# data[].attributes.headline
Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco on July 22, 1916

# data[].attributes.subject
Preparedness Day Bombing in San Francisco on July 22, 1916

# data[].attributes.body
"The Preparedness Day Bombing." History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In San Francisco, a bomb at a Preparedness Day parade on Market Street kills 10 people and wounds 40. The bomb was hidden in a suitcase. The parade was organized by the city's Chamber of Commerce in support of America's possible entrance into World War I. San Francisco was suffering through severe labor strife at the time, and many suspected that anti-war labor radicals were responsible for the terrorist attack.

Labor leader Tom Mooney, his wife Rena, his assistant Warren K. Billings, and two others were soon charged by District Attorney Charles Fickert with the bombing. The case attracted international interest because all evidence, with the exception of a handful of questionable witness accounts, seemed to point unquestionably to their innocence. Even after confessions of perjured testimony were made in the courtroom, the trial continued, and in 1917 Mooney and Billings were convicted of first-degree murder, with Billings sentenced to life imprisonment and Mooney sentenced to hang. The other three defendants were acquitted. Responding to international outrage at the conviction, President Woodrow Wilson set up a "mediation commission" to investigate the case, and no clear evidence of their guilt was found. In 1918, Mooney's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

During the next two decades, many groups and individuals petitioned California to grant the two men a new trial. By 1939, when evidence of perjury and false testimony at the trial had become overwhelming, newly elected Governor Culbert Olson pardoned Mooney and commuted Billing's sentence to time served. Billings was not officially pardoned until 1961.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Preparedness Day bombing - Jul 22, 1916 - HISTORY.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In San Francisco, a bomb at a Preparedness Day parade on Market Street kills 10 people and wounds 40. The bomb was hidden in a suitcase. The parade was organized by the city's Chamber of Commerce in support of America's possible entrance into...

# data[].attributes.body
Visit San Francisco. The Union Street Inn, n.d. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.headline
Sold first poem called "My Butterfly. An Elegy" in 1894

# data[].attributes.subject
Sold first poem called "My Butterfly. An Elegy" in 1894

# data[].attributes.body
Frost, Robert. "Lit2Go." My Butterfly | Selected American and British Poems | Robert Frost | Lit2Go ETC. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
My Butterfly

The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today!

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Save only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
Save only me
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.
The gray grass is not dappled with the snow;
Its two banks have not shut upon the river;
But it is long ago-
It seems forever-
Since first I saw thee glance,
With all the dazzling other ones,
In airy dalliance,
Precipitate in love,
Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.
When that was, the soft mist
Of my regret hung not on all the land,
And I was glad for thee,
And glad for me, I wist.
Thou didst not know, who tottered, wandering on high,
That fate had made thee for the pleasure of the wind,
With those great careless wings,
Nor yet did I.
And there were other things:
It seemed God let thee flutter from his gentle clasp:
Then fearful he had let thee win
Too far beyond him to be gathered in,
Snatched thee, o'er eager, with ungentle grasp.
Ah! I remember me
How once conspiracy was rife
Against my life-
The languor of it and the dreaming fond;
Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,
The breeze three odors brought,
And a gem-flower waved in a wand!
Then when I was distraught
And could not speak,
Sidelong, full on my cheek,
What should that reckless zephyr fling
But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!
I found that wing broken to-day!
For thou are dead, I said,
And the strange birds say.
I found it with the withered leaves
Under the eaves.

Reluctance

OUT through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
My Butterfly The embedded audio player requires a modern internet browser. You should visit Browse Happy and update your internet browser today! Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too, And the daft sun-assaulter, he That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead: Save only me (Nor is it sad to thee!)

# data[].attributes.headline
Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for "A Witness Tree", "A Further Range", "Collected Poems", and "New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes"

# data[].attributes.subject
Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for "A Witness Tree", "A Further Range", "Collected Poems", and "New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes"

# data[].attributes.body
"{{(global.pageOgTitle) ? Global.pageOgTitle : Global.pageTitle}}." The Pulitzer Prizes. Pulitzer, n.d. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For its initiative and originality in planning a state-wide campaign for the collection of scrap metal for the war effort. The Nebraska plan was adopted on a national scale by the daily newspapers, resulting in a united effort which succeeded in supplying our war industries with necessary scrap material.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For its initiative and originality in planning a state-wide campaign for the collection of scrap metal for the war effort. The Nebraska plan was adopted on a national scale by the daily newspapers, resulting in a united effort which succeeded in supplying our war industries with necessary scrap material.

# data[].attributes.headline
Woodow Wilson elected President on Nov. 7, 1916

# data[].attributes.subject
Woodow Wilson elected President on Nov. 7, 1916

# data[].attributes.body
"Wilson Elected President." Wilson Elected President | Our History. Boy Scouts of America, n.d. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.headline
First non-direct blood transfusion, 1916

# data[].attributes.subject
First non-direct blood transfusion, 1916

# data[].attributes.body
"The First Successful Non-direct Blood Transfusion Is Carried out." South African History Online. N.p., 16 Mar. 2011. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
On 27 March 1914, Belgian doctor Albert Hustin conducted the first non-direct transfusion, using sodium citrate as an anticoagulant. Initially, blood transfusions needed to be made directly from the donor to the receiver before coagulation occurred. However, in the 1910s, it was discovered that adding anticoagulant to blood and refrigerating it allowed for longer storage times, which led to the establishment of blood banks.

