Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on a ‘Winter Evening Walk’)

“I had for my winter evening walk—
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.” —American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “Good Hours,” in North of Boston (1915)
 
After a couple of inches of snow on Tuesday—and more expected closer to the weekend—my area of the Northeast may see more of the kind of scenes Frost had in mind over a century ago.
 
The only problem: The temperatures (and that pesky wind chill factor!) will be so low that many won’t want to be out, lest they experience frostbite.

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on ‘Bare November Days’)

“Not yesterday I learned to know
     The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
     And they are better for her praise.”— Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “My November Guest,” in A Boy's Will (1915)
 
I took this photo in Overpeck Park, not far from where I live in Bergen County, NJ, three years ago this month.

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on a ‘Hushed October Morning Mild’)

“O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief,
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “October,” in A Boy’s Will (1913)
 
I took the image accompanying this post, of the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass., 15 years ago this week, while vacationing in Boston and its environs.

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on an Unexpected Result of Apple-Picking)

“Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “After Apple-Picking,” in North of Boston (1915)
 
For this week, I was seeking a work that evoked this point in autumn. This poem does—just under the wire, as, I gather, the height of apple-picking season ends in mid-November.
 
In any case, it’s hard to beat the seemingly casual brilliance of this poem, from the almost tactile physical description (e.g., “every fleck of russet”) to the symbolic undertones (to indicate the condition of man, on three other lines, the use of the word “fall” or “fell”).
 
There are no literary allusions here, but you find yourself reading and re-reading these lines—and even at the end, not sure you’ve plunged all the way into the depth of its splendor.

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on Responsibility and Persistence)

"By good rights I ought not to have so much 

Put on me, but there seems no other way. 

Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.

He says the best way out is always through.”—American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “A Servant to Servants,” in North of Boston (1915)

(The image accompanying this post, a 1959 photograph of the poet taken by Walter Albertin, comes from the Library of Congress’ New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection.)

Quote of the Day (Robert Frost, on His ‘Lover’s Quarrel With the World’)

“And were an epitaph to be my story

I’d have one ready for my own

I would have written of me on my stone

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” -- Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), “The Lesson for Today,” from A Witness Tree (1942)

It’s always a shock for me to think that Robert Frost, born on this date in 1874, was a native of California, not the New England where the overwhelming majority of his work is set. 

Like the landscapes of the settings he came to know so well in adulthood, his work is solid, but hardly as straight or smooth as one might expect. Its tone, conversational more often than not, is a trick of the poet’s voice, with unexpected depths and edges. It is, for all of that, extraordinary and enduring.

(The image accompanying this post, a 1959 photograph of the poet taken by Walter Albertin, comes from the Library of Congress’ New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection.)

Quote of the Day (Willa Cather, on the Haunting Power of the Prairie)

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”― Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918)

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Willa Cather was born on this date in 1873 in Back Creek Valley, Va. Though she did write about her native state in one of her last books, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), the bulk of her fiction concerned the land to which her family moved when she was 10: Nebraska. In much the same way that the New England setting of most of Robert Frost’s work has made most people forget that the poet was born in California, so extraordinary was the descriptive power of Cather in evoking the Midwest that I doubt if many readers know she came from someplace else.

(An author with whom Cather has been more frequently compared--including sense of place--is Edith Wharton, as I discussed in this prior post.)

My Antonia (1918) concluded Cather’s trilogy of her adopted state (O Pioneers! and Song of the Lark came first). Only six years earlier, her novel Alexander’s Bridge had displayed all the marks of an apprentice fiction writer, especially in its heavy indebtedness to Henry James. Even though My Antonia is not without such influences (particularly in its nature as an “envelope story,” in which the main narrative is bracketed by an outside male character, similar to The Turn of the Screw), it also showed that Cather had developed a mature, sinewy style of her own, laying claim to subject matter largely ignored till then.

In particular, many readers have been inspired by the central character of the novel, an immigrant girl who survived a host of troubles with little to aid her but her own innate tenderness and strength. “No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Antonia,” wrote the normally acerbic critic-journalist H.L. Mencken. Many readers couldn’t agree more.

For an especially interesting journey into the work of Cather, you’ll want to check out the “A Literary Odyssey” blog, which earlier this year started “The Willa Cather Project”—the blogger’s attempt to read the entire works of the novelist, then write about it.