He said, “You hate yourself?”
“I wouldn’t be religious unless I did.” You see, we had an argument –
of that kind.
( CPPP, 910)
Reichert and Frost were essentially right. From the golden rule to the shema
to the circumcision of the heart, all of the essential moral teachings of the
New Testament could be found in the Old Testament. As much as those teach-
ings could be founded on love, much of the religious experience could also
be said to be based on human limitation, doubt, and failure. Frost based both
of his masques on Old Testament works – the books of Job and Jonah. The
fact that he did so raises some very significant questions about Frost’s religious thinking. First, both masques in form recall Milton’s masque Comus, a work about Puritan thought that Frost loved to have his students at the Pinkerton
Academy perform. For Frost, Milton’s work tests the limits of theodicy and the ability of the mind and spirit to consider maintaining unworldly standards.
Both of Frost’s masques appear to be in considerable argument with Milton,
particularly about the ability to justify evil, much less stand above it. Second, both of Frost’s masques challenge the idea that there are any appreciable revelations to be had in the New Testament. Since both masques are about revealing
answers to final questions and apocalyptic subjects, they demur from the Book
of Revelation as well as poke fun at such apocalyptic modernist writers as
Yeats. Instead, there he presents a view consonant with one stated elsewhere
that “Life is punishment. All we can contribute to it is gracefulness in taking the punishment” ( N, 663).
Frost saw the Book of Jonah as the first book in the Bible in which the
question of God being merciful appeared. Jonah’s demand for God to confirm
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
160
Works
human expectations of justice appears as comical as Job’s demands for an
explanation for his suffering. As Frost’s Jonah says “I’ve lost my faith in God to carry out / The threats He makes against the city evil. / I can’t trust God to be unmerciful.” Frost introduces a bookstore owner named “Keeper,” Paul (the
author of Christian theology), and Jesse Bel, Keeper’s wife. Jesse Bel’s name
is particularly interesting because it links her to the city of Thyatira, one of the seven cities mentioned in the Book of Revelation of the New Testament.
She is among the faithless in that city and her name is supposed to remind
us of Jezebel, the idolatrous wife of Ahab in Kings. Thyatira was the name
Frost gave to Job’s wife in A Masque of Reason. Yet, both these women play important ethical roles in challenging God and Paul. Frost appears to turn
the New Testament against itself, pointing to the women not as traitors but
to the Bible as a unified document or one that transcends the bifurcation of
new and old wisdom. This is significant given that the masques were published
in 1945 and 1946 respectively, after the revelations of the Holocaust, when
apocalyptic visions of human history were particularly potent, when demands
for explanations of suffering and justice were widespread and exigent, and
when relations between Jews and Christians were horribly strained.
Frost places one of the key thematic phrases of A Masque of Mercy, that of courage, with its original emphasis on the heart, in the mouth of Jesse Bel.
She tells Jonah: “Your courage failed. The saddest thing in life / Is that the best thing in it should be courage.” Keeper says near the end of the drama “Courage is of the heart by derivation, / And great it is. But fear is of the soul. / And I’m afraid.” Both Paul and Keeper agree that fear and courage go together in
uncertain sacrifice.
We have to stay afraid deep in our souls
Our sacrifice, the best we have to offer,
And not our worst nor second best, our best,
Our very best, our lives laid down like Jonah’s,
Our lives laid down in war and peace, may not
Be found acceptable in Heaven’s sight.
Keeper’s response to Paul also admits of failure in courage:
My failure is no different from Jonah’s.
We both have lacked the courage in the heart
To overcome the fear within the soul
And go ahead to any accomplishment.
Courage is what it takes and takes the more of
Because the deeper fear is so eternal.
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost and believing-in
161
Fear here, as elsewhere in Frost, expresses the terror of uncertainty. In emphasizing courage and playing on its derivation from “the heart,” Frost seems to
leave as impossible the merciful love of the sacred heart of later Christianity.
“The courage in the heart” does, however, encompass and echo the circumci-
sion of the heart that one finds expressed at the core of the teachings of both Old and New Testaments.
When Frost expresses himself in poetic prayer in the “Cluster of Faith”
section of In the Clearing, his last book, he leaves clearly stated but nevertheless baffling tensions. “Accidentally on Purpose” pokes fun at cartoon-like notions of evolution, giving the impression that he is dismissive altogether of the notion of descent with modification. When he comes to the question of who or what
may have been steering “the Omnibus,” he leaves that to rationality and limits himself to prayer and belief:
Whose purpose was it? His or Her or Its?
Let’s leave that to the scientific wits.
Grant me intention, purpose, and design –
That’s near enough for me to the Divine.
He prays to be granted “intention, purpose, and design” and that would be
“near enough” to the “Divine.” But the final stanza admits a more modest
sense of human motive, placing our “passionate preference” in line with the
simple heliotropism of a plant:
And yet for all this help of head and brain
How happily instinctive we remain,
Our best guide upward further to the light,
Passionate preference, such as love at sight.
The couplet that concludes “Cluster of Faith” may be at once more amusing and
more disturbing in its brilliantly paradoxical embodiment both of the childish motives of prayer to the child-like and bumbling creator to whom they may be
directed:
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
In a letter he wrote to Wallace Stevens in 1935, Frost repeated a phrase he liked to say in one form or another in both correspondence and talks, claiming he
was “never so serious as when playful.”
