"Who will come to the old man's rescue?"

Robert Frost before he became "the old man."

Have you seen this article by Ron Charles, giving glimpses of a story? Joyce Carol Oates is stirring up attention, attacking Robert Frost (and his poems) by the means of the cudgel of a story in the November Harper's. I have a few thoughts about this sort of enterprise, even before I see the full story, only partially available to non-subscribers.

Disclaimer: I have read many books by the writer, both poetry and fiction, and I have nothing against her as a person--never met her and am not suffering from any negative feelings toward her. In fact, I am the sort of person who rarely gets angry at people in real life, so I'm not too likely to have bad feelings about people I don't even know.

• For me, it is wrong to take selective bits of a living or once-living person's life and write a story about them in order for the author to grind an axe. This portrayal feels too personal and too governed by the desire to mock and to debase for the author's own purposes. (Here I should admit that I have written one fictional piece based on--based on, not professing to be the truth--events associated with a once-living person. I wrote it because I was fascinated and intrigued and felt sympathy for how the man's nature clashed with his time and place. I did not use his name. It is forthcoming. I also used the Puritan figure of Edward Taylor as a minor figure in one of my novels and in a story, though only a tiny number of readers recognized him. I believe no axes were ground in any of those tales.) 
• I happen to believe that it is always a mistake to write a story from a stance of lovelessness. It is probably a mistake to write anything or even say anything from that stance. "Love one another" is pretty good advice for human beings and hey, even for writers. What's the point of a character you despise and upon whom you visit no mercy?
• Desire to transgress with the unwitting help of the dead seems to me . . . necrophiliac.
• If you have no sympathy with Robert Frost's instinctual grasp of structure, sound, and metrical variation, fine. (In that case, I probably won't be thinking all that highly of your understanding of poetry, even if you have published a good deal of poetry, but you in turn won't be thinking highly of mine, so we come out even.)
• Side note: Robert Frost has been out of fashion for a good long time--not that I give one little whit or hoot about fashion. Attacking him is both ostensibly transgressive (he's sexist! he's racist! etcetera) and yet weirdly easy. Let's topple somebody who's out of fashion! It's about like cow-tipping. Now Poe was brave when he attacked W. W. Lord, a poetry power in the realm at that time (and, oddly enough, once rector here at Christ Church in Cooperstown.) But attacking Frost is about like attacking Longfellow these days. (Both deserve not to be forgotten.) Here I note that Frost's attacker is given a Longfellow name, Evangeline. Longfellow's poem of the same name was enormously popular.
• The fact is that Modernism stripped away many of the elements of poetry, not just sound and form, and that the richness and sentiment and color and abundance of a poet like Frost now look fairly strange to many of those who came after. That's okay. The thing we are now--post-post-post-Modernism or what have you--will also pass away (if it hasn't already) and look strange in its turn. People will wonder how so much of our poetry became so thin and drab and pedestrian and unpleasing to the ear. People will not wonder why we lost our audience.
• There is no progress in poetry. There is only alternation and flux and the occasional achievement of beauty and power. To think that there is progress gives a person the strange idea that one might just be a better person and poet than an accomplished writer who lived in an earlier time. This is a false way to think. Because he lived long ago, Andrew Marvell is not less than, say, Mary Oliver. As a writer, he might even be better. I don't care about whether he's better or not better in any other way. It's not my business or my interest.
• People who lived in the past are not exactly the same as people who live now. It is a category error to think that people in the past were just like us and felt and believed exactly as we do. (That's why we have so many historical novels that sound like contemporary people are wearing fancy dress and pretending. And it's why we can sometimes feel so very self-righteous in scolding the great men and women of the past.)
• I do not care about Robert Frost's failings as a human being, or about how he evinced any traces of his time and culture. Robert Frost is done with all earthly repentance and grief and attempts to be a better person. We the living are the ones who must struggle in that way now. 
• What I care about in the case of Robert Frost is something very different. I care that he gave over much of his life to the making of wonderful little constructions of beauty and power out of words and "a mouthful of air," as Yeats said. I care about the costly-to-him, free-to-us gift that he left behind for me and anybody who wishes to pick it up. That is no little thing. 

