concept of our humble beginnings was compatible with an idea of original sin.
Frost himself certainly thought deeply about the challenge of the Darwinian
conception of nature and man’s place in it to his own religious inclinations.
Frost held science as another form of poetry, both created and limited by
metaphor. He admired it greatly, and though never a positivist, his inclina-
tions, as we shall see, went strongly with the empirical and experiential ten-
dencies of science. Though it would be simple and wrong to say Frost was
not swayed and moved by instincts and intuitions for which science had no
names.
When Frost decided to attend Harvard in 1896, he had hoped to study with
William James, who was on medical leave. James was a physiologist who even-
tually became a psychologist and philosopher, deeply and positively influenced by Darwin’s theories. James found in Darwin’s concept of natural selection an
alternative to a deterministic view of life. Yet James’s search for and belief in religious experience would also lead him into the strange domain of spiritual-ism. Nevertheless, James represented a major strain in American thought that
attempted to heal the rift between science and faith. As a polymath who had
developed new paths in the study of psychology, he had also been part of a
group of Cambridge philosophers known as “The Metaphysical Club,” includ-
ing Charles Sanders Peirce, Chauncey Wright, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
James’s development of pragmatism owed a great deal to Darwin and actu-
ally used Darwin’s theory of natural selection to combat overly deterministic
views of human action and will. James championed the human “will to believe”
within the framework of the scientific worldview, and he also maintained faith in the reality of religious experience. James welcomed a vision of reality that was always in flux, and in which theories were merely instruments for an ongoing
process of work:
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“God,” “Matter,” “Reason,” “the Absolute,” “Energy,” are so many
solving names. You can rest when you have them. You are at the end of
your metaphysical quest.
But if you follow the pragmatic method, you cannot look on any such
word as closing your quest. You must bring out each word its practical
cash-value, set it at work within the stream of your experience. It
appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work, and
more particularly of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.5
James’s instrumental theory of consciousness and language put man in the
position of imposing truth on a constantly fluctuating reality:
In our cognitive life as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands
readily malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like
the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man
engenders truth upon it.6
Frost did actually study philosophy at Harvard with two men worlds apart in
their thinking: Josiah Royce and George Santayana. Irving Babbitt, with whom
Frost did not study, also exerted considerable influence on the intellectual
debate about science and religion of the time. Babbitt advocated humanism
against romanticism, and he went to great lengths to define both of these
terms carefully in his early lectures and his most famous book Rousseau and Romanticism. Babbitt’s aristocratic humanism insisted on perfecting the individual rather than the humanitarian elevation of the group and in maintaining
a balance between sympathy and selection. More important, Babbitt strove
to delimit the impact of empiricism and materialism. Babbitt viewed Fran-
cis Bacon as one kind of corrosive influence, whose thinking “unkinged”
man in the name of scientific law and progress. Rousseau, in Babbitt’s view,
allowed for an excess of liberty, in the advocacy of unfettered action.7 Both
tendencies, Babbitt thought, could be found not only in Emerson but also
in William James and Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, whose widely
influential Creative Evolution Frost read in 1911. Babbitt’s advocacy of classical restraint and balance made him fear the possible consequences of severe
religiosity or social chaos; he hated both theology and science. While some
in Frost’s lifetime would identify him with some of Babbitt’s views, Frost
never missed a chance to distance himself from “humanists,” and to ally
himself at least to some degree with those of both a scientific and religious
temperament.
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23
Frost had little to say about Royce’s idealism in his later years. But Royce’s lectures would have given him ample exposure to the history of German idealism and to the problems it faced by evolution and contemporary science.
In a lecture later published as “The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution,” Royce characterized the significant shift in nineteenth-century thinking, which he
characterized in terms of flow and change:
But for our nineteenth century it is just the change, the flow, the growth
of things that is the most interesting feature of the universe.
