Have you seen the size of the OED? It's the slag of dictionaries.The OED - the widely accepted authoritative source of English in the world. But of course you don’t accept it. Obviously.
He sought to legitimise his yokel persona by owning a farm, just like Jeremy Clarkson 2,000 years later.I don't think you can really call him a poseur. He was interested in and highly valued rural life and work, he had experience of owning and working a farm. I wouldn't say he had a yokel persona as such, but he observed it and learned from it.
He's not artless by y'all's spurious definition but he is in that he was unaffected, which you agree with when you say he doesn't have a persona.You could only come to the conclusion that Frost was artless, in any of its various definitions, from the abolutely shallowest of readings - that he used simple language and wrote about farmers and that.
Plot twist: Shakespeare was working class, and because of him even royalty speaks common.theres way more working class salt of the earth DNA in american literature (at least early 20th c) than there is in the british canon
They fake it because they sincerely believe it should be faked if it can't be done sincerely. The meta-sincerity of duty.I don't think of Americans as sincere necessarily
I think of them plastering a fake grin on and saying have a nice day bucko
Frost, had he earned a college degreeThe Lobster and the Quiet Fire
—In the style of Robert Frost
I met a lobster down a tide-worn shore,
Where kelp swung low and brine did not ignore
The whisper of the sea’s repeated hymn,
Or how the day would end in shadows dim.
He scuttled slow, in armor rough and red,
With ancient thoughts inside his claw-tipped head.
He knew the weight of depth, the pull of tide—
And something in him flickered, still, with pride.
“No monarch am I,” he seemed to confess,
“But still I feel the press of worthiness.
Some current in me, chemical and pure,
That grants me will, and makes my stance endure.”
I paused and watched him, half in jest, half truth—
As if he bore the philosophic ruth
Of creatures small, yet dignified and wise,
Who never look away with downcast eyes.
“Serotonin,” I said, “they say it dwells
In even you, down in your tidal cells.
That in your fights, your place is writ and earned—
A fire of mood that can't be unconcerned.”
He raised one claw, as if to point or warn,
Or simply to salute a mind reborn.
Then turned, and vanished in the sea’s slow moan,
Each bubble like a thought he left alone.
And I, who’d wandered there for salt and air,
Felt some small shift within me, faint and rare—
That even in the dark, with claws and shell,
Some unseen flame declares: “All shall be well.”
For Once, Then, Something
By Robert Frost
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
That there's no such thing. And that there's a sort of indulgence in its appeal. Which english culture has evolved to weed out in all its guises.What do older people learn that makes simple sincerity less available, or artful selfconsciousness more appealing?