Flashes of Creative Intuition: the Unrecognized Aphorisms of Robert Frost

Flashes of Creative Intuition: The Unrecognized Aphorisms of Robert Frost A PROJECT SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Philip B. Bradley IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF LIBERAL STUDIES May 2013 © 2013 Philip B. Bradley CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………........................iv Chapter: 1 – Introduction…………………………………………………………………...1 2 – The Aphorism as Genre – I…………………………………………………...5 3 – The Aphorism as Genre – II…………………………………………………15 4 – The Aphorism as Fragment………………………………………………….26 5 – The Notebooks of Robert Frost……………………………………………...34 6 – The Aphorisms of Robert Frost: Categories, Examples, Analysis…………..42 7 – The Aphorisms of Robert Frost: Reflections………………………………....68 8 – Conclusion……………………………………………………………………85 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………...91 Appendix…………………………………………………………………………97 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have many people to thank, but this project really began with Gino Ruozzi, professor of Italian literature at the University of Bologna. I am extremely grateful for his encouragement and support in the further study of aphorisms following my class in Italian literature with him, in which aphoristic literature played a role of major importance. I would never have traveled to Italy had it not been for the patience and dedication of my Italian language teachers at the University of Minnesota: Simonetta Sambrotta, Monica Barbieri, and Maria Bates; there was also special help from Ann Mullaney. I owe a big debt of gratitude to Elizabeth Teefy, who taught the first-level Italian literature class, and who arranged for us to meet at the U’s Learning Abroad Center during one class period. She insisted that we should all consider spending a semester or year studying in Italy; this possibility had never occurred to me, but I began to embrace it over the next year. At the Learning Abroad Center, I discovered that the Bologna Cooperative Studies Program had no age limit, and eventually applied to this program, spending the 2004-2005 academic year in Bologna. I am grateful to Chip Peterson at the Center, who had confidence in my ability to succeed, despite my status as a senior citizen. I would also like to thank Susanna Ferlito, whose Italian literature classes I took and who encouraged me to apply for the BCSP program; and Susan Noakes, whose class on Dante and the Divine Comedy opened a fascinating new world to me. On my return, determined to study American aphorisms, I took American and English literature classes from Kent Bales and John Watkins; I am very thankful that both professors recommended the Masters in Liberal Studies program as a possible route to this goal. iv I then discovered The World in a Phrase, James Geary’s 2005 bestseller about the aphorism. I can’t thank James enough for his generous response to my e-mails, and for connecting me with others interested in the field. He was also instrumental in organizing the 2008 conference on aphorisms at the University of London, which I attended; this was a great opportunity for me to network with attendees who were scholars and/or aphorists. The Masters in Liberal Studies program staff has been extremely supportive—thanks to JoEllen Lundblad, Connie Hessburg, and Adam Reef. Those who taught the MLS seminars and other classes which I took were helpful to me in many ways; they include David Shupe, Ed Griffin, Anita Gonzalez, Steve Daniel, Sabrina Ovan, Dan Mrozowski, Julie Neraas, Tim Brennan, Bill Dikel, and Karl Lorenz. Special thanks to Jack Johnson, who taught the final MLS seminar. I couldn’t have asked for better advisors. Jennifer Caruso, my MLS advisor, kept me on the straight and narrow, and suggested sources that turned out to be critical in my study of the creative process; and Michael Hancher, a Frost scholar in the English department, not only guided me in my analysis of Frost and his aphorisms, but also directed me towards multiple sources of information which became essential to the project. Finally, I have saved the most important thanks for last: I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jan, whose patience has been enduring, and who now knows more about aphorisms than she could have ever imagined. v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION “Aphorisms, representing a fragmentary knowledge, invite men to investigate further…” Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, 1605 “Per essere perfetto, le mancava solo un difetto.” My balky brain struggled with the Italian: “To be perfect, one lacks only a defect.” This was the professor’s opening statement in my Italian literature class at the University of Bologna during my study abroad in 2004-2005. It is an aphorism, by Karl Kraus, and has many characteristics of the genre: it is short, definitive, philosophical, and has a humorous twist. Professor Ruozzi began his first lecture with an aphorism because the theoretical part of the class would concentrate on aphoristic literature, an academic