The first recorded attempt of a blood transfusion was described by the 15th-century chronicler Stefano Infessura. In 1492, Infessura noted that the blood of three boys was given to Pope Innocent VIII, who had fallen into a coma. Following orders from a physician, the blood was transferred to the pontiff through the mouth, as the concept of intravenous circulation had not yet been discovered. The three young blood donors, all ten years old, had undertaken this experiment after being promised a ducat each. Unfortunately, the Pope and all three boys died.

After the discovery of intravenous circulation by William Harvey in 1628, more sophisticated research into blood transfusion began in the 17th century, and successful transfusion experiments were conducted on animals. However, transfusion attempts on humans continued to fail.

The first fully-documented human blood transfusion occurred on 15 June 1667, administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denis. A physician to King Louis XIV of France, Denis transfused the blood of a sheep into a 15-year old boy. Although the boy recovered, the transfusion was not entirely successful and the boy died at a later stage.

It was only in the 19th century that the existence of different blood types was discovered, and therefore the reason for past transfusion failures. It was found that a mixture of blood from the donor and the receiver was more successful in a transfusion.

Dr. James Blundell, a British obstetrician, performed the first successful human blood transfusion of human blood in 1818, which was used to treat a postpartum haemorrhage. The patient's husband was the donor, and gave four ounces of blood from his arm to his wife. From 1825 to 1830, Blundell conducted 10 blood transfusions, of which five were successful. Blundell went on to publish his results and invent several instruments to use in blood transfusions.

On 1 January 1916, the first blood transfusion that utilized blood that had been stored and refrigerated was performed by Oswald Hope Robertson, a medical researcher and U.S. Army officer. Robertson is generally credited with establishing the first blood bank while serving in France during World War I.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The first successful non-direct blood transfusion is carried out

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
On 27 March 1914, Belgian doctor Albert Hustin conducted the first non-direct transfusion, using sodium citrate as an anticoagulant. Initially, blood transfusions needed to be made directly from the donor to the receiver before coagulation occurred. However, in the 1910s, it was discovered that adding anticoagulant to blood and refrigerating it allowed for longer storage times, which lead to the establishment of blood banks.

# data[].attributes.body
CriticalPast. "Armistice Brings WWI Fighting to an End, on November 11, 1918. German Troops Surr...HD Stock Footage." YouTube. YouTube, 16 June 2014. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Armistice brings WWI fighting to an end, on November 11, 1918. German troops surr...HD Stock Footage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Link to order this clip: http://www.criticalpast.com/video/65675049722_End-of-World-War-I_American-flag_German-prisoners-of-war_people-celebrate Historic Stock Footage Archival and Vintage Video Clips in HD. Armistice brings WWI fighting to an end, on November 11, 1918. German troops surrender. American troops leave combat zones. Armistice ends hostilities of World War I. German troops surrender and large groups of Germans marching.

# data[].attributes.body
Miles, Jonathan. "All the Difference." The New York Times. The New York Times, 10 May 2008. Web. 01 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Yet it did, and Hall's aim is to map the way it happened. Or rather, the way he imagines it happened. He lays out his case in a choppy, fragmentary series of 128 vignettes, some of them extended narratives starring Frost, others composed of bits of poetry, interview snippets, dreamscapes or scraps of correspondence - even, in one instance, a flashback to Virgil writing his fourth "Georgic." In addition to Frost, whose vanity and callousness Hall mollifies with moments of bona fide poignance, we meet Frost's father, a mercurial San Francisco newspaperman with a "paper-white face, blue below the eyes, the red coins in his cheeks not a sign of health," as well as his mother, a "Swedenborgian blessed with second sight, patient wife, incipient lunatic, embryonic writer." To varying, flickering degrees, we get a sense of Frost's children, his "brood of brooders," whose fates - the firstborn son dead of cholera at 4, the other son killing himself with a deer rifle at 38, a daughter institutionalized for mental illness - cast a long shadow on Frost's life. His wife, Elinor, remains the ethereal presence Frost's biographers made of her, wafting from sickness to tragedy, a vapor of tight-lipped resentments. Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall, Philip Larkin and other poets have cameos, though bunched together, ponderously, as a choral character named "The Younger Poet." We also encounter Nikita Khrushchev, the cold war's pre-eminent "old-stone savage armed," whose 1962 meeting with Frost provides the nearest thing to plot in Hall's book. It was a cordial meeting - Frost would have preferred it be called a summit - that Frost squandered by misquoting Khrushchev upon his return to the United States, claiming Khrushchev had described the United States as "too liberal to fight." If American poets are no longer dispatched to powwow with foreign leaders, there's why.

