Reading Frost this afternoon...much focus on mortality in poems like an old man's winters night...midlife in the oven bird...death or afterlife in after apple picking...the nature of decisions and rationalizing them in the road not taken...good stuff, very relevant to me at this point....love the line about highway dust over everything from the Oven Bird...sounds contemporary like Bob Dylan...(I was thinking of the line Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues...you can tell by the way she smiles...from Visions of Johanna)

...then going to Starbucks in Nob Hill to meet a friend for coffee...we talked some about the parallels between literary and architectural periods...I have tried several times to explain Postmodernism to someone not interested in literary theory, and I suppose the fact that I don't really understand it doesn't help, but I was able to talk with some coherence about modernism, and some of the parallels between literature and architecture really struck me:
-- a certain adherence (awareness at least) of the classic structure and design, not a neo-classicism, but a sort of nod to tradition, form, and structure...

--a reaction against excess and flourish of Victorian styles

--challenged by post-modernists on the grounds of a certain sterility and-- probably because of its attention to some elements of classical form-- elitism.

This is interesting, and I can really see much of this in modernist literature, though I don't know enough about architecture to recognize whether or not these parallels are real. I do know that, in literature people like Joyce, Eliot, Pound all seemed acutely aware of the western tradition in literature and not at all throwing everything away, or even deconstructing, but refashioning things, not to destroy literature, but to reevaluate literature and to make it (as Pound said) new, in order to make it relevant once again.

What I can see in modernist buildings is new materials (concrete, glass, steel), but lots of right angles and recognizable shapes. I am thinking of the Seagram Building in NYC and IBM Plaza in Chicago. Isn't there a parallel to many modernist writers' works: Joyce certainly covers some very 'new material' in Ulysses--defecation, menstruation, fornication; DH Lawrence (need I say more). So the material is new, but in many ways the form is the same (or at least recognizably based on a traditional form). Ulysses is an Odyssey, albeit a modern rendering. DH Lawrence's novels (Son and Lovers, Lady Chatterley's Lover) don't seem overly experimental in terms of form, but the material (theme, subject) is new. 

And finally, in this post, we come full circle...back to Frost. I memorized Frost poems in the eight grade with Mr. Ehler's and I think I always kept the poet in my mind as a nice, respectable, patriotic, Pastoral. But,  I have to say, I see something else now. The form, the language, the rhythm all seem familiar, easy, even lovable. There is something more though-- something, if not sinister, highly sceptical about Frost. You see it in a poem like the road not taken, for example. I think it is funny how that poem has been held up as a 'hallmark card' of poems-- celebrating the visionary American, the Yankee Pioneer, who's not afraid to take the less traveled path and stick to her guns. In reality, whichever path we take, the other paths in life all become 'Roads not taken'. Is this poem mainly a poem about how humans rationalize their own decisions, even though they know the other path might have been "just as fair"? And then they tell it "with a sigh" because they are aware of their own rationalizing dishonesty.



The other thing which comes to mind with much Robert Frost poetry is the possibility for a sort of Taoist/ Buddhist interpretation. I am reminded of the old Buddhist parable that is called Se-ung-ji-ma in Korean. I know it through Korean and through a children's book called Zen Shorts . The story can be summarized as follows: A man finds a horse. His neighbors say good. He says maybe. His son falls from the horse and breaks a leg. Neighbors say bad. Man says maybe. This goes on and on, illlustrating that good and bad are all about perceptions. I think this is easily relatable to The Road Not Taken (if we take the poem as ironic).