17. Reading Poems for the Lichen with Dr. Andrew Osborn

I’m joined this week by Dr. Andrew Osborn, Associate Professor of English at the University of Dallas. We talk about poetry: why Robert Frost’s poem “The Road not Taken” is not at all about individualist self-expression, about the legendary junior poet course that all UD English majors take, and why, when it comes to poetry, it’s sometimes better to attend less to the forest than to the individual trees, and even to the minuscule lichen on those trees.Dr. Osborn mentions several poems, including:William Wordsworth’s “I wandered Lonely as a Cloud”:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken

Gwendolen Brooks’ “The White Troops Had Their Orders But the Negroes Looked Like Men”: http://contingenton.blogspot.com/2015/10/gwendolyn-brooks-positive-integration.html

And the book he mentions, by Mutlu Konuk Blasing, is called Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words:
 https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691126821/lyric-poetry

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