[HN Gopher] Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?
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Is Robert Frost Even a Good Poet?
Author : lermontov
Score : 41 points
Date : 2025-03-25 06:11 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theparisreview.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theparisreview.org)
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > He responded to my October 2022 email, explaining that he had
| "stopped writing much journalism as of 2015 so as to avoid
| distractions from a book project that I thought would take an
| almost unfathomably long time--two years or perhaps even three.
| Seven years later, I'm doing my best to polish the third draft."
|
| One encounters this _over and over_ again--even books that
| successfully get finished and published take far longer than
| expected, very consistently, and especially any involving
| research. Books (non-fiction in particular) written as series
| often also expand from, say, five planned volumes in the forward
| to the first edition of the first volume, to (say) a dozen.
|
| Reminds me of software estimation.
| ggm wrote:
| Vikram Seth. Massive advance for a "jump novel" on "a suitable
| boy" characters in modern times, breaks up with life partner,
| has total catastrophic writers block, book still "coming soon"
| a decade later.
|
| Also a poet. Said to pick his team at the agency from people
| who like poetry, working his prose.
| etc-hosts wrote:
| Never knew about Vikram Seth before.
|
| He's coming up on beating Joseph Mitchell's 30 years of not
| finishing anything:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/01/joseph-
| mitchel...
| dmoy wrote:
| My dad has been writing a specific non fiction book since
| forever (at the very least 25+ years, possibly longer?). It's
| not exactly the kind that can be finished. If you need to know
| about that specific topic, there's that one and like one other
| that goes into as much depth.
|
| He resurrected and nearly completely rewrote someone else's
| thing from mid 20th century era, which itself was a
| resurrection of an late 19th century era thing.
|
| But yes it's exactly as you describe - keeps expanding and
| updating. Near 6000 pages now?
| mysterydip wrote:
| Has it been released and he's doing updated
| revision/editions, or has it still not been released?
| dmoy wrote:
| Oh, it got released like 20 years ago, and there's new
| editions with new volumes every N years, and constant
| updates to the older material as it goes out of date or
| needs newer references or whatever.
|
| It'll just never be done, it's not a thing that can really
| be finished
| lupire wrote:
| > This has a lot to do with the fetishization of what's
| difficult,
|
| And this reminds me of software development!
| jonahx wrote:
| A nice quote by Plunkett from the interview:
|
| > There's a cultural association between the time of exposure and
| the level of sophistication. You'd sound pretty vulgar if you
| said, Oh, yeah, I learned to play Bach when I was thirteen--
| that's easy stuff. But people really do make pronouncements like
| that about literature. Someone I met a few years ago, a big
| poetry person, just could not believe that an adult would spend
| years of his life thinking about Robert Frost. To her it seemed
| like doing a Ph.D. in simple algebra.
|
| Also, article title is a rare exception to Betteridge's law.
| josefritzishere wrote:
| Gold star for Betteridge's law refernece.
| lupire wrote:
| > Also, article title is a rare exception to Betteridge's law.
|
| Sort of. "Even" is a kind of sarcastic/negative word, so the
| question is asking "Robert Frost is a bad poet, right?"
| jonahx wrote:
| Huh, nice observation. The suggestion implied by the question
| is false.
| nimish wrote:
| He had product market fit -- this entire site is premised on the
| same grounds as 'A Road Not Taken' so i mean come on
| Hizonner wrote:
| No, I think Frost has really gone downhill.
| lupire wrote:
| Like Plunkett says of Frost, this interview is hilarious in its
| superficial simplicity covering a deeper indirect commentary.
|
| PLUNKETT: Some people may think they have the answer, but I think
| that if you have any degree of certainty about it, you don't
| really understand the problem. I would say the same about reading
| Frost's poetry.
|
| INTERVIEWER: That if you think you have the answer, you don't
| have it?
|
| PLUNKETT: You don't quite understand the problem.
| jll29 wrote:
| Kevin Murphy's lecture on Frost is the best one I've ever heard:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5140uJOUDE
|
| He first recaps the conventional view people have about Frost,
| then reads "The Road Not Taken", his most famous poem, and then
| completely takes Frost AND the poem AND THEN the public's
| misunderstanding of Frost apart.