We're also introduced to the biographical origins of Frost's poems, and it's here one's guard stiffens. Recall Frost's warning to an early biographer: "It would seem soft for instance to look in my life for the sentiments in 'The Death of the Hired Man.' There's nothing to it believe me." Sometimes Hall is subtle, as when he depicts Frost's building a line from "The Tuft of Flowers" word by word, while "turning the hay with a fork in the morning sunshine." At other times, less so: "'Home,' you repeated, wondering what the word meant." Or: "Come spring, the gaps in the stone wall down by Hyla Brook make Frost suspicious. ' Something's doing it. Or somebody. Why would they?'" ("It's de frost," his neighbor tells him, one of the many frosty puns drifting through the book.) Or: "'May Hill or Malvern?' Frost asks at the path fork and, amused, watches Thomas agonize. Whichever way they go, they're sure to miss something good on the other path."

Hall stitches these scenes together in the same way Michael Ondaatje assembled his kaleidoscopic portrait of the jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden in his 1976 novel "Coming Through Slaughter." Hall's writing evokes Ondaatje, too: imagistic, elliptical, strenuously lyrical. It's prose plainly intended to haunt. From the title (cribbed from Emily Dickinson) on down, "Fall of Frost" is a hive of allusions, with stray lines from Herrick, Wordsworth, Browning, Faulkner, the Song of Solomon and others buzzing through the text. "Most of my ideas occur in verse," Frost confided in a letter, something Hall gamely attempts to convey, showing Frost thumbing through his Rolodex of metaphors as he encounters the world: "He knocked; the wolf at the door. He invaded her room like a blast of cold air. He fell on her like a shell." This may be an accurate rendition of the poetic mind, but it also calls to mind the old adage about sausage-making: it's best left unseen. "Last night the spring peepers were shouting in chorus," Hall writes, before going on an alliterative bender, "pulsing like crickets in summer, but with spring music, with a shivery shimmer, as though the head-heavy snowdrops were swinging, ringing, or like distant sleighbells, like the last dissipating ghost of the Christmas season, yielding to spring heat, spring love." Such half-dressed passages aren't adequately counterbalanced by Frost's own poetic voice - the concrete result of all that imagined messiness, the performance rather than the practice - since Hall was denied permission to quote from Frost's copyrighted works, a situation he testily addresses in his author's note. What he offers, instead, is paraphrase - not only of Frost's poems but, ultimately, of his life. Perhaps, then, we should grant Frost the last word: "To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective," he wrote in a 1932 letter, "is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful." On second thought, let's cue up Joseph Brodsky: "Would you like to meet Mr. Frost? Then read his poems, nothing else."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Fall of Frost - Lawrance Thompson - Book Review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Yet it did, and Hall's aim is to map the way it happened. Or rather, the way he imagines it happened. He lays out his case in a choppy, fragmentary series of 128 vignettes, some of them extended narratives starring Frost, others composed of bits of poetry, interview snippets, dreamscapes or scraps of correspondence - even, in one instance, a flashback to Virgil writing his fourth "Georgic."

# data[].attributes.body
http://afflictor.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Margaret_Eddy_with_her_fathers_kites.jpg

# data[].attributes.body
"In writing about Robert Frost, one hardly has to mention that he is often thought of as the simplest of the great English-language modernists, even the most simplistic. This is when he isn’t considered too simplistic to be modernist or great, remembered from graduation speeches and picture books, which seems to have tempted everyone writing about Frost to tell readers very quickly that they’re wrong: wrong to feel his emotions as simple, wrong to hear his language as plain. Even the best things written about the character of the man and the work, written by and for specialists and sophisticates, tend to proceed by negative theology. We have been taught that Frost’s poems are not earnest or kindly, not optimistic or light. Not saintly, he was also not monstrous. Never clearly present in his poems, he was never quite hidden." -Tim Kendall
Plunkett, Adam. "Robert Frost Was Neither Light Nor Dark." New Republic. N.p., 13 June 2014. Web. 01 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Howard Sochurek/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

He's worth reading because we're both

In writing about Robert Frost, one hardly has to mention that he is often thought of as the simplest of the great English-language modernists, even the most simplistic. This is when he isn't considered too simplistic to be modernist or great, remembered from graduation speeches and picture books, which seems to have tempted everyone writing about Frost to tell readers very quickly that they're wrong: wrong to feel his emotions as simple, wrong to hear his language as plain. Even the best things written about the character of the man and the work, written by and for specialists and sophisticates, tend to proceed by negative theology. We have been taught that Frost's poems are not earnest or kindly, not optimistic or light. Not saintly, he was also not monstrous. Never clearly present in his poems, he was never quite hidden. He was not even a native New Englander. (He was, however, a racist.) He was rarely ever just serious, and all that his critics clearly agree on is that he was often mischievous but rarely for its own sake, which is another way of saying that we do not understand the tricks he played on us or where they came from. We know the glory of his works, or at least we feel it.

