Although the class has not started I decided to do some reading in advance.  I started with the essay by Mr. Logan.  I ffounf it be largely incomprehensible.  I had always considered my myself to be a personal of reasonable intelligence.  Not super smart but ok.  But for the life of me I cannot understand what Logan is saying and I have no idea from where he draws some of the observations he makes.  Case in point

"His fantasies have a primitive agency, a primitive terror - and don't men act at times as if they believed what Frost is only whimsical about? His poems require not that we believe them, but that we know that we could believe them if we were different - that is, if we were Frost. This slight offness or strangeness let's his readers take as pleasant fictions what would otherwise be unpleasant truths. though that doesn't make the less unpleasant."

Much of Frost is mysterious.  This essay makes Frost even less understandable.

Anyway, just had to complain to someone.

Hello John,

The William Logan article wasn't the easiest read but I found it worth the effort.  He is himself a poet considered difficult by some (but I haven't read much) and a university professor of literature (U. Fla.), and their guild seems to require a certain opacity, or maybe it's just the lingo of their trade.  Still, he gets across his point that Frost is not the cracker-barrel sage, Grandma Moses figure many seem to take him for.  The paragraph you quoted reminded me of The Witch of Coos, which he cites elsewhere and is one of my favorite Frost poems.  On the surface, it is a rather whimsical ghost story, but by the end Frost had me thinking about betrayal, revenge and deception.

While I've read a modicum of Frost's poems, I feel I've just scratched the surface and look forward to a much deeper dive in this program.

Mike