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Robert Frost for our times — 17 Comments

  1. The first Jewish family in my home town was named Harrison. We were about the fifth or sixth.

  2. We are beyond yak yak talking. What now counts is lead. Death, their death, is all they will understand. Crude, brutal but I’m not sorry.

  3. neo: Top link has died since you last checked. (Happens to me all the time too.)

    I’m feeling dense. I get Jefferson, but who is Harrison?

    I’m guessing Henry Wallace, who was FDR’s veep in 1940 but in 1944 FDR replaced him with Truman. Wallace was ahead of his time as something close to a “fellow traveler” when it came to communism and New Age-y sympathies. He ran for president under the “Progressive Party” banner in 1948.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace

    A curious fellow. IMO he should be more well-known.

  4. The Frost poem reminds me of an e.e. cummings:
    ________________________________________________

    kumrads die because they’re told)

    kumrads die because they’re told)
    kumrads die before they’re old
    (kumrads aren’t afraid to die
    kumrads don’t
    and kumrads won’t
    believe in life)and death knows whie

    (all good kumrads you can tell
    by their altruistic smell
    moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
    kumrads enjoy
    s.freud knows whoy
    the hope that you may mess your pance

    every kumrad is a bit
    of quite unmitigated hate
    (travelling in a futile groove
    god knows why)
    and so do i
    (because they are afraid to love

    –e.e cummings (1935)
    ________________________________________________

    In 1931 Cummings visited the Soviet Union. Unlike many Westerners who visited then, he returned a staunch anti-communist. Which is something you might not expect from an avant-garde poet (and painter btw).

    (all good kumrads you can tell
    by their altruistic smell
    moscow pipes good kumrads dance)

    Preach it, brother!

  5. Despite cummings’ eccentric punctuation, capitalization, line breaks and spelling, he often wrote in strict verse forms like the sonnet or, here, a sestain, a six-line form, in this case with AABCCB rhymes.

  6. “Richard Saunders on July 21, 2020 at 6:47 pm said:

    The first Jewish family in my home town was named Harrison. We were about the fifth or sixth.”

    Family named Harrison?

    hehe cough cough …

  7. Hmm. neo’s “more…” link is to an essay on Frost’s politics. It mentions Wallace twice in less than admiring terms, but as to the “Jefferson” poem, the author asserts that “Harrison” is not any specific person:

    Several of the critics of A Further Range could have sat for [Frost’s] satirical portrait of the archetypal American ideological revolutionary in his poem, “A Case for Jefferson”…

    It’s true there were many fashionable intellectuals in that day, keen on the Soviet experiment and Freudianism.

    Marcuse and Foucault were merely updates of that tradition.

    And here we are today.

  8. Harrison, Harris, Miller… gotta say that my E T A Hoffmann Whimsical Surname Dodger Antennae perk up at the sight of these 😛

    But Frost really had a point there and it’s one that everyone on the Right (no… not you Cucks in the Corner) need to constantly remind themselves of: the termite it from the inside and blow it all up mind virus was in the West long before the Jewish Enlightenment and their later waves of immigrants — some of whom certainly *did* do their fair share of termite-ing to be sure and some of whom became model citizens.

    History of C19/20 Yankeedom is a gradual then accelerating internal radicalization then enervation, then capitulation. End Result… Well, one thing is for sure, the New Elite doesn’t look anything much like the old one, ethnically… and sure as hell doesn’t have the faintest vestige of noblesse oblige or sense of responsibility toward Flyover People. Let them eat Fentanyl.

    But we’re not here today to talk about who really *does* have inordinate clout today. And even if we were, the original sin in losing the plot and destroying most of what was good in Western Civ and betraying the ordinary folk of the Shire lies with the Old Elite… whether it be Boston Brahmins, Oxford PPEs, Or Whatevers.

    We did it to Ourselves. Which probably explains some of the virulence of some aspects of antisemitism. Serves them right though for coming up with the concept of ‘Projection’. Late-stage rotting civilizations can do one thing well: Irony.

  9. Speaking of the malice of the left. The NYT is trying to doxx Tucker Carlson.

    Do these people have any idea of the potential horrors of the – literal – social war they are busy precipitating?

    Carlson has already had to move once, two years ago, when his family was tracked, assaulted, threatened with violence and his home made unsafe. Now, the “paper of record”, is itself hunting down the man who has developed from a kind of collegiate imitation of the ineffectual and supercilious George Will, into one of, if not the most, articulate, perceptive, persuasive, and effective critics of the emergent Woke Terror, its ideologues, lap dogs and running dogs, as the Chinese used to say.

    So they are going after him. What will your liberal friends say when you mention to them that his family has been attacked, he has been forced to move, and now the NYT is obviously attempting to push things a step further?

    Their answer to that, will tell you what they would say if the same program were directed against you.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7IkxdLpJJg

  10. “Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power.”

    I, too, had never considered Frost’s politics, but I made that exact case to a theology professor many years ago. I must have been clever once. He was a raging near-atheist mostly-faux-Buddhist SJW practicing kabuki theology in a supposed Christian institution. The pop his head made still makes me chuckle.

  11. CS Lewis wrote, in a similar vein. “I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.

    I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

    The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .

    The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”

    As to Frost’s line “not a Russian Jew,” I took a slightly different take – and not mutually exclusive. (Poets like to do more than one thing at at time.) I took it is “not like the conclusion some of you are jumping to.”

  12. We dance round in a ring and suppose,
    But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

  13. “…for our times.”
    Indeed.

    From 1920:
    “Some say the world will end in fire,
    Some say in ice….”

    And from “our times”:
    1.
    https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/not-an-unprecedented-thing-dhs-says-it-is-in-portland-to-protect-federal-property
    Key graf:
    “Over the Fourth of July weekend, the courthouse was attacked with commercial-grade fireworks, and the federal employees guarding it were struck by frozen water bottles….”

    2.
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8546473/Almost-50-Chicago-cops-injured-protesters-throw-fireworks-frozen-bottles.html
    Key graf:
    ‘Chicago Police officers had fireworks, frozen water bottles and other projectiles thrown at them in what started as a peaceful protest,’ the department said.

    And so, the poet as prophet? (Not for the first time, certainly…)

    And/or, Antifa / BLM are lovers of poetry, in particular, “applied poetry”?—especially poetry written by Dead, White, Conservative Males? (Entirely possible, since “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”?)

    In any event, certain common denominators would indicate that there does seem to be a pattern here. A playbook? A blueprint?)

  14. Also, @ Huxley, thank you for the e e cummings poem. I had never seen it before.

    Assistant Village Idiot: You’re welcome! cummings is a complicated fellow, but still worthwhile.

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