|
| Don't get fooled by the bare visual appearance of Murphy, his
| empty blackboard (no PPT, no bs) - this lecture is a fantastic,
| suprising and deeply disturbing (regarding what is revealed about
| Frost and his public misappreciation). Simply priceless teaching
| - thank you, dear colleague.
|
| EDIT: If you ask ChatGPT for a "10-20 sentence interpretation of
| The Road Not Taken", it falls right into the trap that Murphy
| warns about.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| robert frost goes so hard. he's very dark and people have no
| clue. that is an obscure reading of the text that you only pick
| up if you're an avid reader or english major.
| jldugger wrote:
| > he's very dark and people have no clue.
|
| ... is The Road Not Taken a map to where he hid the bodies?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53087/out-out
| alabastervlog wrote:
| What's amazing is it's _not_ obscure. It 's in the plain
| language of the poem--you either read it (something like)
| that way, _or_ you have to, IDK, assume Frost was just so
| extremely sloppy or inept that he got all confused a couple
| times in the middle of writing this short poem but then
| published it that way regardless, and then also decide that
| the common reading (despite all the confusion and
| contradictions) is the one you 're going with for--I can't
| even imagine what reason, because it's what you get if you
| only pay attention to the very beginning and very end of the
| poem, and not very close attention to those, even, I guess?
|
| The latter is ridiculous... and yet common.
|
| What this reveals is that an enormous proportion of people
| who can read, cannot do so at all well. This isn't like
| catching the multilingual puns and their significance in
| _Finnegan 's Wake_, it's quite straightforward, at least
| insofar as it's plain that even the surface meaning is not "I
| in-fact took the road less traveled by, and that was good".
| LPisGood wrote:
| A more charitable interpretation might be that most people
| have read this poem maybe once while half paying attention
| in school and they have forgotten all of the details except
| for the famous line and the cultural context that it
| usually comes with.
| scottyah wrote:
| I love books with hidden little things in books, like
| Hofstadter's GEB where he writes messages in the first
| letter of each line. Not to mention the plethora of meta
| self-references and recursions.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry and
| interpret the poem based on its own understanding, you'll get
| more closely aligned to what Murphy is talking about. Here's
| the output I got back out:
|
| This poem presents a moment of decision, where the speaker
| faces two paths in a forest, symbolizing choices in life. At
| first, they hesitate, examining both options. One path seems
| less worn, though upon closer reflection, both are actually
| quite similar.
|
| The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other behind
| with the thought that they might return--though deep down, they
| acknowledge that choices lead to new choices, making it
| unlikely they'll ever revisit the first path.
|
| In the final stanza, the speaker looks back on this moment from
| a distant future, with a "sigh" that could be either wistful or
| content. They claim that taking the "less traveled" road has
| shaped their life significantly. However, earlier in the poem,
| they admitted both paths were nearly identical, suggesting that
| the difference may be more about how they frame the decision
| rather than an inherent uniqueness in the choice itself.
|
| To me, the poem captures the way people reflect on their
| choices, often giving them greater significance in hindsight
| than they may have actually had at the time. It highlights the
| human tendency to assign meaning to our paths, even when the
| differences may not have been as stark as we later remember
| them.
| akhleung wrote:
| > The speaker ultimately chooses one, leaving the other
| behind with the > thought that they might return--
| though deep down, they acknowledge that > choices lead
| to new choices, making it unlikely they'll ever revisit the
| > first path.
|
| Not unlike TODO comments! An interesting analogy for life in
| general.
| LPisGood wrote:
| > If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry
|
| AI models can't ignore their training in any sense, so what
| exactly is the intended outcome from using these tokens?
