Find out about Matthew Rohrer's Shelley-inspired tattoo. Get brave with Yu Xuanji and Tina Chang. Experience Keats as a fragment of Ed Hirsch's consciousness, and hear George Herbert through the ears and mind of Alfred Corn. Oh I'm out on a kind of date there too, but my favorite pre-19th Century poet is wearing a wicked Invisibility Cloak. (And anyway, just between you and me, I think this poem of Robert Frost's might have competed hard as my top pick if I hadn't already written about it here.)
--Jenny Factor
Thank you, Jenny, for this excellent post. I share your enthusiasm for Frost's "Bereft." -- DL
Posted by: David Lehman | January 31, 2013 at 10:39 AM
Thanks, David. I hadn't been at all familiar with the Thomas Gray poem until I read your post. Was it hard for you to figure out which poem to write about for Slate?
I was so surprised to learn Frost wrote "Bereft" pre-1900, because it feels so markedly different from his other tiny early pieces from "A Boy's Will" (the poems he would have been writing around the same years).
I wonder why he waited so long to publish it? Was he uncomfortable perhaps at first with the poem's refusal of closure...or was he hiding raw shame or grief or atheism from public scrutiny? The "ear" on the poem feels different from other early shorter works too.
Posted by: Jenny Factor | January 31, 2013 at 02:19 PM