Friday, April 09, 2021

Playful thought …

 ‘The Letters of Robert Frost’ Review: Poetry and Pressure. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 What’s most continuous with earlier letters is a predilection for the playful, a term Frost himself endorsed: “Great thought, delicate thought, sinister thought, but in any case playful thought. It must be a play of thought to be a poem.” At times the play is pure, untouched by anything delicate or sinister, as when he assures the author of a guidebook to Vermont that he has read about every town once, and some twice, and advises him: “Next time put in more elevations. Nothing is so uplifting as the heights of small towns. The height of Peacham did me good.”

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