Mike McConnell

'Rethinking Robert Frost'

 

1974 stamp.

1974 stamp.

From poet/farmer Mike O’Connell’s piece about the last years of the charming, terrifying and still usually misunderstood Robert Frost, “Rethinking Robert Frost: I’ll beat the drum/ till it cry sleep to death’’. To read it, hit this link.

“For all {Robert} Frost’s hide-and-seek, for all his escapes into and out of the underbrush, in the end you can’t miss him. He hogs the road, blocks our way, hectors us until we understand him wrong or right. ‘It hurts like everything,’ he once wrote, ‘not to bring my point out more sharply.’ After his own conflicted fashion, he was straining with agitated heart to do this until the end. And as we witness the new century’s continuing stream of director’s-cut editions of his writings, we begin to see, {many} years after his death, what Frost meant about a willful return to earth. His ‘lover’s quarrel with the world’ endures; his prickly conversation with his reader goes on.’’