The American Spectator

Among the Intellectualoids

(Page 2 of 2)

/blockquote> br> Or this one by Kozan Ichikyo from 1360: br> blockquote> em>Empty-handed I entered the world br> Barefoot I leave it. br> My coming, my going -- br> Two simple happenings br> That got entangled. /em> /blockquote> br> Frost biographer Jay Parini, who volunteered to teach the alternative sentencing classes, and whose Frost courses at Middlebury College reportedly cost students "a hefty sum," likewise believes in "the redemptive power of poetry." Such talk is fine in an English term paper, even a master's thesis defending the redemptive power of poetry, but isn't it a bit out of place in the legal system? I've yet to see any evidence of poetry's magic power to change delinquent behavior. Besides, that's not why we read, or should read, poetry. Poetry is, in Ezra Pound's words, an art "originally intended to make glad the heart of man." True, not all of it succeeds at this. In fact reading some contemporary verse can seem like cruel and inhuman punishment. Even some Frost.

Robert Frost was a bit of an ornery old cuss. He believed fences made good neighbors, and as for poetry, it was "a way of taking life by the throat." I suspect the one-time swinger of birches, were he alive, would have taken those teens out behind the woodshed and applied a birch switch to their behinds. It's a good thing he isn't.

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Law