William H. Pritchard

The author, especially noted for his reviews, tells his story at Amherst College, then as a grad student at Harvard including teaching a section of Brower’s Hum.6, a course invented when Brower taught at Amherst. So many AmColl profs from the fifties left to chair departments—Brower, Barber (Indiana), Poirier (Rutgers). And eventually Pritchard returns to the college on a hill to teach for the rest of his life.

Pritchard’s is a worthy sequel to Theodore Baird’s English at Amherst which describes how the subject of “English” emerged from the philosophy and theology degrees that populated the faculty at the turn of the 20th Century. Both books take their place in the rich pantheon of histories of the college, from W.S. Tyler to Meiklejohn, from Thomas LeDuc and George Whicher to George Peterson. Now that the College has rejected its excellent fight song, “Lord Jeffrey Amherst,” the fine shelf of college histories bejewel its fame.

“English” was not required to enter Harvard until the late 19th Century, when the Latin entrance exam added contemporary English literature, Silas Marner, which became a mainstay of H.S. English in America until my days in the early sixties. But Amherst’s English 1-2 was a unique, rigorous course with daily papers, designed by Theodore Baird and Armour Craig. The latter was Department Chair my freshman year, and taught my section of English 1. He got me an Amherst Fellowship when I left for grad school at the U of Minnesota, where I adopted daily papers, evoked by questions such as “Have you ever lied? Tell of a time where you masked the truth with language.” Another quarter I asked them about knowing and not knowing, “What would you call such a story, whose truth you are not sure of? A lie? Fiction? Gossip? Hearsay? Myth? Superstition?”

Perhaps my most popular course, third quarter, asked them to assess Beatles songs as a dramatic monolog, like “Hey Jude,” or songs with irony, such as those by U of Minnesota dropout, Bob Dylan/ Zimmerman, “How Many Roads?”
Two roads. That’s how many the subject of Pritchard’s Ph.D. walked down, diverged in a yellow wood (evidently in Olde England, though it always reads like the Newer one). Securing the Instructorship at his undergrad mater, his lowly position had the perk of serving as secretary to his doctoral Subject on his yearly two visits to Amherst as Simpson lecturer.

“Frost’s mind…in connection to poetry was full of touchstones, not exactly Arnoldian ones, just couplets or whole poems that meant everything to him. Or it felt to me like ‘everything’ the way he would say aloud lines like
William Collins’ “Ode” of 1746:
‘How sleep the brave, who sink to rest
By all their country’s wishes blest!
Or James Shirley's dirge from one of his plays:
‘The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things…
Sometimes it was no more than a brief moment, a saying excerpted from a poem that seemed to mean something to him that I could not possibly understand, as in three lines from William Vaughn Moody’s “Gloucester Moors,” a poem I’d never even read:
‘Who has given to me this sweet?
And given my brother dust to eat?
And when will his wage come in?’
It was Frost’s speaking voice, fetching up these bits of remembered lyric he had carried around with him since sometime in the preceding century, that unfailingly heroicized them, made a listener feel in the presence of something lofty, noble, heart-stirring.

" That was the accent I was listening for, although there were other, less lofty ones to be heard…about the absurdity of the United Nations…You had to hear how canny Frost had been in dealing with the government so as to procure Ezra Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital (it turned out that Archibald MacLeish was the significant mover in this case)…and how the later Yeats’s highly sexualized poetry revealed him as a dirty old man. One sat through these oft-reformed routines and waited for something less prepackaged.

"One of Frost’s letters speaks of the difference between “thinking” and “voting,” and how much classroom talk by teachers and students was taking sides…
When I suggested to him that I hoped to publish my dissertation as a book he was unimpressed, advising me to “keep it around” to “deepen” it. (I ended up keeping it around for twenty-four years.)"[128-29]

