POETICKS

The best English-language poets are named Robert, but Robert Frost would have been a favorite poet of mine even if he’d been named Adolph.  I consider his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” the best straitverse poem I’ve encountered. So it was nice to see a review of a newly available volume of his letters in the latest issue of The New Criterion–although no surprise, considering how little interest to it poets younger than dead for forty years, figuratively if not literally, are.  It was good, too, to learn that the reviewer,  Andrew Hamilton, feels this collection of letters “should serve as a thorough corrective to (the view of Frost’s main biographer, Lawrence) Thompson as a “monster”–although I never have thought of him as anything but a sometimes cranky decent man, myself . . . although he’d be on my list of great poets however bad a human being I agreed he was, and that comes close to all that counts with me.

I bring him up not only to get another blog entry out of the way so I can go back to bed but because the quite interesting review of his letters   mentions his writing in one of them about how appropriate the language of his poetry’s is “to the virtues I celebrate.”  “Virtues.”  Didacticism. Poetry with a moral.  Horace’s stupid pronouncement that poetry should teach as well as please–although it usually comes up in reverse to the way I have it, reminding people that poetry should please as well as teach.  I’m an extremist here although I contend I usually seek the middle between extremes–unless I go for both extremes simultaneously.  I believe poetry should give pleasure, period.  Any teaching it tries to do will only distract from that.

But the first poem of my own I thought okay (the one in my 14 and 15 March entries)  pushed the virtue of wilderness versus ordered sterility.  My one about “tr,af:fi;c.” had nothing to with any virtue, though.  Which doesn’t mean someone trying to force it into everything could charge it with celebrating the virtue of winter serenity or something.  It does that.  A higher virtue it can be said to honor is the simple virtue of sensual awareness.  Perhaps at an even higher level it expresses my own religion’s highest virtue, reverence of the universe.  Urp.

But all this indicates is that virtue is a part of any poem to some degree.  Ergo, to permit discussion of virtue in a poem to be of value, one must distinguish explicit references to standard abstract virtues like honesty and tolerance (two of my favorites) from implicit references, implicit reference, that is, which the context of the poem fails explicitly to suggest may be there.  Only poems concerned with the first kind of virtue should count as moral poems.

I use the same kind of reasoning to justify my contempt for the frequent declaration that all poems are political.

By this reasoning, I consider my favorite Frost poems “lyrical,” which I use for poems the main intent of which is to give aesthetic pleasure, and little or no moral improving.  Ergo, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is not a moral poem–although it does convey a moral meaning: duty before pleasure, or something about the importance of fulfilling responsibilities.  Frost’s use of this moral message is brilliant, though: it’s only a frame to attach his much more interesting characterization of his persona to, whereas that characterization is only a ladder to a scene (in a [mood]) . . .  in Time.  But it’s all also in a poem, a poem that is a box of sounds as another sense that poem makes.

My traffic poem goes directly to the scene, with a box of punctuation taking the place of Frost’s box of sounds, and my poem as a whole doing less than Frost’s–but, I would argue, more for poetry.

Actually, my poem has a persona, too.  He just isn’t physically in the poem the way Frost is in his.  Nor is he brought anywhere near alive.  But he’s watching the sky’s descent.  He’s punctuating along with the traffic. . . .

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