of superseding the old in favor of the new:
I must have taken it as a truth accepted that a thing of beauty will never
cease to be beautiful. Its beauty will in fact increase. Which is the
opposite doctrine to Emersons in “Verily know when the half gods go
the gods arrive”: the poets and poems we have loved and ceased to love
are to be regarded as stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things.
Growth is a distressful change of taste for the better. Taste improving is
on the way upward to creation. Nay-nay. It is more likely on the way to
dissatisfaction and ineffectuality. A person who has found out young
from Aldous Huxley how really bad Poe is will hardly from the
superiority of the position this gives him be able to go far with anything
he himself attempts . . .
( N, 49)
Frost once said that the way he became a poet was “by following the procession down the ages.” Classical poets including Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, and Ovid
as well as the great English poets, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Smart, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning among many formed
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part of Frost’s own canon; he knew thousands of their lines by heart. He also
immersed himself in American poets. He gave his future fiancée, Elinor, the
iconoclastic Emily Dickinson’s Poems, First Series (1890) (although, at the time, much of Dickinson’s strange practices of punctuation had been edited out).
Frost’s interest in metaphor’s way of saying one thing in terms of another
as well as one thing and meaning another may reflect Dickinson’s sense of
circumference and her methods of telling the truth slant. When Frost wrote
“A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books,” he may well have
had Dickinson in mind as a model of the home-bound poet. In reading “The
Road Not Taken,” it would be hard to imagine that, in addition to Dante, Frost did not have this poem by Dickinson in mind:
Our journey had advanced;
Out feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being’s road,
Eternity by term.
Our pace took sudden awe,
Our feet reluctant led,
Before were cities, but between,
The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope,–
Behind, a sealed route,
Eternity’s a white flag before,
And God at every gate.
Frost may be less inclined to meditate beyond the grave but both he and Dick-
inson had penetrating minds, exploring the conflict of knowledge and faith.
Frost also read and admired the poetry of William Cullen Bryant, Emerson,
Longfellow, and, of course, Edwin Arlington Robinson, all poets known and
popular in their own times. It might be true that Frost sought to align himself with a New England tradition and sense of place associated with these poets. The chords often strike deeper. Frost no doubt loved both the thought and the wit of Emerson’s appeal to the vernacular in Monadnoc: “I can spare the college bell, /
And the learned lecture, well; / Spare the clergy and libraries, / Institutes and dictionaries, / For that hardy English root / Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot.”
Writing of this passage in 1918 to Regis Michaud, a Smith College Professor,
Frost stressed both its emphasis on the colloquial and its inspiration of the local in poetry:
I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am
that the national is the root of all thought and art. It may shoot up as
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high as you please and flourish as widely abroad in the air, if only the
roots are what and where they should be. One half of individuality is
locality; and I was about venturing to say the other half was
colloquiality.
( SL, 228)
Other notable Frost poems appear to work in some dialogue with poems by
Emerson. For example, Emerson’s “Hamatreya” begins with a vision of men
who once “possessed the land which rendered to their toil / Hay, corn, roots,
hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood.” But the speaker goes on to ask “Where
are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds; / And strangers, fond as they,
their furrows plough.” Frost’s “The Gift Outright” continues the meditation
on who and how we “possess” the land and how it possesses us. Frost, too,
though in a different way from Emerson, leaves open the question of the future of its possession.
Though Longfellow became the bête noire of Pound’s modernist poetics, Frost never condescended to him. While one would be hard-pressed to find
the kind of sentiment in Frost one finds in Longfellow, the interest in writing memorable poetry in meter and in form no doubt attracted Frost to Longfellow’s shorter lyrics. The pastoral world of such longer poems as Evangeline, the world of the “forest primeval” where the village of Acadian farmers has
gone to waste and “the farmers forever departed,” no doubt resonated with
the decaying New England landscape that haunted so many poems in North of
Boston and other books. The title of Frost’s A Boy’s Will is a phrase from a line of Longfellow’s 1858 poem “My Lost Youth”: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will, /
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” It may be worth keeping
in mind that the line in Longfellow to which Frost alludes is itself actually a translation of a line from a Finnish folk poem; the allusion may provide an
interesting comment on originality as well as on the notion of “will” itself.
