TS Heavy Hitters Poll #3: Frost vs Stevens

Stevens is definitely a Romantic-capital-R. "Credences of Summer" and "Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction" play with Romantic tropes.

Lots of Shelley in "Credences of Summer," for instance.

Also: Stevens came up with the most awesome, OTM titles in the history of poetry (he really used to keep a notebook filled with them). Sometimes the titles are better than the poems. Here's one where it isn't the case:

"The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad"

The time of year has grown indifferent.
Mildew of summer and the deepening snow
Are both alike in the routine I know:
I am too dumbly in my being pent.

The wind attendant on the solstices
Blows on the shutters of the metropoles,
Stirring no poet in his sleep, and tolls
The grand ideas of the villages.

The malady of the quotidian . . .
Perhaps if summer ever came to rest
And lengthened, deepened, comforted, caressed
Through days like oceans in obsidian

Horizons, full of night's midsummer blaze;
Perhaps, if winter once could penetrate
Through all its purples to the final slate,
Persisting bleakly in an icy haze;

One might in turn become less diffident,
Out of such mildew plucking neater mould
And spouting new orations of the cold.
One might. One might. But time will not relent

Stevens

here we go:

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

In the far South the sun of autumn is passing
Like Walt Whitman walking along a ruddy shore.
He is singing and chanting the things that are part of him,
The worlds that were and will be, death and day.
Nothing is final, he chants. No man shall see the end.
His beard is of fire and his staff is a leaping flame.

(I mean, that passage is sovereign, despite the unfortunate title.)

Lots of Shelley in "Credences of Summer," for instance.

And Keats! "To Autumn"!

Beat me to it.

Oh, that's definitely one from Harmonium. Can't place the title though.

xpost

I appreciate those comparisons of Stevens to Shelley, and Keats—that actually helps me appreciate him more. I always assumed Frost was influenced by Hardy, and Yeats, and Browning, more than those other two. One other difference between the two, for me, is their humor; Frost makes me giggle with his cynicism, while Stevens seems more whimsical, even absurdist sometimes.

Stevens is more droll ("One might. One might. But time will not relent.")

xpost: That last stanza of Sunday Morning is gorgeous. I always get kind of lost in the middle of that poem, though

Yeah, SM drifts in the middle. Part of the problem is the poem's published form is very different from its original sequence (the second stanza was originally the last, for instance).

gotta be stevens

Frost/Stevens

If the question was, who was more influential, I think it has turned out to be Stevens

SM is where Stevens first became Stevens. Nobody knows what happened. War is declared on God (what are you supposed to be doing on Sunday morning but aren't?) and the birds appear.

"The Plain Sense of Things" gets me every time. Without that rat coming out it would be too cold to bear.

If the question was, who was more influential, I think it has turned out to be Stevens

this is absolutely true - how happy are you with the present condition of poetry becomes the question then

at which point we will have a proper lit-fight on our hands

aw man later this week I will give this some serious reading/thought

at which point we will have a proper lit-fight on our hands

I don't know about proper, more like unfortunate and lazy.

?

unless you're a person who doesn't think poetry has its ups & downs like any other genre I guess

had a Russian teacher in high school who would, on occasion, do something like look out the window and notice it was starting to become winter or something and then would just go "you know, this reminds me of a poem by Robert Frost" and then recite the entire thing from memory

love that guy

sorry aero, wary of blanket dismissals, have sat through too many

oh I don't blanket dismiss all poetry being written at present, nothing like that there's a lot of people working I like, I'll read anything wave books puts out usually with pleasure & I think we have in Norman Dubie something of a really oddball national treasure who doesn't get talked about nearly enough. but I do think some of the more alienating aspects of modernism & its various legacies, the directions the form went throughout the 20th century - i.e., the influences that took hold, among which Stevens ranks high; the things about Stevens against which Frost in his general clarity tends to stand - are the things about which people have disagreements, which are generally fun & even healthy

^^^ Do the Russians love Frost? Nabokov did.

I know Joseph Brodsky loved Frost. Stevens, not as much

I've always had the impression that Stevens did not really have much appeal outside of English-speaking countries--see also: Wordsworth.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Stevens wins; Alfred gives up.

When presented with a situation where numerous explanations are equally plausable, it is wise to choose the most charitable among them. Alfred may have been the victim of a bad haircut and consequently is ashamed to show his face around here until it grows out.

Wait till you see my beard.

LOL sorry Alfred, I didn't mean to be uncharitable...

Really digging this description of Triton/the sea from The Comedian as the Letter C

... Triton incomplicate with that
Which made him Triton, nothing left of him,
Except in faint memorial gesturings,
That were like arms and shoulders in the waves,
Here, something in the rise and fall of wind
That seemed hallucinating horn, and here,
A sunken voice, both of remembering
And of forgetfulness, in alternate strain.

Wonderful depiction of a God, for a start, and a wonderful description of the sea (that remembering and forgetfulness in alternate strain, descriptive of the hush and flood of the ocean).

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

The one moonlight, in the simple-colored night,
Like a plain poet revolving in his mind
The sameness of his various universe,
Shines on the mere objectiveness of things.
.
It is as if being was to be observed,
As if, among the possible purposes
Of what one sees, the purpose that comes first,
The surface, is the purpose to be seen,
.
The property of the moon, what it evokes.
It is to disclose the essential presence, say,
Of a mountain, expanded and elevated almost
Into a sense, an object the less; or else
.
To disclose in the figure waiting on the road
An object the more, an undetermined form
Between the slouchings of a gunman and a lover,
A gesture in the dark, a fear one feels
.
In the great vistas of night air, that takes this form,
In the arbors that are as if of Saturn-star.
So, then, this warm, wide, weatherless quietude
Is active with a power, an inherent life,
.
In spite of the mere objectiveness of things,
Like a cloud-cap in the corner of a looking-glass,
A change of color in the plain poet's mind,
Night and silence disturbed by an interior sound.
.
The one moonlight, the various universe, intended
So much just to be seen --- a purpose, empty
Perhaps, absurd perhaps, but at least a purpose,
Certain and ever more fresh. Ah! Certain, for
sure...

Head says Stevens, heart says Frost on this. Today, I think I'd go Stevens, but happy to have both.

I'd not read 'For Once' before. I love it. If it hadn't been in that format (and not in the thread, obviously) I might have mistaken it for Larkin.