Re: Robert Frost 's work vs. his life

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On 9/06/09, Lit Teacher wrote:
Frost himself
> as a person is fascinating - if anyone is America's poet
> Frost is.
>
> There are purists who study poetry in isolation from the poet
> but I'm not one of them. I'd share with them after the poem
> that Frost was manic depressive - read something of Frost.
> I'm blanking on whether he took his own life. He actually is
> not from a farm background that his poetry cultivated that
> image for him.

======================================================

If you had written something and published it, would YOU
want your readers to judge your ideas as profoundly true or
false qualified by their knowledge of your life? Isn't this ad
hominen-ism disallowing an author his anonymity, his - well -
"redemption" from a sad or difficult life. Should what we say
or write be judged by its source, or by whether it is true or
false independent of that? If Satan tells us that the world is
round rather than flat, should we qualify the truth of his
remark because of its source? (How many times do we hear one
another say, "Oh, you say that because you are etc." - as though
our intellectual and moral lives were one and the same thing.)

If we talk about the author and his life, we are talking
about biography/history, not literature.

L. Swilley  

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