Old-fashioned science used to go about classifying things. There were
live things and dead things; of live things there were classes, orders,
families, genera, species, – all permanent facts of nature. As for man, he
had one characteristic type of inner life, that was in all ages and stations
essentially the same, – in the king and in the peasant, in the master and
in the slave, in the man of the city and in the savage . . . The dignity of
human nature, too, lay in just this its permanence. Because of such
permanence one could prove all men to be naturally equal, and our own
Declaration of Independence is thus founded upon speculative
principles that, as they are stated, have been rendered meaningless by the
modern doctrine of evolution.8
Royce’s last statement about evolution’s threat to Jefferson’s “speculative principles” or natural law resonates strongly with the debate that goes on about
Jefferson’s principles and the Civil War in Frost’s “The Black Cottage.”
George Santayana also taught with Royce the same philosophy survey that
Frost took. Frost had a strong and apparently contrary reaction to Santayana,
who seemed to him too much of an aesthete. Santayana approached the problem
of science, scientific psychology, and religion by proposing the ultimate power of beauty and aesthetic pleasure and preference. He offered a radical skepticism that tended to glorify the power of the mind and place all constructs in the realm, happily so, of illusion. When writing of religion in The Sense of Beauty (1896), Santayana encouraged trust of the supremely imaginative beyond any veracity:
For, if we are hopeful, why should we not believe the best we can fancy is
also the trues
t; and why should if we are distrustful in general of our
prophetic gifts, why should we cling only to the most mean and formless
of our illusions? From the beginning and end of our perceptive and
imaginative activity, we are synthesizing the material of experience into
unities independent of reality of which is beyond proof nay beyond the
possibility of evidence . . . The most perfect of these forms, judged by its
affinity to our powers and its stability in the presence of our experience,
is the one with which we should be content; no other veracity could add
to its value.9
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Illusion, then, exalted to its highest form of imagination became Santayana’s
reaction to the scientific worldview. This satisfied Wallace Stevens in part but Frost found it anathema. In his notebooks, Frost remained critical of Santayana’s sense of imagination and spirit dissociated from matter: “All Santayana thinks is that almost all natural basis for spirit can be done away with – not quite all: almost all virtue can be stated in terms of taste – not quite all. The spirit needs not personality nor nationality nor any place of order at all. But it must have place. Be it no more than chaos” ( N, 254). Referring to them by initials, Frost in his notebooks criticized the masks of Yeats and the aesthetic illusions of Santayana. Poetry becomes the shedding of “dead selves” and “illusions” in the pursuit of reality. Frost’s metaphor of the “stream that runs away”
suggests the figure he uses in “West-Running Brook,” a figure of consciousness and duration that he appears to have adapted from both William James and
the French philosopher Henri Bergson:
There is such a thing as sincerity. It is hard to define but is probably
nothing but your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead
selves. Miraculously. It is the same with illusions. Any belief you sink
into when you should be leaving it behind is an illusion. Reality is the
cold feeling on the end of the trout’s nose from the stream that runs
away. WBY and G. Santa. are two false souls.
( N, 456–457)
This severe comment does at least give some indication that Frost maintained a sense of the real outside of the human imagination. He wrestled with the relationship of poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge of the world, acknowl-
edging an interesting, if uneasy, relationship between the two seemingly dis-
parate realms.
Yet it would be wrong to assume that Frost, a consummate craftsman, whose
most intense preoccupations were with the tones of voice in poetry and with the power of instinct and “passionate preference” in ethics, would be indifferent
to Santayana’s sense of beauty.10 Frost’s sense of aesthetic pleasure always led to life beyond the poem: “My object is true form – is was and always will be –
form true to any chance bit of true life” ( SL, 361).11
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Chapter 3
Works
Frost’s poetics
Frost’s elaboration of his poetics came in the form of relatively short essays and often letters. Unlike Eliot, Pound, and, to some extent, Stevens, Frost
deliberately avoided deflecting attention away from his poetry by the enterprise of literary criticism or critical theory. Nevertheless, he left an impressive body of critical prose, and many of his concepts “sound of sense,” “education by
metaphor,” poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion,” have come to
define not only his own work but also some of the most salient problems of
modern poetics. His later essays on poetry are, by most standards, extremely
short and published in what would be considered unlikely venues for a world-
famous poet intent on having his views brought forth to world. “Education by
Poetry,” his richest statement on the nature of metaphor, was a talk given to an Amherst Alumni Association meeting. One of his most important statements
on history, nature, and poetic form was a short letter of thanks to the Amherst student newspaper for their salutation on his sixtieth birthday, now known
as “Letter to The Amherst Student.” His Norton Lectures on Poetry, delivered at Harvard before audiences of thousands of students and faculty, were never
published, and not so much as a draft of them survives.
