
ISSUE DATE: Oct. 9, 1950
THE BUZZ:
Of living U.S. poets, none has lodged poems more surely where they will be hard to get rid of. At its best, Frost’s crabapple-tart verse distills into the pure liquor of lyric poetry. “Stopping by Woods” is one of the loveliest poems ever written. Every U.S. schoolboy knows “Birches.” His lines carry the tone and temper of New England’s dour and canny folk, often have the trenchancy and inevitability of folk sayings. Frost has made “good fences make good neighbors” part of the language. Chores are “doing things over and over that just won’t stay done”; home is “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
But Frost is a poet with few disciples. Today’s bright young men look to the intricate, mannered, literary methods of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for their models. They grudgingly admire Frost as a kind of 19th Century relic, resent his commanding popularity, and smart under the reproach: “If Frost can make himself intelligible, why can’t you?”
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