ALTHOUGH ROBERT FROST sometimes promoted himself as one who delivered the “straight goods” (CPPP 915), using plain, if tonally variegated, language to express the plain sense of things, it was Wallace Stevens who wrote a poem called “The Plain Sense of Things” and who could plainly entitle poems “An Ordinary Evening” or “Sunday Morning.” Frost and Stevens were not close as friends or aesthetically affiliated; nonetheless, it is not unreasonable to think that these two adoptive New Englanders (Frost from California, Stevens from Pennsylvania) might have had at least one eye on each other. Maybe it was even more than that, considering how Frost and Stevens, separated in age by only five years, sometimes riff on each other’s poems, especially when the subject is birds. Birds may seem an unlikely entrée into the concerns of these two poets, but I will argue that both poets exhibit the difficulty of writing about birds in the aftermath of romanticism, which often used birds as symbols and translated them into human terms. Both Frost and Stevens, who came of age in a time of great ornithological interest, engage the postromantic challenges of writing about birds explicitly and repeatedly. Are birds to be naturalistic creatures of the environment or emblems of verse? We find evidence of both tendencies in these poets, but the trajectory is toward empirical observation. The legacy of their breakthrough is the practice of contemporary poets, which has in turn helped to inspire a new ecocriticism.1

中文翻译：

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被精通的需要：弗罗斯特、史蒂文斯和鸟类

尽管罗伯特·弗罗斯特有时将自己宣传为“直货”（CPPP 915），使用朴素的语言来表达事物的朴素意义，但华莱士史蒂文斯写了一首名为“朴素的感觉”的诗。事情”，谁可以简单地将诗歌命名为“一个平凡的夜晚”或“星期天的早晨”。弗罗斯特和史蒂文斯既不是朋友，也不是审美上的关联。尽管如此，认为这两个收养的新英格兰人（来自加利福尼亚的弗罗斯特，来自宾夕法尼亚的史蒂文斯）可能至少有一只眼睛并不是没有道理的。考虑到弗罗斯特和史蒂文斯的年龄相差仅五岁，他们有时会反复调侃对方的诗，尤其是当主题是鸟类时，或许还不止于此。鸟类似乎不太可能进入这两位诗人的关注中，但我会争辩说，两位诗人都表现出在浪漫主义之后写鸟类的困难，浪漫主义经常使用鸟类作为象征并将它们翻译成人类术语。弗罗斯特和史蒂文斯都在对鸟类学非常感兴趣的时代成长起来，他们明确地和反复地写下关于鸟类的后浪漫主义挑战。鸟类是环境中的自然生物还是诗歌的象征？我们在这些诗人中发现了这两种倾向的证据，但轨迹是朝向经验观察的。他们突破的遗产是当代诗人的实践，这反过来又有助于激发新的生态批评。 1 弗罗斯特和史蒂文斯都在对鸟类学非常感兴趣的时代成长起来，他们明确地和反复地写下关于鸟类的后浪漫主义挑战。鸟类是环境中的自然生物还是诗歌的象征？我们在这些诗人中发现了这两种倾向的证据，但轨迹是朝向经验观察的。他们突破的遗产是当代诗人的实践，这反过来又有助于激发新的生态批评。 1 弗罗斯特和史蒂文斯都在对鸟类学非常感兴趣的时代成长起来，他们明确地和反复地写下关于鸟类的后浪漫主义挑战。鸟类是环境中的自然生物还是诗歌的象征？我们在这些诗人中发现了这两种倾向的证据，但轨迹是朝向经验观察的。他们突破的遗产是当代诗人的实践，这反过来又有助于激发新的生态批评。 1