits defeat page after page, a manual for the uninitiated which never dumbs down or tidies up its unsettling suggestions. On face, The Road Not Taken looks like that earlier book, which performed a particular service for a particular audience: if you’ve always wanted to vacation to that foreign destination called Poetry, but simply don’t have the time, Orr’s travel guide will save you the trouble by condensing all that beautiful, pointless sightseeing into 200 pages. Orr is a pithy, pushy poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and the author of one previous book, Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (2011). The latest defense of Frost-the longest, most publicized, and most extravagantly subtitled to date-is David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong. These corrective lenses have scandalized casual readers, but they utterly delighted Frost: when, at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday dinner, Trilling shocked guests by toasting Frost as “a terrifying poet,” Frost responded with a thank-you note: “You made my birthday party a surprise party.” “The Other Frost” (to quote the title of a Jarrell essay) is not a populist, apparently patriotic bard, but a modernist whom you might call (depending on whose Frost you’re meeting) coy, playful, mischievous, malevolent, an unsparing skeptic (if not an atheist), or an unappeasable pessimist (if not a downright nihilist). He has also been our most defended poet: Frost’s respectable partisans, among them Lionel Trilling, Randall Jarrell, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Muldoon, have insisted that we look more closely at the true Frost, a poet less lovely, more dark and deep, than the Frost we were taught to love. For a half century, Robert Frost has been the most unavoidable of American poets: the nation’s inaugural inaugural poet, laureate of swinging birches and snowy evenings, a fixture as essential to the middle-school classroom as the chalkboard.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |