![]() 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. We may think we are in a better position that others but it is not the reality.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. He again relates this with our lives as each decision of ours has its own set of good and bad decisions. He though But after walking for some distance, he realises that both the paths were almost same. The poet says this because this path was more grassier and hence must be walked upon by lesser people. He then takes a path which he feels is slightly better because it was taken by lesser people. After looking at both paths for a long time, the poet realises that both paths look identical. He relates the same with life as we come across some tough situations and have to make our choice among them. But after a certain point, he was only able to see trees and grass. ![]() The poet tried to be careful and find the most appropriate path between 2 before making his choice.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |