Old Bob

Eric Ormsby on Robert Frost's notebooks. An excerpt:

The notebooks prove Frost a master of aphorism. Haggen likens him to Lichtenberg; the comparison isn’t far-fetched. Some of Frost’s aphorisms have a classic cast: “The malicious talker commits himself to an enmity” or “Absolute outsideness forever eludes us” or “Repetition analyzes.” Others are lyrical, hovering between incisiveness and suggestion: “Thought advances like spilled water along dry ground. Stopping gathering breaking out and running again” or, in a similar vein: “The smoke flowed down the roof and in the open window and up the chimney again.” A few have a disturbing, almost Beckettian, bleakness: “Only one way to come into this vast hollow with no surrounding walls.” Still fewer are unexpectedly personal: “In composing poetry I am packing up to go a long way on wings.” These polished dicta spring from the page amid a welter of notations which range from the banal to the truly bizarre (“The bat flew out of my mouth/ I nearly died in my sleep”) and yet, all the jottings send us back to the poetry with new eyes.

[HT: Arts & Letters Daily ]