Even today, people use many clichés that few recognize came from Frost: “I have miles to go before I sleep”, “the road not traveled”, “good fences make good neighbors”, and so many others.

But it’s a fact that most of the poetry written in the past, say, forty years is ugly-minded or stupid. It breaks my heart to read the kind of poetry with which students come into contact now. They will never know the human triumph of the kind of poetry that feeds your soul. Don Carlos was absolutely correct above when he wrote: ‘The only “poets” we hear about today are not poets. Unless poetry is crap.’

Consider the Poet Laureate of England recently was Carol Ann Duffy. This is the special Christmas poem–deliberately written for Christmas–she wrote for 2012:

(If you think this has to be an ugly joke, you can find it in all its very real reality at: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/books/poetry/article3630214.ece)

The Mistletoe Bride
by Carol Ann Duffy

The December bride who, bored with dancing, skipped from the castle hall to play hide-and-seek, a white bird flickering into the dark . . .

The groom, who searched each room, calling her name; then the bridal guests, flame-lit, checking the grounds . . .

The fifty Christmases till a carpenter jemmied an old oak chest; the skeleton with its unstrung pearls, loose emeralds, its rings of diamond, sapphire, gold . . .

The running feet, the shouting for others to see what he’d seen; mistletoe in the loose bones of a hand . . .

Like love, patiently green.

All it did was to make the slaves think they were free.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyAqh4-18nQ

Also, wade into his book On Difficulty, and Other Essays. (A humbling experience, at least for me — he actually gives your mind a workout, of the type that used to mark the highest truly intellectual endeavours.)

I was first twigged to him by his appearance on the old PBS Dick Cavett Show. Fascinated, I then bought his book.

I was interested to see him referred to in Ace’s place tonight, by a Yale law professor writing about the rash of commencement cancellations:

“The literary critic George Steiner, in a wonderful little book titled “Nostalgia for the Absolute,” long ago predicted this moment. We have an attraction, he contended, to higher truths that can sweep away complexity and nuance. We like systems that can explain everything. Intellectuals in the West are nostalgic for the tight grip religion once held on the Western imagination. They are attracted to modes of thought that are as comprehensive and authoritarian as the medieval church. You and your fellow students — and your professors as well; one mustn’t forget their role — are therefore to be congratulated for your involvement in the excellent work of bringing back the Middle Ages.”