It is no exaggeration to call Frost the least understood of the great modernists, despite the aspects of his work that children can understand easily. His symbols are often straightforward enough that the prospect of exegesis seems like middle-school English (green is innocence, the dark woods are death). Not being teachers of middle school, the best scholarly and critical minds of the last generation or two have largely passed Frost over for the denser surfaces of Eliot, Stevens, Auden, Oppen, Pound, Crane, Yeats, Stein-and, a bit later, Lowell, Bishop, and Ashbery. There are no major works on Frost by Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, Frank Kermode, Marjorie Perloff, Christopher Ricks, no great artistic tribute like Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson. Nearly all the major work on Frost is from sixty-year-old essays and talks (Randall Jarrell's, Lionel Trilling's, Robert Frost's) and out-of-print books (William Pritchard's, Mark Richardson's, a book of essays by Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, and Derek Walcott). "I'm just the country boy," Frost said in 1959. "It is smart today ... to be reading St. John Perse, or T. S. Eliot, or me. No, leave me out. Not smart." Critics have looked past him because of his lack of ostensible difficulty, and we misunderstand him because of his difficulties. It is difficult even to say what they are.

His work tends not to challenge us in the ways that we have come to expect from good poetry. His famously intricate forms are often rather easy to spell out, as are his less famous allusions (Romantic poets, Emerson, Shakespeare, Dante, Virgil, Catullus, Plato, Swedenborg, Darwin). His singular achievement in meter-what he called "the sound of sense"-was such an achievement precisely because he could convey a wide range of emotions by sentence sounds alone, even when we haven't made sense of them. He was no great student of philosophy or history or politics, and most of his abstract ideas, almost all about poetry, are right there in the Collected Prose or the poems. The challenge, then, is the lack of challenge: that we experience the poems with more depth than we can usually comprehend. In this we are uncannily like the people in his poems walking past forests or down country roads or finding other sights that entrance them, who know that they reflexively project their desires and fears onto what they see even though they can't help themselves. No matter how false their projections, their experience of them is as real and as intricate as that of what they see (and as that of their own theories and doubts). To read Frost is to feel his characters' inner conflicts and to feel as conflicted as his characters, who are all too often lost in themselves. So the critic is tasked with the slippery business of tracing her patterns of feeling and thought back to the source without leaving too much of herself or, like most critics, too little.

The Art of Robert Frost is as good an example of the latter problem as anything, not least because it is a useful and intelligent book. Tim Kendall, a British literary critic and scholar, has republished a large selection of Frost's poetry, though almost all from the first half of his oeuvre, and has written a short critical essay on each selected poem. One could quibble with which poems he leaves out, but what he leaves in is largely representative and excellent. Kendall is very observant and is careful enough, if not perfect; the book is both a fine introduction to Frost and a thoughtful work of criticism, bringing the corpus of Frost scholarship to bear on the poems' minutiae and on their places in the whole of Frost's work. This is what makes it such a good example of what we miss when we read Frost without sustained attention to the conflicts that he provokes in ourselves. It shows how even the most diligent of critics, with a century of scholarship behind him, can explain Frost's poems with great sensitivity but without regard to his own inner conflicts, and can thereby leave all but untouched the gap between the words and their lingering beauty.

The art of Robert Frost, according to The Art of Robert Frost, is that of meaning a number of things by what he said. No one would disagree, not even the middle-schoolers, which I suspect is why Kendall brings up the idea with an SAT word, "ulteriority," and contorts himself trying to define it: "Although Frost defined ulteriority as 'saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another,' it is better to think of it as a way of meaning two things at once, or of saying one thing in terms of another thing which is also said." If the main tension in Frost's art is between the literal and the ulterior, the critic's main task is to figure out which is which. "The issue central to any consideration of Frost's achievement," Kendall writes, is "how [we can] know when we should read for ulteriority." What the method largely misses are the ways in which our projections are themselves central to our readings of the poems, the ways in which we read ulteriority into Frost's words whether we'd like to or not.

Consider the first poem in Frost's first book, A Boy's Will, which is also the first poem in Kendall's selection: "Into My Own," in which, according to Frost's initial epigraph, "The youth [the poem's speaker] is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world." Kendall offers a number of good reasons for why the youth's conviction is silly. The youth, who boldly proclaims to arise and go off to the wilderness, does nothing and congratulates himself nonetheless, in grandiloquent language to boot. "This is stay-at-home poetry," writes Kendall; it is "less than [Frost's] best work."

Kendall is right, of course, that the youth is a little ridiculous. (Since when was youth anything but?) Yet the absurdity is part of the point and, crucially, not toward the end of cheap satire, ulteriority, mischief. Without any loss of composure, the youth's conviction in his journey is weighed down by his fears and his doubts and the vagueness of his ambitions. With every reason not to be, he is sure of himself. Likewise, in reading his poem, it is hard not to be taken by his passion even as you doubt its propriety, and to be swept up by his language even as you notice its conventional badness, believing in his words despite yourself. It's hard not to feel like the youth.

