Sunday, April 8, 2018

Poetry Thoughts 2018: Introduction


It took me a few years, but at the beginning of 2018 I finally finished The Oxford Book of American Verse. From Anne Bradstreet to Robert Lowell, for over 1,100 pages, I sampled what the literary critics and poetry enthusiasts considered the best of American verse in 1950.

Contrary to how I treat my other books, I often break the no-tampering rule and allow myself to write (with pencil, mind!) in them. This is the way I can keep track of my initial opinions and perceptions, and as needed diagram the meaning of some of the headier works. Unlike prose, I have found that my opinion of specific poems or poets may change over time.


For example, I once would have described Emily Dickinson as my favorite poet. During college my enthusiasm for her faded—though, to be fair, this could be a result of having to dissect her works too much, and in the process hearing some rather fantastic postmodern interpretations of what she thought of religion, love/sex, and feminism.

On the other hand, I’ve always disliked Robert Frost; I remember being bored and aggravated as a child by the Reading Rainbow episode that narrated Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, especially during reruns when I wanted to see the one where he went to the Star Trek: The Next Generation special effect department, or showed a lady making Ukrainian Easter blown eggs, or the one where he went on a boat with a marine biologist…

But I digress. Back to Frost. The Oxford Book of American Verse naturally includes a selection of his poems. To skip them would be to be cheating, anyway, so I decided to give him another chance. To my surprise, he wasn’t as bad as I remembered as an eight-year-old wannabe Ukrainian marine biologist in space. In fact, I discovered an appreciation for his poetry that captures a piece of rural “Americana.”

Because April is National Poetry Month (and, as T.S. Eliot would point out, “April is the cruellest month”…especially for those who hate poetry!), I’ll take the opportunity to talk about some of the poems I found interesting. 

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