Auden was a realist and knew that poetry couldn’t stop the approaching machinery of war – the elegy was written in 1939 – nonetheless he upholds the human need to commune with other humans.īut might literature – novels, plays and, yes, even poetry – be more than a mouthpiece? It is “a way of happening”, he continues, “a mouth”. People draw on it when they want to denigrate poetry: if one of last century’s great poets thinks poetry is more impotent than important, why should they have to read it?īut these readers tend to forget (or choose to ignore) what comes next: poetry survives, Auden asserts, “in the valley of its making”. Yeats” - it could even be the most quoted line of his career. Auden’s famous elegy, “ In Memory of W.B. Martin Reveals 'Winds of Winter' Details and More". ^ " 'Game of Thrones' Author George R.R.^ Fire and Ice - Fred Lerdahl, archived from the original on, retrieved."Frost's 'Fire and Ice' and Dante's 'Inferno' ". Critical companion to Robert Frost: a literary reference to his life and work. " Fire and Ice," A Group of Poems by Robert Frost. It is also read by Kristen Stewart's character, Bella Swan, at the beginning of the film Eclipse. The poem is the epigraph of Stephenie Meyers' book, Eclipse, of the Twilight Saga.Martin has said that the title of his A Song of Ice and Fire series, which was later adapted into the Game of Thrones television series, was partly inspired by the poem. "Fire and Ice" by the American composer Kirke Mechem, one of the choral settings in his opus "American Trio."."Fire and Ice" by the American composer Fred Lerdahl, a vocal arrangement of the poem."Fire and Ice" by the American composer Andrea Clearfield, a choral cantata using the poem's lyrics as libretto.In contrast, hate is discussed with verbs of reason and thought ("I think I know./To say."). įrost's diction further highlights the parallels between Frost's discussion of desire and hate with Dante's outlook on sins of passion and reason with sensuous and physical verbs describing desire and loosely recalling the characters Dante met in the upper rings of Hell: "taste" (recalling the Glutton), "hold" (recalling the adulterous lovers), and "favor" (recalling the hoarders). Additionally, the rhyme scheme-ABA ABC BCB-he remarks, is similar to the one Dante invented for Inferno. He draws a parallel between the nine lines of the poem with the nine rings of Hell, and notes that, like the downward funnel of the rings of Hell, the poem narrows considerably in the last two lines. Serio claims that the poem is a compression of Dante's Inferno. Marveled at for its compactness, "Fire and Ice" signaled for Frost "a new style, tone, manner, form." Its casual tone masks the serious question it poses to the reader. The poem's meter is an irregular mix of iambic tetrameter and dimeter, and the rhyme scheme (which is ABA ABC BCB) suggests but departs from the rigorous pattern of Dante's terza rima. The poem is written in a single nine-line stanza, which greatly narrows in the last two lines. Shapley was surprised at seeing "Fire and Ice" in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley describes an encounter he had with Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asked him how the world will end. In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts" presentation, the prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired "Fire and Ice". InspirationĪccording to one of Frost's biographers, "Fire and Ice" was inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell (the traitors) are submerged up to their necks in ice while in a fiery hell: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass.right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice." Published in December 1920 in Harper's Magazine and in 1923 in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book New Hampshire, "Fire and Ice" is one of Frost's best-known and most anthologized poems. " Fire and Ice" is a popular poem by Robert Frost that discusses the end of the world, likening the elemental force of fire with the emotion of desire, and ice with hate.
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