Here is the poem in full:

One of my wishes is that those dark

trees,

So old and firm they scarcely show the

breeze,

Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of

gloom,

But stretched away unto the edge of

doom.

I should not be withheld but that some

day

Into their vastness I should steal away,

Fearless of ever finding open land,

Or highway where the slow wheel pours

the sand.

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,

Or those should not set forth upon my

track

To overtake me, who should miss me

here

And long to know if still I held them

dear.

They would not find me changed from

him they knew-

Only more sure of all I thought was true.

It's true, the youth applauds himself before he does anything, turns his back on people by imagining their running after him, declaims his fearlessness in literal "doom" and "gloom" rhetoric, a rhyme that was parodied by Shakespeare the way "trees" and "breeze" was parodied by Pope. The youth wants everything because he fears that he will get nothing. This hides his intimacies: the wide eyes with which he draws us into his confidence ("One of my wishes"); the mythic assurance of "I should not be withheld but that some day"; the vividness of the "highway where the slow wheel pours the sand," the line slowing, nearly halting, like the pour. Of the moments of grandeur within his grandiloquence, the greatest are his final two lines: "They would not find me changed from him they knew- / Only more sure of all I thought was true." Will he grow more sure because he comes to realize the courage of his convictions or because he stops considering other perspectives, because he strengthens or because he ossifies? Who hasn't wondered this about himself?

One of Frost's great subjects is the tension within the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves-how, for instance, they can feel certain despite their arbitrary foundations, imaginary highways made of sand. Consider the poem that everyone knows, "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The ironies of this poem are almost as well-known as Hallmark cards, and Kendall rehearses them well. The speaker spends less time describing the roads' differences than telling us that they aren't that different. The road he took was not even less traveled by, and his saying so, "with a sigh," is his impression of his future self, who will have made a myth of the decision. The poem is a "cunning nugget of nihilism," as Dan Chiasson has observed. Your sense of it "as an anthem for non-conformity" was perfectly wrong.

Since the poem "has probably caused more confusion ... than any other of Frost's poems," as Kendall writes, it has probably caused the most critics to tell readers that they are wrong. But this misses the point: the wrongness is part of the point, the temptation into believing, as in the speaker's impression of himself, that you could form yourself by your decisions, that you, like everyone else to whom the speaker is "telling this with a sigh," could take the road less traveled, as the master of your fate. In falling for his ruse, we show its force. We fall for it despite our better critical judgment, because we fool ourselves like his future self. The charge is not nihilism, which would mean that our decisions never matter, but the reflexive temptation to see ourselves as brave, unique, self-determining, at the expense of remembering how little our decisions might have mattered and how little we knew about them. Imagine how dry this would sound if you hadn't been tempted.

I hope that no one mistakes my argument as a defense of purely naïve readings of Frost, or for ignoring his ironies. I mean only that we misunderstand him when, in studying him, we disregard our unstudied reactions. For instance, Kendall convincingly shows the ways in which Frost's "An Old Man's Winter Night" parodies "Frost at Midnight," Coleridge's great meditative poem about a quiet winter night. The earlier poem, from 1798, is a picture of clarity: clear syntax, clear thoughts, clear descriptions, clear faith that the natural world is a reflection of God, whom Coleridge's infant son could come to know by wandering in nature "like a breeze." "So shalt thou see and hear / The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters, who from eternity doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself." Where Coleridge's poem is clear, Frost's is muddleheaded; his old man (not an infant) wanders through his house and forgets things. Coleridge's faith in animated nature becomes, in Frost's hands, an old man's delusion ("All out of doors looked darkly in at him / Through the thin frost"). Coleridge's crystalline images, such as the "silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet moon," become a windbag the old man can't quite inflate:

He consigned to the moon, such as she

was,

So late-arising, to the broken moon

As better than the sun in any case

For such a charge, his snow upon the

roof,

His icicles along the wall to keep;

And slept.

Yet gestures of parody need not amount to a parody. The old man's faith may be rootless, but it is real to him. It helps him sleep at night. His consignment of his snow to the moon, while certainly mocking Coleridge's "high language of Romanticism," is not "nonsensical." His syntax meanders, like an old man, but his subject agrees with his verb. Tergiversation aside, the old man knows what he wants, and the poem asks for your respect as well as your mockery, as if to say that even a faith like Coleridge's, and a genius like his, would come to sound like this in due time, and to question whether we could still share something of his faith, knowing that.

The poem may not be as evenhanded as "The Road Not Taken" or "Into My Own," but, if it resonates, it is not because it "[demonstrates] the meaninglessness" of Romantic attachments to the landscape, as Kendall writes, but because we have it in us both to romanticize nature and to dismiss those attachments, just as we both dismiss the elderly and look past our prejudices. Like Frost, we are conflicted, we are both / and: passionate and critical, skeptical and ingenuous. His best work plays on these tensions in ourselves, in the way that his "Design" describes a predatory spider as if it were a human infant, to ask whether we should be as terrified of the latter as we are of the former if their cruelty stems from a greater design; or the way that "Birches" describes the boy's swinging in such phallic terms-taking the stiffness out of his father's trees and all that-to confront us with impurities we desperately want to ignore, as if we were children running away from our newfound sexuality and finding it everywhere.