A number of the attitudes and practices of high modernism became anath-
ema to Frost. In a remarkable 1934 letter to his daughter, Lesley, largely about Ezra Pound and modernism, Frost defined five aspects of the modernist movement he found objectionable. First, he thought that modernism overvalued
imagism over the play of rhythm and meter. Second, he believed that mod-
ernist fascination with fractured form and fragments sacrificed the inner form and organic integrity of the whole poem. He stated rather succinctly that
everything, including a work of art, has two “compulsions”: the movement
to inner form, driven by the spiritual or individual, “formity”; and the pressure from without, which may be social, “conformity.” All poetry, Frost thought,
followed those two principles, except for “poetry according to the Pound–
Eliot–Richard Reed school of art. For me I should be as satisfied to play tennis
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with the net down as to write verse with no verse set to stay me.”1 A third, and related, aspect of modernism that troubled Frost was the way the emphasis on
the image allowed for disassociation among the images or no great attempt
to create connections among them. Fourth, Frost found the modernist poem
became a kind of a self-referential game, “intimation, implication, insinuation, and innuendo as an object in itself.�
�2 Fifth, and related, Frost found much of modernist poetry a game of literary allusions, “They quote to see if you can
place the quotations.”3
The tension in Frost between innovation and tradition remained throughout
his work. In his sly Introduction to E. A. Robinson’s King Jasper, Frost begins by summarizing many of the trends of modernism, “new ways to be new,” but
seems to praise Robinson for having found “the old fashioned way to be new.”
Frost made an ambivalent response to Pound’s and the modernist mantra of
“make it new.” Perhaps his difference from Pound and other high modernists
also had something to do with his attitude toward success and toward his
audience. Frost wanted to succeed by being read by a larger circle than those
acclimated to the limited objectives of his own highly specialized ideas about poetics. Writing in 1913 from England to his former student John Bartlett, Frost emphasized his desire to “reach out” and, if possible, by “taking thought”:
There is one qualifying fact always to bear in mind: there is a kind of
success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success
with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive
where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get
outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their
thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it – dont you
doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never
make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend
Pound does. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do
by taking thought.
( CPPP, 667–668)
Frost was consonant with some of the attitudes of his contemporaries in his
sense of the limits of self-expression in poetry. Dickinson presented a luminous but powerful lyric ego in circumference and Whitman an operatic ego. For all
Whitman’s emphasis on self-song, he is not really more personally revealing
than was Dickinson in her poetry. Though we are often tempted to identify
Frost’s biographical persona with the lyric “I” of his poetry, Frost also resisted turning his poetry into self-expression, much less confession:
Poetry is measured in more senses than one: it is measured feet but more
important still it is a measured amount of all we could say an we would.
We shall be judged finally by the delicacy of our feeling of where to stop
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short. The right people know, and we artists should know better than
they know. There is no greater fallacy going than art is expression – an
undertaking to tell all to the last scrapings of the brain pan . . . Im never
so desperate for material that I have to trench on the confidential for one
thing, nor on the private for another nor on the personal, nor in general
on the sacred.
( SL, 361)
Frost’s comment does not veer far from, though it is by no means the same
as, T. S. Eliot’s assertion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry is an escape from personality. Frost may be drawing on emotions and thought,
what he liked to call (from the Roman poet Catullus) the mens animi, or the
“thought of his emotions,” but not from the raw and unvarnished scraps of his
personal life.
Frost took the “scrapings of the brain pan,” or at least his intellect, quite
seriously. Frost’s way of “taking thought” in poetry took many forms. He once
wrote that the mind is a dangerous thing in poetry and must be left in:
Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous
and should be left out. Well, the mind is a dangerous thing and should
be left in . . . If a writer were to say he planned a long poem dealing with
Darwin and evolution, we would say it’s going to be terrible. And yet you
remember Lucretius. He admired Epicurus as I admire, let’s say, Darwin.
