Friday from the Archives: ““living deeper into matter”: Robert Frost’s “Kitty Hawk” and the Creation of Nature” by William Stott in NCLR 2003
Our special feature of 2003 was “Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the First Flight: Aviation in North Carolina Literature and Letters“, so fitting we should revisit for Aviation History Month.
Stott wrote, “The history of aviation is, Goldstein notes, not merely the events themselves – first flights, transcontinental and transoceanic crossings, global circumnavigations, moon walks, dramatic disasters – but also the “designs and descriptions in books and pamphlets … and depictions by artists” (Goldstein, “Nostalgia” 751).
The implication is worth considering: the meaning of human flight is located in literary representations and reflections, as well as in the technical reports or the physical events themselves. It is through stories, poems, essays, and visual images that we internalize the complex, often contradictory meanings of grand events and artifacts. The icons of modernity – automobiles, skyscrapers, airplanes – are complex alloys, compounds of metal and human desires.”
Stott then tackled Robert Frost’s “Kitty Hawk,” delving into the depths and heights of this “last ambitious poem.” He wrote, “For Frost the most significant aspect of “flight” is that of human imagination. Christ’s incarnation (” … God’s own descent /into flesh … “) is reckoned the epiphanic merging of human and divine, an image of the dialectic of earth and sky, matter and spirit, experience and archetypal (literary) form. Or, as he lightly puts it later in the narrative,
Don’t discount our powers; We have made a pass
At the infinite,
Made it, as it were, Rationally ours,
To the most remote
Swirl of neon-lit
Particles afloat. ( 439)”
NCLR intern Sandra Carawan added in sidebars First Flight-related poetry snippets from Catherine Albertson, John Williams Andrews, Ray Bradbury, Philip Levine, Walt McDonald, William Henry Rhodes, Selden Rodman, Christine Sloan, and John Foster West. A brief reminder that scholarly critiques of the North Carolina authors in this list would likely be eligible for a John Ehle Prize Award for “a writer whose work has not (yet or in some time) received the critical attention it deserves.”
Read Stott’s work on Gale Cengage. Add the 2003 issue to your collection today!