Or the way that "Birches" strains toward language so lovely that you feel as though it will snap out from under you. This loveliness is like that of the sounds in "After Apple Picking," which are pellucid despite the picker's weariness, raising the question of whether he really was right to act on his desires even if they must feel wrong when fulfilled. (The Biblical reference is obvious; the references to Keats's odes are less so.) The sounds in "Desert Places" are as lulling and hypnotic as the snowfall they describe, as Seamus Heaney pointed out brilliantly. Could they palliate us enough to admit their lack of any spiritual significance-"no expression, nothing to express"-or are our projections as inevitable as describing your inner state in terms of a landscape, a desert? The question is like that in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," a poem that starts out playfully, the speaker speaking for his horse, until we hear, "These woods are lovely, dark and deep" and are inclined to agree until we come to wonder whether his congenial feeling that the woods' darkness has loveliness and depth, not just death, is as frivolous as the ideas that he had projected onto the horse.

The Art of Robert Frost is at its best not with the shorter lyric poems, which I have been discussing, but with the longer narrative poems, such as those that make up nearly all of Frost's second book, North of Boston, the only collection that Kendall republishes in full. He faithfully describes the poems' exceptional dramatic range, so exceptional because the emotions were so non-poetic-what Frost called "boasting tones and quizzical tones and shrugging tones ... and forty eleven other tones," effected in "a language absolutely unliterary," the casual speech of the countryfolk who inhabit the book. Kendall takes the view, which Frost himself encouraged, that the narrative poems were his greatest achievement, the triumph of natural speech over bookish speech, words overheard over words simply read, the poet come into his own.

Never mind the ever-present tensions between the literary and the unlearned, or that some of the narrative poems are rather boring, enough so that even the endlessly generous Heaney could write that their blank verse could "tire attention." My reservation with Kendall's approach is that his concentrating on the drama of the narrative poems, which takes place almost all between people, tends to obscure the lyric drama of someone's struggles with himself. He approvingly quotes David Bromwich, who compares the lyric poems to "parables" but thinks that the narratives aim for "moral transparency" in their conflicts. This is to treat the lyrics as no better than partial sides of the narratives, when they really are narratives deeply compressed. The best of the narrative poems, in fact, are lyrics writ large.

Chief among them is "Home Burial," a poem about a rural couple's incompatible means of grieving the death of their young son. The husband is frustrated with his wife for her aloofness from him, and she is withdrawn and angry because of the cavalier pose he seemed to strike after he buried the child. "You could sit there with the stains on your shoes," she says, "And talk about your everyday concerns.... / I can repeat the very words you were saying. / 'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.'" He talks like a Frost poem, of course, whereas she can only be silent, a reticence that Kendall takes to be "unsympathetic to everything [Frost] holds dear." "It is a testament to [Frost's] genius," Kendall writes, that he "portrays so sympathetically" a character with no faith in poetry. Yet Frost was such a character himself, or always contained such a character as part of himself.

He was a poet who put virtually none of his private life directly into his poems, so that his greatest moments of intimacy are the ones in which he is most hidden. His poems' great pronouncements for poetry all run the risk of counting against it. (His "Oven Bird," who alone among birds "knows in singing not to sing," famously raises the question of "what to make of a diminished thing," leading everyone and Kendall to answer, "a poem," overlooking that the oven bird has permanence only because he asks "in all but words," which are all a poet has.) Frost at his best was not a writer of parables and homilies. His faith was troubled. His writing strains toward the transcendent, but implicit in his every moment of transcendence is the lingering concern that it will all turn out to have been an illusion, that his language will have not been enough. He also leaves implicit in his every sign of failure the hope that his words can transcend it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Howard Sochurek/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images He's worth reading because we're both In writing about Robert Frost, one hardly has to mention that he is often thought of as the simplest of the great English-language modernists, even the most simplistic.

# data[].attributes.body
"The powerful rhyme, reinforcing the ironic comment in the last line, clinches it, and leaves the receptive reader horrified at what appears to be the sinister world of nature. Frost also switches color imagery at the end, and now the references to the color white are succeeded by a reference to design of darkness to appall." -Ken Sanes
"Design." Design by Robert Frost. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Design by Robert Frost:
A Malevolent Transformation

In this sonnet Robert Frost describes a simple scene from nature --- a spider on a flower (known as a heal-all) is holding a moth that it has captured as its prey. But Frost's description is filled with gothic imagery, including the fact that all three elements -- the spider, the flower and the moth -- are white, which here seems to embody, not purity and goodness, but deathly pallor.

