![]() ![]() Oates’s story appears so entirely hostile to Frost that the reader starts to wonder about its real meaning. ![]() The story ends with Frost collapsed on the ground, almost murdered by his interviewer’s contempt. After commenting nastily on the poet’s physical appearance-”his torso sagged against his shirt like a great udder”-Oates gives us a Frost who makes lecherous comments, and lies about his past, and trashes other poets, and fails as a father and husband, and displays an overall arrogance and meanness that make him entirely loathsome. But the Frost on display here is so odious that the interview soon turns into a confrontation, then an inquisition. ![]() The story, “Lovely, Dark, Deep”-its title drawn ironically from one of Frost’s most famous poems, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”-describes the attempt of a young woman, Evangeline Fife, to interview the aging Frost in 1951. But in November 2013, a half-century after Robert Frost died, Harper’s Magazine published a withering attack on his legend, in the form of a short story by Joyce Carol Oates. It’s not often that a poet is famous enough to become the target of character assassination 50 years after his death. ![]()
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