From Oxford University Press (12/20/06):
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Waking up every day this week to David Lehman’s thoughts on American poetry might actually turn me into a morning person. Today, Lehman, editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Poetry Coordinator of the New School Writing Program in New York City, looks at scary poetry. >>
What is the scariest poem in American poetry? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to terrify. It is possible, however, that Robert Frost — Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage — has written the darkest and most frightening poems in our literature. The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.
The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth — exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.
Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not the death but the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off — / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos.
Click here to continue reading this piece, originally posted on December 20, 2006.
Wait a second, what about "Safe in their alabaster chambers? It's far scarier, in the blank infinity sense, than anything by Poe or Frost, even as they could be "scary," too. But Emily Dickinson is far and away (who could contest it, she's got lots of scary ones) the most terrifying poet of the United States.
Posted by: Kent Johnson | February 27, 2020 at 06:54 PM
You may be right, Kent. Dickinson is terrifying, all right. I wrote the piece in 2006. If I were to write it today, I might well make the argument for certain Dickinson poems, such as the one in which the sight of a desert isle is, for the shipwrecked sailor, no grounds for hope:
But most, like Chaos - Stopless - cool -
Without a Chance, or spar -
Or even a Report of Land -
To justify - Despair.
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | February 29, 2020 at 05:38 PM