This is taken from the www.poets.org website, http://www.poets.org/exh/Exhibit.cfm?prmID=6 and explains why there are so many sad poems. Frost's distinction below is one we see in the difference between the solipsistic poetry of so many adolescents which is more therapy than art, and the mature voice in established poets.

To Go Its Way in Tears: Poems of Grief Curated by Edward Hirsch -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to mourn, to let sorrow inhabit one's very being.
Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears." Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish--to let others vanish--without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art.

Express YOURSELF......


Written for Feodor Dostoyevski
inspired by the character of Prince Myshkin
in his novel 'THE IDIOT'


Strangers in an ever shifting
tempest thrown,we impart
like longing lovers...
desire for unchanging home.


and designate by the patterned stars
an ensuing time and place
as though the world
would end tomorrow
and love die always...

when ennobled by our suffering
is to love ever wrong?


......Jana Pawlowski copyright 1998

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