"And I’d like to suppose that Frost himself would recognize that any ingress into a poem is better than being locked out entirely. His little two-liner, “The Secret,” suggests as much: “We dance round in a ring and suppose / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” Most truly good poems might be said to contain a secret: the little sacramental miracle by which you connect, intimately, with the words of a total stranger. And whether you come at the poem frontward, or backward, or inside out—whether you approach it deliberately, word by word and line by line, or you parachute into it borne on a sudden breeze from the island of Serendip—surely isn’t the important thing. What matters is whether you achieve entrance into its inner ring, and there repose companionably beside the Secret." newyorker/online/blogs/books/2013/07/reading-poems-backward.html
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 10:02:51 +0000
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