It’s in and out: sometimes it’s poetry, sometimes intelligent doggerel,
sometimes quaint. But a great poem. Yes, the poet can use the mind – in
fear and trembling. But he must use it.4
( I, 124)
Frost rigorously engaged some of the most difficult intellectual problems of
his time, particularly the conflict between science and faith, as well as lasting human ethical problems of justice and mercy, freedom and fate. Perhaps the
most challenging intellectual problem of the age into which Frost delved as a
writer was natural science in general and Darwin in particular. Two years after Frost’s birth, Melville began his conclusion to Clarel, his epic poetic pilgrimage in the Holy Land, “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year, / Shall that exclude the hope – foreclose the fear?” In “New Hampshire,” Frost wrote somewhat
wryly (conflating the scientist with great pugilist John L. Sullivan), “The matter with the Mid-Victorians / Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”
For the young, avid botanist and astronomer, the questions raised about nature in light of natural selection did not go unnoticed. The early books he read on both subjects, Dana’s How to Know the Wild Flowers and Richard Proctor’s Our Place among the Infinities, contain detailed discussions about the impact of Darwinian thought on their subjects.
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Much of the discussion of science and Darwin had focused on the conflict
between science and religion or science and faith. Romantic writers such as
Wordsworth, Emerson, and Thoreau, each in their own way, had allowed for
a confluence between the mind and nature that led somehow to revelations
of spirit. Darwin himself was an avid reader of Wordsworth’s poetry. Darwin
altered and threatened much of this way of thinking by introducing a vast
amount of waste into an uncertain, fluid, and clumsy game of chance and vio-
lence. Nature included human nature in the animal kingdom. Natural history
and natural selection threatened science itself by including the human mind
in the process of change, bringing enormous skepticism to the enterprise of
scientific and positivistic certainty.
Frost hardly rejected Wordsworth, Emerson, or Thoreau. A reader of Frost’s
poetry will recognize his dialogue with Wordsworth in “The Mountain” and
“The Black Cottage”; with Thoreau’s account of the loons in Walden in “The Demiurge’s Laugh” or the French Canadian woodchopper in “The Ax-Helve.”
But the dialogue remains complex. In one interview with Reginald Cook, Frost
praised Walden as a favorite book but then wryly called himself “Thorosian,”
suggestive of the way Thoreau tends to lose himself in his details ( I, 143–144).
In another interview, Frost also insisted “I am not a ‘back-to-the-lander.’ I
am not interested in the Thoreau business” ( I, 78). As full of praise as Frost could be about Emerson’s writing, particularly his style (“one of the noblest
least egotistical styles,” LU, 166), Frost also wrote in his notebooks “Emerson’s Mistake about Nature” ( N, 162).
That entr
y could have referred to many things but it is reasonable to assume
that by the end of the nineteenth century, nature did not remain the same
symbol of the spirit that Emerson had suggested in his first essays. Emerson read nature emblematically and symbolically in terms of correspondences between
the mind of man and nature. Natural facts could be transformed and sublimated
by man into spiritual facts. Darwin may have made man too much part of
nature to make that kind of upward correspondence and symbolic reading
possible. While one senses skepticism in Emerson’s later essays (particularly
those produced after the death of his son and the publication of On the Origin of Species), one senses a limit to how radical his thinking about nature becomes.
Darwin and science had driven many of faith entirely away from nature. One
path for artists was that of despair at the disappearance of God. Another path could be the way of pure aestheticism. This duality became something of the
major division among Victorian writers. Frost would eventually say of Emerson
that he was “too Platonic about evil,” referring to Emerson’s essay “Circles” and his line in the poem “Uriel” that “unit and universe are round” ( CP, 204). Frost added that “ideally in thought only is a circle round. In practice, in nature, the
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circle becomes an oval. As a circle it has one center – Good. As an oval it has two centers – Good and Evil” ( CP, 205). While Frost did not portray himself as a moralist (“Never mind about my morality . . . I don’t care whether the
world is good or bad – not any particular day” CP, 106), he did continually suggest and dramatize a duality of conflict in which the poles of good and evil could be hard to discern. “We look for the line between good and evil and see
it only imperfectly for the reason that we are the line ourselves,” Frost wrote ( N, 169).
The rift created between Darwin and religion remained complex. For many
Christian fundamentalists, Darwin and natural selection remained incom-
patible ways of viewing creation and divinity. Some Protestant intellectuals
attempted to reconcile evolutionary theory and Christianity, either through the misguided idea that evolution meant progress or by considering that Darwin’s
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 4