Likes Robert Frost.

Transcript context

…Sure, but this one. Robert Frost. I love Robert Frost. What I would direct your attention to is that he’s not a doddering old fart mumbling platitudes. He’s a radical. He’s a radical poet who is teaching us again and again how much of our joy is mixed with pain, how much of our work and our joy in our work is charged with either integrated eroticism or repressed sexuality. He’s extraordinary at looking dispassionately at how hard it is to be in a lifelong partnership. His husbands and wives are so often mismatched and maladapted one to another and the natural world. He’s a great inheritor of that Puritan tradition, even though he was born in California. He embraced a New England ethos, which tells us it’s good to acknowledge our pain. Switching to Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Brooks.…

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