I quote Pritchard at length to do justice to our his prose, but still omit much subtlety and complexity. As an aside—in a series of asides—I am gratified to note my poetry teacher Archibald MacLeish’s role here, perhaps the only time he surpassed the good grey poet.
MacLeish was most generous to me, securing with my grad advisor a yearlong research grant at Brown University, and praising my resultant essay, “Your effort is better than academic. It leaves me feeling learned and grateful.” I used this on the back-cover of my book including that essay, to the annoyance and elimination of academic reviewers. But MacLeish left Amherst soon after he came there as Simpson lecturer, and taught me and my brilliant friend Tom Weiskel, who ascended to Yale (a protege of H Bloom) and beyond.
Tom was a brilliant parodist of fiction and criticism, whom I attempt to capture in Parodies Lost (2016). He was also, to round out this note, the undergrad advisee of Bill Pritchard.… (mehr)

i read this when it first appeared, but I recall a substantial impression, that Pritchard had achieved what his title announces--a kind of Johnsonian exercise in biography and critique. Pritchard does this through his fine ear for voice and tone of voice. It's amazing how commonly these are ignored by modern aloudreaders--such as Obama's First Inaugural poet, a Yale prof, for heaven's sake, who had no idea how to read her own poem. She was the victim of poetry instruction over the past few decades, which has ignored the essentials of voice and tone, replaced them with the French Disease, Deconstruction, and then with verieties of political correctness. Such pretentiousness does not result in good aloudreadings--nor particularly good poems.
Hardy, Robinson, Yeats, Eliot all reward reading for Tone of Voice. Pritchard calls his Frost chapter, "Elevated Play," and his Eliot chapter, some form of amusement. I find his analysis particularly helpful in reading Hardy, a poet who needs a modern helper because of his grim fatalism, his Dorset grit. Turns out, there's an element of play and of distance in this. Having lived in Dorset off and on over the years, and having visited the Hardy sites--birthplace, Max Gate, etc--I do not find my understanding of his verse greatly increased. But reading Pritchard, I do.
So it may be said for most of the poets included here, which makes this an essential book for one's shelf. The great terror of English bookshleves, H Bloom, does not have the patience or the ear to reveal the heart of these poets. (In his books, one often encounters Hardy or Blake explicating Bloom.) Though, that said, I must appreciate Bloom's psycho-literary reading of Lucretius's "clinamen" (famous now a s "swerve") which is much more convincing, and useful, than Greenblatt's Lucretius as inventer of the modern. You may as well claim Epictetus--a thoroughly modern character, including his handicap.… (mehr)

Continuing on my summer quest to do better with poetry, I selected Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered from the Chautauqua reading list of 1985. I thought I would like it because one of the few poets have enjoyed reading, and the only one I can quote, is Frost. The book turned out to be a combination of biography and literary criticism which I found difficult to get through. Since I knew very little about Frost's life, however, I did learn some things. He was a difficult person who had a difficult life. He and his wife had 6 children: two died in early childhood; the youngest (and Frost's favorite) daughter survived T.B. to die of complications of puerperal fever; and a son who committed suicide. His wife died in 1938 (4 years after the death of the youngest daughter and before the suicide of the son) and he seems to have suffered a great deal of guilt for "having dragged her through pretty much of a life as frail as she was. Too many children, too many habitations, too many vicissitudes. And a faith required that would have exhausted most women."

Another theme of his life is a need for recognition, reassurance and attention. He aparently often said (regarding speaking invitations but it probably also applied to his life in general) "I only go if I'm the show". This need appears to have never met completely met inspite of 4 Pulitzer prizes, several choice positions as "poet in residence" at excellent universities and honorary degrees from many of them including Oxford and Cambridge. And so he died in late January 1963, a complex, difficult and aparently unhappy old man.… (mehr)

Here's simply the best life of Frost based on close readings by a critic with an ear (also a fine pianist). The author had many conversations with the poet, over many years, many "talks walking." The writing is worthy of the fine writer that Frost can be; contrast Thompson's ponderous prose, and judgments.
For example, Pritchard cites Jarrell's interviewing Frost for the Library of Congress in 1959, where Jarrell focused on North of Boston and the numbers of deprived women speakers, say, in "A Servant to Servants." "Frost told Jarrell that 'the woman always loses,' but added that 'she loses in an interesting way. She pulls the whole thing down with her.' This remark attributes power to 'the woman' even as it designates her the loser in whatever she suffers at the hands of her husband or her family or 'life' in general."… (mehr)