Frost makes the scene sound cold-blooded (which it undoubtedly is), and horrific, and then uses it to suggest that the larger design of nature is similarly heartless or malevolent. The second and third question in the last part of the poem even suggest that nature has designs on living things, in which it sets up events to facilitate killing and death:

What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

The powerful rhyme, reinforcing the ironic comment in the last line, clinches it, and leaves the receptive reader horrified at what appears to be the sinister world of nature. Frost also switches color imagery at the end, and now the references to the color white are succeeded by a reference to "design of darkness to appall."

Although the speaker is clearly himself appalled by what he sees, this isn't exactly an angry poem, like "Spring," by Edna St. Vincent Millay, which expresses rage at the existence of death in nature. Instead, the speaker seems to examine his subject in a somewhat detached way, almost with a clinical eye. One might even say that the speaker's tone partially matches the cold-bloodedness he is describing in nature itself, which means he is himself the poet as spider who catches his subject and holds it up for clinical inspection, so we can be horrified along with him.

At the same time, the poem is a kind of philosophical joke since, when Frost refers to design, he is making an ironic reference to the famous argument from design, which says that the world looks and acts like it was designed, and therefore there has to be a God who designed it. Frost says yes, it does look designed, but it looks like the "design of darkness to appall?--"

But then Frost was known for this kind of thing. Here is what a Time magazine article, titled "Books: The Poet Laureate (Robert Frost)" said about him in 1962:

"Many of his poems are half wisdom and half whimsy, and Frost often seems to be sharing a sly, private joke with God. In fact, one couplet in In the Clearing offers God a bargain: Forgive, 0 Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."

As noted, the heal-all referred to in the poem is a flower. But the poem isn't healing; it is opening (or reopening) a wound in the reader's perspective on life.

- - - - - -

Here is an earlier, weaker, version of "Design" by Robert Frost, titled "In White," from 1912:

by Robert Frost

A dented spider like a snow drop white
On a white Heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of lifeless satin cloth--
Saw ever curious eye so strange a sight?--
Portent in little, assorted death and blight
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth?-
The beady spider, the flower like a froth,
And the moth carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The blue prunella every child's delight.
What brought the kindred spider to that height?
(Make we no thesis of the miller's plight.)
What but design of darkness and of night?
Design, design! Do I use the word aright?

Note, in particular, the way Frost points out in the last two lines that he is using the word "design" ironically:

What but design of darkness and of night?
Design, design! Do I use the word aright?

This becomes more subtly and ironically suggested in the final version of the poem:

What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

- - - - - -

This page has various writings on "Design," including one by the literary scholar, George Montiero, who says that "Design" "is now considered one of the century's most explosive poetic statements on the metaphysics of darkness." The poem expresses the fear, he says, that our existence isn't supported by any larger design or that the design is one "of unmitigated natural evil." The poem, he says, allows for both interpretations.

"Design" by Robert Frost: A Sample Commentary by S. Spachman
Robert Frost's "Design": A Critical Analysis
(There is a lot of information here, although the ethnic reference used as a metaphor in the first sentence would be better edited out.)

A look at "Design" and "In White" by Robert Frost
A student explains Robert Frost's "Design"

Robert Frost at Wikipedia
An explanation of some Robert Frost poems, not including "Design"
The great-grandson, also named Robert Frost, speaks

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

# data[].attributes.headline
Critical Context: Quote By Robert Lowell

# data[].attributes.subject
Critical Context: Quote By Robert Lowell

# data[].attributes.body
"Frost had an insatiable yearning for crowds, circles of listeners, single listeners—and even for solitude. Can we believe him when he says he “took the road less travelled by”? He ran, I think, in no tracks except the ones he made for himself. The thinker and poet that most influenced him was Emerson. Both had something of the same highly urbane yet homemade finish and something of the same knack for verbal discovery. Both went about talking. Both leaned on and defied the colleges. A few of their poems are almost interchangeable." -Robert Lowell
Lowell, Robert. "Robert Frost: 1875–1963." The New York Review of Books. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 May 2017.

Website

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After Frost's wife died in the thirties, he stepped up the pace of his public readings. He must have gotten consolation from being Robert Frost, from being the image of himself that he had perfected with such genius. I have heard him say mockingly that hell was a half-filled auditorium. This was a hell he never had to suffer. Year after year after year, he was as great a drawing-card as Dylan Thomas was in his brief prime. Yet there was a strain; never in his life was he able to eat before a reading. A mutual friend of ours once said with pity, "It's sad to see Frost storming about the country when he might have been an honest schoolteacher."

Frost had an insatiable yearning for crowds, circles of listeners, single listeners-and even for solitude. Can we believe him when he says he "took the road less travelled by"? He ran, I think, in no tracks except the ones he made for himself. The thinker and poet that most influenced him was Emerson. Both had something of the same highly urbane yet homemade finish and something of the same knack for verbal discovery. Both went about talking. Both leaned on and defied the colleges. A few of their poems are almost interchangeable. "In May when sea winds pierced our solitudes-I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods." Part of Frost was wary of Emerson. "Great is the art/Great shall be the manners of the bard." He knew better than anyone that his neighbors would find this manner boring and insufferable. He tried to make himself a man of many ruses, subtle surprises, and weathered agility. He was almost a farmer. Yet under the camouflage there was always the Brahma crouching, a Whitman, a great-mannered bard. If God had stood in his sunlight, he would have elbowed God away with a thrust or a joke.

