ABSTRACT
Beauty is the forbidden word of our age, as Sex was to the Victorians. Frost loves the present participle in titles, particularly when it blurs into other parts of speech: the noun-verb or gerund, 'a mending', or the adjectival 'mending', to describe the character of a wall, or even, by implication, an adverbial 'mending' to describe the action of a wall. Like Frost, Elizabeth Bishop seems to have nothing to say about 'beauty' as an ingredient of the poem or an emotional lure to the poet. Jamie McKendrick has noted the connections between Bishop's poem and Frost's 'For Once, Then, Something', both of which contain, as he summarizes, 'the presence of quartz and three somethings'. Bouhours and Jankelevitch might seem to belong to a minor Gallic or continental tradition of mystical theorizing, a tradition inimical to the Anglo-American, and in particular inimical to the twentieth-century 'realist' work of Frost and Bishop.
