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Literary anecdotes abound with traded rhetorical punches; a celebrated exchange in American literature is that between Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, the latter observing (as he had at the opening of his wonderful story "The Rich Boy") that the very rich are different from us, and Hemingway presumably winning the two-blow bout by his debunking, "Yes, they have more money." They were both right, but perhaps the reader has to work through the truth of the punch line to emerge with his or her own "And yet, and yet. . . ."
In Key West in February 1940, Wallace Stevens reportedly said to Robert Frost, whom he had first met there five years previously, "Your trouble, Robert, is that you write poems about--things." Frost replied, "Your trouble, Wallace, is that your poems are about bric-a-brac."
The two great poets were flinging at each other the most reductive critical cliches about their respective bodies of work, representing such instructively different relations between poetic work and literary career. Certainly a poem by Frost allows for its being said (however, ultimately, mistakenly) to be "about" something. This is seldom the case with all but Stevens' earlier poetry, and even there his titles are enigmas. (In this only he is perhaps more like Emily Dickinson, and Frost more like Whitman.)
Frost had a constituency including many more or less superficial readers of poetry who thought of him as mending and tending a wall of tradition and American values against the assaults of modernism, complexity and the intellectual groundswell under it. Stevens had a smaller readership, consisting more of good poets and, eventually, some extremely perceptive critics. (Until both poets encountered critics worthy of them, Stevens was thought of as difficult and trivial and Frost easy and profound.) Frost, who taught somewhat informally in New England colleges, was a literary eminence. Stevens, who after 15 post-Harvard years as a lawyer in New York spent most of his life as an executive of an insurance company in Hartford (his specialty was surety and fidelity bonding), was never much of a public figure. Frost was misconstrued during most of his life as writing direct unproblematic poetry, full of the clarity of exposition and what William Carlos Williams once scornfully referred to as...