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| The intent is for it to not give me any interpretations of
| what it's been trained on but instead provide me with an
| interpretation using the plain text I'm giving it. Of
| course it's going to use its training, but I don't want it
| to regurgitate interpretations of the poem that it was
| trained on.
| recursive wrote:
| > If you ask ChatGPT to ignore all training on poetry and
| interpret the poem based on its own understanding ...
|
| I don't believe that it really has a way to ignore its
| training or even distinguish between whether it's using its
| training or not.
|
| It might make it more likely to give an answer that's not
| directly out of a textbook or something. Or not.
| magicmicah85 wrote:
| That's an important distinction and looking back at my
| prompt. I didn't ask it to ignore all training but instead
| it's previous understanding of poetry so that it can give
| me an interpretation using the plain text I'm giving it.
| Whether it can truly do that or not, I don't know, but the
| results still came through. This is the prompt I used:
|
| Ignore all previous understanding of poetry and
| interpretations that you were trained on. I want you to
| interpret the below poem in your own understanding only. Do
| you understand what I am asking you?
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I don't have time to watch the lecture but interested in it. I
| remember reading about Frosts personal life at one point, and
| learned that he had a very conventional marriage for decades
| before his wife passed away. Some time later he began having an
| affair with his friends wife. My memory is hazy here, but I
| think I recall looking up the year that Road Not Taken was
| written, and it was during this time he was having this very
| unconventional late-life period. It made me wonder whether that
| poem was him looking back on his traditional/moral life he'd
| lived, and wondering whether it was the right choice.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| > I remember reading about Frosts personal life at one point,
| and learned that he had a very conventional marriage for
| decades before his wife passed away. Some time later he began
| having an affair with his friends wife. My memory is hazy
| here, but I think I recall looking up the year that Road Not
| Taken was written, and it was during this time he was having
| this very unconventional late-life period.
|
| He wrote "The Road Not Taken" 23 years before his wife died,
| your suggested time line does not add up.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| INTERVIEWER
|
| Frost was an important early example of the way a poet could
| inhabit the university, in roles that many American poets depend
| on for their livelihood today--he was the original writer in
| residence, or visiting writer, or professor of the practice, that
| kind of thing. Yet he was so critical of higher education. How do
| you think about that tension?
|
| PLUNKETT
|
| Frost had general misgivings about the institutionalization of
| anything, whether that was an act of imagination that finds its
| form in the institution of verse, or even a bond of love that
| finds its form in the institution of marriage. He had a sense of
| misgiving about what's lost in learning as it's institutionalized
| in college. He occupies this funny role where he has these
| misgivings but he very much thinks that the institution is better
| than the utopian alternative. He's a lapsed Romantic, where both
| the Romanticism and the lapse are important. He is able to
| imagine an ideal alternative to the way things are, while being
| critical of the kind of idealism that would demand that the world
| actually rise up to meet it.
| marko-k wrote:
| He's a brilliant poet, though often misunderstood. Skip _Stopping
| by Woods on a Snowy Evening_ and try _Birches_ [1], _A Tuft of
| Flowers_ [2], or the _The Witch of Coos_ [3] instead.
|
| [1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches
|
| [2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-
| flo...
|
| [3]
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volum...
| djeastm wrote:
| >Skip Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
|
| No way, that's one of my favorites. I don't want to let
| pretension keep me from liking what I like.
| dkga wrote:
| Perfect timing. Robert Frost is by far one of my favourite poems,
| which I do not say lightly as I love poetry - and I am not a
| native English speaker. I am now recording one of his poems and
| this read, and the additional info here in the comments such as
| Kevin Murphy's lecture is great material for me.
| archiepeach wrote:
| Humble plug for my poetry app. When I was getting into poetry I
| was reading a lot of them online but found the majority of sites
| to have awful designs with garish ads that completely detracted
| from the poem. So I wrote a scraper which downloaded 40,000 poems
| that were in the public domain and rendered them in an iOS app
| with a beautiful design. Crafting individual profiles for all of
| the poets was painstaking and arduous, but the users seem to
| really enjoy the app so far. I do already have some AI analysis
| for arcane poems (but I don't explicitly mention that it's AI as
| I think apps should never say that - it doesn't interest users,
| only investors).
|
| https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/the-poetry-corner/id1602552624
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