Another great Frost quote
”We go to college,” [Frost] wrote, ”to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in high school.” He dropped out of both Harvard and Dartmouth, and married his high-school sweetheart with few career prospects other than a fresh, unconventional talent for teaching children English and Latin. (The way to read a poet, he maintained, is ”to settle down like a revolving dog and make ourselves at home among the poems, completely at our ease as to how they should be taken.”)
When I first read that, for a split second I saw the phrase as “revolving door.” But “revolving dog” is great, and I know just what he means. So does this guy, who tells us everything you always wanted to know (or didn’t want to know) about the behavior:
And this guy has more to say about dogs’ pre-poop spinning. They have research on this, folks:
Reading closely (as we may have license to do) will have us alight on Frost’s use of the simple English word “make” in speaking of poetry and of poets. That is the deal, after all.
My grandfather had Frost as an English teacher at Pinkerton Academy c. 1910 and didn’t think he was very good. As Gramps’s mother and sister were both schoolteachers (Londonderry, then Manchester) he possibly knew what he was talking about. The story comes down that Frost’s heart just wasn’t in any of it in those years – not the farm, not the teaching. But that may have only been an interpretation tacked on later.
My son, BTW, must be one of a very few people to have a Robert Frost tattoo: the last lines of “Two Tramps in Mud Time” on the underside of his arm.
I guess that explains why Muslims hate dogs: They won’t poop facing Mecca.
I wonder why Robert Frost never got a Nobel Prize? Surely he deserved it more than Bob Dylan. If politics is a consideration for the committee, then the feminist and one time pacifist, Edna St. Vincent Millay, should be ahead of Dylan. She should have won it if she hadn’t produced anything other than her masterpiece Renascence.
Go figure.
The Other Chuck:
See this:
Seems mighty odd to me.
I suspect they also didn’t like his politics.
Speaking of politics and Millay, see this.
Neo, thanks for the link to your article which explains quite well why they didn’t like Millay. I have a small book collection of her poems inherited from my stepfather whose 1st wife taught at Mills College and was a big fan of her poetry.