A close reading

“No sweeter music can come to my ears,” Robert Frost once wrote a friend, “than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.”

Frost’s ghost, then, can be grateful to New York Times poetry columnist and Cornell University prof David Orr for this book. It will certainly stir up the kind of tumult that the poet — whom many remember as a kindly if eccentric New England farmer and many others regard as an egomaniacal monster — would have enjoyed.

Orr lays out the battle lines on the book’s cover: “Finding America in the Poem Everybody Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong.” That’s a lot to promise in a subtitle: that the poem most of us have heard proclaimed at commencement exercises, weddings and funerals; have memorized and written school themes about; have Googled — more than any other poem in the English language, Orr reports — and have even had pitched to us in advertisements for Mentos and Nicorette, is also a poem most of us do not understand. That the poet has, in effect, bamboozled us. Frost would like that, too. / Bill Marvel, Dallas News

David Orr: The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong
(Penguin, $25.95)