Chekhov's Mistress
Auden Facts Theory
Here’s a bit from W.H. Auden’s essay on Robert Frost in The Dyer’s Hand. It seems dated in its particulars, (i.e. “An American Poet… vs “European”), yet otherwise strikes me as very much the state of poetry such that – and mind you this is slightly more of an observation than a judgement – Frost’s poetry nearly represents something novel at best and perhaps even lost:
There have been European poets who have come to similar conclusions about the isolation of the human condition, and nature’s indifference to human values, but, compared with an American, they are at a disadvantage in expressing them. Living as they do in a well, even overpopulated, countryside where, thanks to centuries of cultivation, Mother Earth as acquired human features, they are forced to make abstract philosophical statements or use uncommon atypical images, so that what they say seems to be imposed upon them by theory and temperament rather than facts. An American poet like Frost, on the other hand, can appeal to facts for which any theory must account and which any temperament must admit.
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