Who is better Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson? It’s no contest...Emily Dickinson. But this is why I’m unnerved every time I listen to Simon and Garfunkel's “The Dangling Conversation” and hear the lines “you read your Emily Dickinson / And I my Robert Frost.”
Seriously, Robert Frost?
Do not get my wrong, I don’t have a secret vendetta against Robert Frost. I mean, every elementary student must salute him for providing them with a perfectly pleasant poem to memorize. Which poem? The poem that is a fixture in our American public school curriculum:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
This song is about the communication barrier between a couple. In my opinion the cause of communication barrier is revealed in this line - it derives from their differing taste and intellect. Someone who prefers Robert Frost to Emily Dickinson obviously has elementary taste in poetry. I know my conversation would be stifled if someone started talking about the merits of Robert Frost and I was reading Emily Dickinson. Talk about a conversation killer.
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