Silent Cal's revenge

[larryhammer]

I'm fond of marginalia in used books — comments and annotations and arguments from previous owners. All the reasons described in 84 Charing Cross Road.

I also collect old poetry anthologies. Editors a century ago had a very different sense of what was important and good and likely to last, of the 50 years previous to them, than we do today. They tended to stuff in gobs of poets I've never heard of outside of these anthologies. Some of it is, indeed, lost gems. A lot is, well, banal and uninteresting.

Best of all are old textbook anthologies with student notes. I looove finding these. Such this one, currently kept in my office for de-stressing breaks: The College Book of Verse, copyright 1927, used by Maude Muller Morgan (probably within a decade of its publication) as her notebook, taking down marginal lecture notes in pencil. This book is a treasure mine of mostly obvious and occasionally astute observations, as well as the occasional head-scratcher.

Which brings me to my question: Does anyone have any idea why someone would write "think of Calvin Cooledge (sic)" next to the first dozen lines of Frost's "Mending Wall"? Because I've no clue.

---L.

Comments

[theodosia.livejournal.com]

Wild-eyed guess: Weren't they both Vermonters? Perhaps Coolidge's accent was similar to Frost's and she wanted to think of the poem read with that accent?

[larryhammer]

Well, Coolidge was from Vermont. Frost was born and raised in California till he was 11, and eventually ended up in Boston then New Hampshire.

---L.

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

It's possible this was one of his axioms--that is, about good fences making good neighbors, etc. He had a lot of them. Or maybe she equated the 1920's widening gap between rich and poor with mending fences, though that seems like a stretch...

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

I have no clue, either, but you did remind me of "Ending Mall", a take off written by Connie Wilkin's son Allen, about the dead mall in Northampton. ("There's something in nature doesn't love a mall") Thanks.

[larryhammer]

A friend in another venue offers the following. She or he (those who know me elsewhere get two guesses who) is, I suspect, probably right:

Oh, it's not much of a stretch. The poem and Coolidge share a "North of Boston" venue (that was in fact the title of the volume in which it first appeared), and the poem dramatizes a steely denial of fellow-feeling and democratic neighborliness in favor of obdurate and rather pessimistic self-sufficiency. It's cold and unloving, and the narrator's neighbor is taciturn (he says nothing save to repeat "Good fences make good neighbors"), all of these characteristics shared by Coolidge.

---L.