However Frost’s comments – in letters, essays, and interviews – found their
ways into the culture and his thoughts on poetics have remained resonant,
and not only as interpretive tools for reading his own poetry. His ideas about sound, figurative language, and cosmology continue to provoke poets and writers throughout the world. Frost’s poetics can be considered around three major areas, all related to the rather elusive notion of form. First, Frost emphasized sound in poetry and particularly what he called the “sound of sense.” Second,
Frost also talked often of figurative language, particularly metaphor, which he provocatively considered not only the whole of poetry but nearly the whole of
thought. Third, in setting so much of his poetry in the country, Frost invoked the ancient mode of the pastoral, a symbolic landscape which often sets the
world of contemplation of the rural against the tumult and sophistication of
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the urban. The pastoral mode has always been burdened with symbolic and
political complications, and Frost’s poetry adds greatly to this tradition. He chose to write in the pastoral mode at a time when almost all of his modernist contemporaries had become urban or cosmopolitan in their symbolic strategies. Confusions and simplifications arise from taking Frost’s statements about his poetics straight up or without recognizing the difficulties of seeing them as ideas that work somewhat differently in practical discussion of his work.
Frost’s concept of sound and metaphor as well as his overarching insistence
on locality and the particularity of rural New England should be discussed
not as theories but as persistent and deeply developed preoccupations in his
work.
The sound of sense
Frost began “The Figure a Poem Makes,” his preface to Collected Poems, 1939, with some comments on abstraction in modern art: “Abstraction is an old
story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day” ( CP, 131). While Frost hardly seemed allied with modern abstractionism, he often sounded close on the matter of sound in poetry. As
he continued in the preface, “Granted no one but a humanist much cares how
sound a poem is if it is only a sound. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential . . .” ( CP, 131). But Frost added that to make each poem as different as possible from another “We need the help of context –
meaning – subject matter” ( CP, 131). From the early stages of his writing, when he developed the unusual blank verse eclogues of North of Boston, Frost’s interest in sound as “pure form” came to dominate his thinking about poetics.
On July 4, 1913, just before the publication of his first books, Frost wrote
a letter to his former Pinkerton Academy student John Bartlett and
made his
own declaration of independence from the Victorian poetics of assonance. This
is the first appearance of his concept of the “sound of sense,” the notion that sentences have meaningful tones that precede the words, “abstract vitality” and
“pure form”:
I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out
theory (principle I had better say) of versification. You see the great
successes in recent poetry have been made on the assumption that the
music of words was a matter of harmonized vowels and consonants.
Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived largely at effects in assonation.
But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short track. They
went the length of it. Any one else who goes that way must go after them.
And that’s where most are going. I alone of English writers have
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Frost’s poetics
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consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of
sense. Now it is possible to have the sense without the sound of sense (as
in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull
reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in
Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to
get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off
the words . . . The sound of sense, then. You get that. It is the abstract
vitality of our speech. It is pure sound – pure form.
( CPPP, 664)
Was Frost interested in the “pure form”? Later in the letter, he provides a more complete sense of how this notion of the sound of sense will be worked into
verse in practice:
But if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully
breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across
the regular beat of the metre. Verse in which there is nothing but the
beat of the metre furnished by the accents of the polysyllabic words we
call doggerel. Verse is not that. Neither is it the sound of sense alone. It is a resultant from those two.
( CPPP, 665)
Frost was indeed advocating something different not only from Victorian poets
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 5