And his format ensures that the poems are always close at hand, complete, in the foreground, asserting their primary importance. Kendall's achievement is in demonstrating the pleasures of close reading, by any other name: dissection, doing a reading, analysis, or, my preferred phrase, attentive reading. 11) Each poem, which is followed by two to four pages of discussion, includes numerous lines isolated and quoted again, for detailed analysis. This ghostly hovering resembles the behavior Kendall claims to have taught his critiques: "While I hope that my commentaries travel at least some of the way, I have not let them forget their origins in that sense of delight which Frost's work continues to give me." (p. ( The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry, by Adam Kirsch, W.W. To read is to allow the poem to shine out as what it is, to take in what it presents to 'do a reading' is to apply to the poem a technique, whose product hovers above or alongside the poem as a ghostly presence. 'do a reading' of a poem, in the academic phrase. As amateur or professional students, we advance to a more detailed reading, i.e. For both sorts, Kendall superbly models what poet and critic Adam Kirsch calls "doing a reading." According to Kirsch, "eading" is "he 'bedrock'" or "the phenomenal level on which we read a poem," much as we read prose or even, say, billboards. This is a minor quibble, but I would instead suggest a composite, probably overlapping two-pronged ideal readership for the book: firstly, a general audience of sophisticated readers who enjoy poetry as an intellectual activity secondly, a specialized audience of English teachers, literary critics and reviewers. These divisions seem a shade too fine, especially as readers who are interested in variant versions will almost certainly be in it for the analysis as well. Unlike Frost, Kendall is not writing for "all sorts." He suggests three sets of readers: those who want just the poems those who want just the analysis and those who "will read from beginning to end," i.e., the combination as presented. By carefully analyzing numerous lines from each poem, he reveals the interpretations, simple and complex, literal and figurative, that Frost's poems invite (or provoke). Kendall is interested in such popularity because the poems lend themselves to simplistic, literal readings. Many American children have learned and are learning Robert Frost poems at home or in school, some of us at very young, impressionable ages. The punch line is a convict's description of a landscape: "'Like something out of a Robert Frost poem.'" (p.3) Frost's memorably aphoristic phrases and idyllic parables are still part of the collective American consciousness (or subconscious). Kendall plunges in, not with a discussion of poetry, but of the movie The Shawshank Redemption. 3) Frost's notion and use of "ulteriority" is the heart of Kendall's study, pulsing its significance among the essays.įrost's achievement of this quest for popularity is wittily and immediately demonstrated. Splicing Frost's words with his own, a device the author regularly employs to bolster his arguments (note well all the double quotes herein), Kendall asserts that Frost's goal "'to be a poet for all sorts and kinds'" was closely linked to "'the pleasure of ulteriority'-that is, 'saying one thing and meaning another, …in terms of another.'" (p. Technically an invented term, ulteriority may be defined as Frost's unique brand of irony. A talented analyst, Kendall elucidates both the poems and his study's underlying focus: ulteriority. The Art of Robert Frost indeed enjoyably treads a parallel path with the poems, via close readings strewn with expressions of an "ordinary" reader's pleasures. He is thus well qualified to carry out his book's second priority: "to pursue the same journey which Frost claims for all great poetry," (p. 9) The author is also a poet as well as critic, professor, and the founding editor of the acclaimed, but now-defunct, U.K. Kendall's first priority, rather complexly expressed, explains his reason for assembling another selection of Frost's poetry: "…to produce a reliable text accounting for editorial decisions which may differentiate it from other reliable versions." (p. The book is both a critical study and a "selected" volume, containing sixty-five poems that span Frost's career, chosen for quality, variety, and/or because they illustrate salient points about Frost's oeuvre. "'It begins in delight, and ends in wisdom.'" Robert Frost's definition of poetry, conveniently applicable to his own work, is the inspiration for Tim Kendall's The Art of Robert Frost. The Art of Robert Frost, by Tim Kendall, Yale University Press, 2012, 408 pages, $35.00 hardcover.
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