>But neither one writes freestanding monuments of ostentatious ambition. Instead, each one’s work as a whole is a great city.

Aha! My vote here for the two most elegantly perceptive sentences written at Harriet in 2008!

Kent

George Steiner (horribly pretentious, even for me, but even so) had a wise remark about the importance of reading an author's lesser works -- the trivial ones, the failed ones -- in order to really understand the great. To me, that minor work is often more of an open conduit to an author's mind (to jump on the authorial fallacy train), and I find that reading it can make the great poems more human and accessible because you've seen the fault-lines and joinery in the rest.

A while back I made a similar point on my blog, with the help of the Irish poet Sinéad Morrissey (see http://perpetualbird.blogspot.com/2008/02/astonishing-sinad-morrissey.html ). One aspect of a poet's greatness is range, after all. Yes?

Cheers!

Trouble is: who decides which poems are "lesser" or "minor" in Dickinson's and O'Hara's work? Or anybody's? I spy a slippery slope!!

I'm with Don on the silliness of weighing poems for major-ness or minor-ness -- doesn't Aristophanes's "The Frogs" have a scale in which Euripides and Aeschylus drop their lines to determine whose are weightier?

BUT, I do thank you, Daisy, for pointing me to that Outhouse poem! I wouldn't have figured out that that's what she's talking about, and your reading is plausible.

(Dickinson & O'Hara both in my Top Fave list.)

Don--Well, who decides is whoever edits the anthology, or Selected. Everybody decides for themselves what's important. But that's beside the point with regard to thinking of poems of larger and lesser ambition as being of a piece--in contrast to the later-Eliot model of separating the serious poems from the cat poems.

Simon--I agree with your approach to small-ambition work. But there's that word, "fault," that's difficult. It implies there's One Great Poem out there that we're all trying to reach, and all of us failing in small or big ways. That's treason to how we should think about O'Hara--and maybe about all poetry. What would O'Hara be without his faulrs?

Daisy

OK, well, I still don't understand the standard for judging "larger" and "lesser" ambition. Sorry to sound so dense!

John says: "I'm with Don on the silliness of weighing poems for major-ness or minor-ness."

Yes, so am I. That's actually my point.

Don--As far as standards go--not my job. I like some poems better and some less, and many people disagree with me (I love "Why I Am Not a Painter"; Simon DeDeo loves it not so much.) Again, I'm not talking about scoring poems like ice skating.

Yrs.,
Daisy

I'm not sure fault implies a "one true work" -- interestingly, I think art historians are most comfortable with this concept, far more than poets. When I read discussions of paintings I love, there is often reference to fault. Enabled in part (in the past) because many great artists had understudies who "did the tree bits", and in part because there are far more technical constraints (either of the representational or craft kind) that one can be unambiguous about.