Ron Charles asks who will defend him. Who will come to the old man's rescue? As I said earlier in the day, Frost, you have at least one woman who will heave-ho your dadgum statue back in place.

Close of the late poem, "Directive"--

 Weep for what little things could make them glad.
 Then for the house that is no more a house,
 But only a belilaced cellar hole,
 Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
 This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
 Your destination and your destiny's
 A brook that was the water of the house,
 Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
 Too lofty and original to rage.
 (We know the valley streams that when aroused
 Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
 I have kept hidden in the instep arch
 Of an old cedar at the waterside
 A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
 Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
 So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
 (I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.) 
 Here are your waters and your watering place.
 Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

A few spoonfuls of Disch

The thought that Thomas M. Disch a.k.a. Tom Disch (he wrote poetry under the latter name) left this world at 68 because it seemed about to oust him from the nest where he had been happy and written dozens of books of poetry and and fiction and highly readable criticism still rankles. He lost the partner to death and then lost their house in Barryville, and he seemed about to lose the Manhattan apartment when he put a bullet in his sadly depressed head on the fourth of July more than three years ago.

But today I am thinking about his poetry criticism. It introduced me to the work of Kathleen Raine--a boon--and made me appreciate Kenneth Koch and a few others more than I did previously.  His essays could also be as hard-hitting and unswerving as the criticism of William Logan, the poet and critic said to be most feared by poets. (I enjoy his writing, even where I have a difference of opinion, but perhaps that is in part because I live in the happy, innocent state of never having been the subject of it.) Disch the critic was good on trends and summing-up, and he was good on individual writers.

You may disagree with him, but he remains challenging and interesting. Try and see:

from THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE

The myth of risk
"Risk-taking" is my favorite blurb-writing maneuver, since rarely is the risk being taken ever specified. the suggestion is that the poet is somehow a member of that international band of persecuted geniuses on whole behalf PEN sends off protests to the dictatorial regimes of third world countries. Usually, of course, the opposite is true, for the political opinions expressed in the poems of reputedly "risk-taking" poets tend to be such as to make university tenure more likely.

Poets in academia
When bad poetry is valued at the going rate of good poetry, Gresham's law is bound to kick in. Bad poetry will drive out good. For bad poets are likely to be capable careerists, who will have the good sense, when they act in some related bureaucratic capacity, such a judging a contest or hiring a teaching candidate, to favor those as ill favored as themselves. In effect, Cinderella's stepsisters are in charge of the invitation list to the ball.

Andrew Hudgins
Hudgins is southern in that enviable sense that imparts to the work of Eudora Welty or Carson McCullers a cruel humor and linguistic crackle that derives ... from a community of, if you'll forgive the pun, wise crackers.

The myth of progress in the arts
The basic myth of the avant-garde (a myth implicit in the "postmodern" label) is that art progresses by historical stages, and each advance is perceived by the uninitiated rabble as sacrilege or nonsense. Painting provides the best paradigm: impressionism, postimpressionism, cubism, abstraction, pop, and then the Babel of the postmodern.

Updike the poet and the upper middle class
If the class that Updike addresses so cogently were in the habit of reading poetry, he would be America's Philip Larkin.

On confessional poetry
...there are no formal challenges, no musicality, no effort to find the mot juste or the telling epithet. There is simply candor, an effort to enlist the reader's sympathy in the circumstances of the poets' lives. All three poets have been award prizes for their confidences, and all three offer thanks to Yaddo on their acknowledgment pages, so however little regard this reviewer can muster for their work, their esthetic respectability is an established fact.

The myriad-minded poet
Once a poet has mastered his instrument, once he is a poet, he is judged--cherished, respected, or ignored--chiefly for his sense of poetic opportunity, for the ways he welcomes or courts his Muse; for his availability, as a poet, to the plenum of experience. Poets distinguish themselves one from the other less by the formal characteristics of their voices than by the occasions they elect to share with us, and while some poets are admired for their judicious cultivation of the same Parnassian half acre, in general the poets we prize most, and read most faithfully, are those whose lives, as reported, seem largest; who are able, in the most diverse moods and circumstances, to map a wide range of experience while maintaining the special alertness and afflatus poetry requires.