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.”
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