topic of interest both to him, as well as to other European scholars. I suddenly recalled a sentence from Emerson’s essay Self-Reliance that had delighted me in high school: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I now realized that this, too, was an aphorism. I became intrigued with this subject while in Bologna and was determined to pursue it further on my return to the United States, but with a focus closer to home, as our class had studied only European aphorisms. What could be said about American aphoristic literature? The 2006 publication of The Notebooks of Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen, suggested a topic. A review in the Times Literary Supplement first stimulated my interest. The reviewer, Tim Kendall, a professor of English at the University of Exeter in England, writes about the notebooks’ “aphoristic intensity,” and finds them “most usefully approached as a compendium of aphorisms” (Kendall). I discovered that Robert Frost (1874-1962), a winner of four Pulitzer prizes for his work as a poet, wrote hundreds of aphorisms in these notebooks—but 1 apparently scholars and critics were interested in them only as they might provide insight into Frost’s poetry. Instead, I would study these aphorisms and write about them. “Flashes of Creative Intuition: The Unrecognized Aphorisms of Robert Frost” is the outcome. It is intended to show that Frost should be remembered as a great aphorist, as well as a great poet. However, before going directly to Frost’s aphoristic work, we should address the aphorism itself—as genre, as fragment, and how it might originate via the creative process. With a deeper understanding of this topic we could gain a broader perspective on Frost’s aphorisms. A literature search was the first step and it soon became clear that there was ongoing academic inquiry in aphoristic literature in several European countries. In 1994, Gino Ruozzi, professor at the University of Bologna, edited a definitive two- volume, 2400-page anthology of Italian collections of aphorisms from 1250 to 2000 which includes over one hundred authors (Scrittori). In addition to selections from this work, our class in Bologna studied a collection of essays on aphorisms, also edited by Ruozzi (Teoria), the authors of which included the philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco. The bibliography for this collection includes over twenty-nine items from twenty authors; six are in German, five in French, and the rest in Italian. A few years later, as a result of an academic conference, a collection of twenty-five essays on aphorisms was edited by Professor M. A. Rigoni at the University of Padova. Two of these essays provided the only academic study of American aphorisms that I had yet found (Bacigalupo, Bernardini). And in 2008, there was a daylong conference on aphorisms at the University of London, attended by about fifty people, among them scholars from Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Serbia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 2 The point of this information is to demonstrate that the study of aphoristic literature in Europe is quite active. My concern, returning here from Bologna, was to learn more about academic inquiry in this subject in the United States. Networking with a number of American scholars who specialized in American or English literature resulted in a consistent response. All of them knew of European aphorists like Bacon, de la Rochefoucauld, Nietzsche, and others; and all could discuss the sayings in Poor Richard’s Almanac or aphorisms found in Emerson’s essays, and could recall various American aphorists like Samuel Clemens or Ambrose Bierce. However, none of them was aware of any study of aphoristic literature in the United States. Research through the University of Minnesota library system confirmed this—I was able to find only eight authors of journal articles or books on this topic published in the last fifty years (Coyle, Lind, Maddocks, Morson, Pagliaro, Waddell, Wolf, and Yoos). It is also likely that the lack of interest in aphorisms in the United States is one reason why so little of the European study in this field has been translated into English. (This field appears to be somewhat neglected in England as well [Elam]). There are a few exceptions to this apparent lack of study in this topic in the United States; for instance, the Northeastern Chapter of the Modern Language Association conference in March of 2012, offered a workshop on aphorisms. In addition, there have been a few popular anthologies of aphorisms published in English in the last seventy years, Geary’s being the most recent (Auden, Geary, Gross, Smith). Returning to Frost, the primary source of his aphoristic work is the forty-eight notebooks transcribed by Faggen which contain over one thousand aphorisms (Appendix). While critics and other scholars reviewing Notebooks may mention the aphoristic aspect of Frost’s writing, their primary focus is on how the notebooks might provide a new perspective on Frost’s poetry.

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