He wasn't quite a farmer even in his early, isolated years. He didn't quite make a living; he got up at noon. He said the cows got used to his hours more easily than his neighbors. There was nothing very heroic or out of the ordinary here, yet these fifteen years or so of farming were as valuable to him as Melville's whaling or Faulkner's Mississippi. Without exactly knowing it, and probably not intending it, Frost found he was different from other men of letters. He used to tell a story about a Florida train trip he took with Wallace Stevens. The two poets were nervous with each other. Stevens however was more in the vacationer's mood. He made witty remarks, and finally said, "The trouble with your poetry, Frost, is that it has subjects." I don't want to spoil the weird, whimsical rightness of Stevens's taunt. Frost had an unfashionable hold on subjects. What were they?

I suppose what I liked about Frost's poems when I read them thirty years ago was their description of the New England country, a world I knew mostly from summer and weekend dips into it. It was a boy's world, fresher, grainer, tougher, and freer than the city where I had to live. "Back out of all this now too much for us," "Over back there where they speak of life as staying," "the dory filled to the gunnels with flowers," "the tar-banded ancient cherry trees," one man saying, "Weren't you relived to find he wasn't dead?" and the other answering, "No! and yet I don't know-it's hard to say/I went about to kill him fair enough." I used to wonder if I knew anything about the country that wasn't in Frost. I always had the pleasure of either having my own knowledge confirmed or of learning something new that completed it. I hardly cared which.

The arts do not progress but move along by surges and sags. Frost, born in 1875, was our last poet who could honestly ignore the new techniques that were to shatter the crust. He understood the use of tools, often wonderful tools, that five or ten years later would be forever obsolete. He was a continuer and completer and not a copyist. When he began to write the American cultural scene was unimaginably different from anything we now know. There were no celebrated masters to meet, no one to imitate. Poetry was the great English Romantics and Victorians and their famous, official American offshoots. Through their practice, criticism, and translations, the known past had been reborn in their image.

Frost had a hundred years' tradition he could accept without question, yet he had to teach himself everything. Excellence had left the old poetry. Like the New England countryside, it had run through its soil and had been dead a long time. Frost rebuilt both the soil and the poetry: by edging deeper and deeper into the country and its people, he found he was possessed by the old style. He became the best strictly metered poet in our history, and our best local observer, at least in meter. The high wind of inspiration blew through his long, packed, isolated rustication. By the time he was forty and had finished his second book, North of Boston, he had arrived. Step by step, he had tested his observation of places and people until his best poems had the human and seen richness of great novels. No one had helped him to learn, and now no one could because no one wrote better.

Randall Jarrell has a fine phrase about Frost's "matter-of-fact magnificence." He writes that the poems' subjects are isolation, extinction, and the learning of human limitation. These three themes combine, I think, in a single main theme, that of a man moving through the formless, the lawless and the free, of moving into snow, air, ocean, waste, despair, death, and madness. When the limits are reached, and sometimes almost passed, the man returns.

This is what I remember about Frost. There was music in his voice, in the way he made his quotations ring, in the spin on his language, in the strange, intuitive waywardness of his toleration. He was less of the specialized literary man than other poets and more curious personally.

Last November I walked by his house on Brewster Street in Cambridge. Its narrow gray wood was a town cousin of the farmhouses he wrote about, and stood on some middle ground between luxury and poverty. It was a traveler from the last century that had inconspicuously drifted over the customs border of time. Here one night he was talking about the suicide of a young friend, and said that sometimes when he was excited and full of himself, he came back by thinking how little good his health could do those who were close to him.

The lights were out that night; they are out for good now, but I can easily imagine the barish rooms, the miscellaneous gold-lettered old classics, the Georgian poets, the Catullus by his bedside, the iron stove where he sometimes did his cooking, and the stool drawn up to his visitor's chair so that he could ramble and listen.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
After Frost's wife died in the thirties, he stepped up the pace of his public readings. He must have gotten consolation from being Robert Frost, from being the image of himself that he had perfected with such genius. I have heard him say mockingly that hell was a half-filled auditorium.

# data[].attributes.body
http://images.forwallpaper.com/files/images/9/9e04/9e04fc96/253424/silk-cloth-glitter.jpg

# data[].attributes.headline
"Somewhere a Voice is Calling" by John McCormack hit #1 on the charts in 1916

# data[].attributes.subject
"Somewhere a Voice is Calling" by John McCormack hit #1 on the charts in 1916

# data[].attributes.body
"John McCormack – Somewhere a Voice Is Calling (1916 Music Video)." Playback.fm. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 May 2017.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
John McCormack - Somewhere a Voice is Calling (1916 Music Video) | Playback.fm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1916 the #1 song in the charts was "Somewhere a Voice is Calling" by John McCormack. Watch the music video and discover trivia about this classic song now.