For the better part of the last century, one of the great literary debates involved two American-born poets, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, whose followers vied for primacy.
Both were hailed as innovators who broke with existing practices – Frost with his feature novels in “North Boston”, Eliot for his eclectic “The Waste Land”.
Over long careers—both died in the 1960s—Frost came to be seen as “America’s Poet,” while Eliot was the vanguard of literary modernism. And, as often happens, both assertions are oversimplified.
Frost went to England to secure his reputation, and then returned triumphantly to New England, where he spent the rest of his life. Eliot made a similar journey from his native St. Louis to Harvard to London, and then stayed in England for the rest of his life.
Frost’s poetry is much deeper and darker than the popular image, while Elliot, the iconic warrior, becomes proper British and Anglo-Catholic; He also wrote wonderful poetry for children.
Nevertheless, it is one of Frost’s poetic sayings that speaks most vividly for our time – his assertion that he sought to model “old ways of being new.”
We have seen the decline of traditional institutions, from political parties to churches, and from local newspapers to any sense of a common literary culture. One possible explanation lies in that oldest American trait – the search for novelty.
Ever since the founding of a “New Nation”—and its democratic and republican foundations were truly a new thing under the sun—Americans have been receptive, perhaps overly receptive, to the next new thing. One of the most recent is something called “artificial intelligence”. Am I the only one wondering if such a thing really exists?
I’ve read as much as I can find on the subject, and I’ve concluded that it’s really part of what we’ve lived through since the 1950s – more and more advanced computer technology.
The problem with calling it “intelligence” is that it takes a uniquely human trait and projects it onto a machine, however amazing and complex it may be.
Forty years ago, Deep Blue, a chess program, had advanced so much that it could beat the great grandmasters, although to this day no one is particularly interested in watching computers play chess.
Chess happens to be a fully quantifiable game, and so it is possible to create a program that is “superior” to human skill.
More contemporary dreams concern robots that can perform countless household tasks, schedule our lives, and provide companionship. It seems unlikely that we will ever be satisfied with the results.
For better or worse, humans are stuck with each other, with all of our flaws and contradictions, because we respond as a species, something the machine we program can never get past.
What is truly important is determined by feelings, convictions, and family and community ties that cannot be reduced to the binary language of computers. Data does not have such qualities and therefore cannot be a reliable guide for decision making.
And computers, even those programmed to write technical manuals or short stories, will never be able to capture the complexity of language, another human acquisition that unites and divides us.
Consider the general areas where digital technologies are taking over.
A money-based political system hardly seems an improvement over political parties. Our loyalties have been so divided that it’s hard to remember what unites us.
Nothing has come to replace the newspaper for accurate and comprehensive local news, and it seems nothing will ever.
If we are not careful, we will lose important parts of a common culture, which has continually adapted over more than two centuries, but which could be threatened as never before.
If we pay more attention to poets, we might learn something important about ourselves, and how we can mend the national fabric.
When Robert Frost spoke at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, he famously ignored what he had written for the occasion, which spoke, perhaps prematurely, of a “golden age of poetry and power.”
Instead, he recited from memory one of his best short lyrics, “The Gift Outright,” which begins, “The land was ours before it was ours.”
As a summary of our history, from the epic struggle between the European settlers and those dispossessed of them to the nation of today, formed from all the nations of the world, is hard to beat. It may come to the point of wisdom.
When we emerge from pandemic conditions, we once again have the opportunity to learn how to gain wisdom from each other, to build better relationships than those that led to such conflict and disagreement.
At the risk of another simplification, we can do it with fewer numbers and more hair.
Douglas Rooks is a Maine editor, commentator, and reporter since 1984. He is the author of three books and now examines the life and career of the Chief Justice of the United States. Comments are welcome at drooks@tds.net