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c04.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
10:5
Chapter 4
Reception
Robert Frost’s recognition as a poet came relatively late but grew into a spectacular crescendo that has never stopped, even if critical appreciation has been divided among poets, literary critics, and general readers. He had tried and
most often failed to publish his poems in magazines in the United States. The
only c
ollections of his poetry that he had assembled before 1912 were the pri-
vately printed Twilight, just two copies of three poems for Elinor, and a small collection for Susan Hayes Ward, editor of the Independent. After arriving in England, Frost assembled A Boy’s Will, and the first English publisher to whom Frost presented it, David Nutt, agreed to publish it. Frost was thirty-nine when it appeared. A year later, Nutt published North of Boston, a book consisting of poems far different in form from the first book.
Frost received remarkable praise on both sides of the Atlantic, expressing
different perceptions on how he had become an American poet. Of A Boy’s
Will, Norman Douglas wrote in The English Review:
Nowhere on earth, we fancy, is there more outrageous nonsense printed
under the name of poetry than in America; the author, we are told, is an
American. All the more credit to him for breaking away from this
tradition – for such it can be called – and giving us not derivative,
hypersensuous drivel, but an image of things really heard and seen.
There is a wild, racy flavour in his poems; they sound that inevitable
response to nature which is the hallmark of true lyric feeling.1
F. S. Flint, in another strong review in Poetry and Drama, similarly emphasizes Frost’s breaking away from America and the merits of his simplicity of diction: Be it said, however, that Mr. Frost has escaped America, and that his first
book, A Boy’s Will, has found an English publisher. So much
information, extrinsic to the poems, is necessary. Their intrinsic merits
are great, despite faults of diction here and there, occasional inversions,
and lapses, where he has not been strong enough to bear his own
162
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c04.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
10:5
Reception
163
simplicity of utterance. It is this simplicity which is the great charm of
the book; and it is a simplicity that proceeds from a candid heart.2
Though he had nothing to do with getting either book published, Ezra
Pound reviewed both books and later took credit for discovering Frost. “This
man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it. And to do this is a very different matter from gunning about for the circumplectious polysyllable,” Pound wrote of A Boy’s Will in Poetry,3 casting Frost in a positive light with a range of literary camps including the Imagists, and other such writers as H. D. and William Carlos Williams. In the same
review, Pound also erroneously described Frost as having been “scorned by the
‘great American editors.’” The image troubled Frost, who wrote to Sidney Cox,
“It was not in anger that I came to England” ( SL, 148). Pound wrote an even stronger review of North of Boston, praising both the fresh depiction of New England life and the naturalness of its speech.
Mr. Frost is an honest writer, writing from himself, from his own
knowledge and emotion; not simply picking up the manner which
magazines are accepting at the moment, and applying it to the topics in
vogue. He is quite consciously and definitely putting New England rural
life into verse. He is not using themes cribbed out of Ovid . . . Mr. Frost
has dared to write for the most part with success, in the natural speech
of New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from
the “natural” speech of the newspapers.4
Whatever irritations and resentments Frost may have harbored toward
Pound’s pressures and condescension, his praise and patronage were extremely
important at the early moment in his publishing career. The remarkable fact
was the range of praise Frost received for his first two books from influential critics, including Pound, Flint, Ford Madox Ford, William Dean Howells, and
Amy Lowell. The praise he had won in England did not in the least bit hurt
him with reviewers in the United States. When Amy Lowell reviewed North of Boston for The New Republic in 1914, she was struck by the flexibility of his blank verse “which does not hesitate to leave out a syllable or put one in,” and she said regarding Frost’s poetics, “he goes his own way, regardless of anyone else’s rules, and the result is a book of unusual power and sincerity.” Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Lowell’s review included her observation of the
darker aspects of Frost’s New England:
Mr. Frost has produced both people and scenery with a vividness which
is extraordinary. Here are huge hills, undraped by any sympathetic
legend, felt as things hard and unyielding, almost sinister, not exactly
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c04.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
10:5
164
Reception
feared, but regarded as in some sort influences nonetheless. Here are
great stretches of blueberry pasture lying in the sun; and again, autumn
orchards cracking with fruit which is almost too much trouble to gather.
Heavy thunderstorms drench the lonely roads and spatter on the walls of
farm-houses rotting in abandonment; and the modern New-England
town, with narrow frame houses, visited by drummers alone, is painted
in all its ugliness. For Mr. Frost is not the kindly New England of
Whittier, nor the humorous and sensible one of Lowell; it is the
latter-day New England, where a civilization is decaying to give place to
another and very different one.5
Frost experienced simultaneous waves of accolades and severe criticism,
sometimes both severely misguided, during his own lifetime and since. Nev-
ertheless, his appeal to a wide audience and a great variety of readers, with
strong and sometimes merely passing interests in poetry, philosophers, his-
torians, both in the United States and abroad, has diminished little since his death in 1963. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Frost has a readership that
extends to school children and adults with no formal education in poetry.
Those readers look to him as an icon of meaning and order in a chaotic world.
For the same reasons and others, he is often regarded within academia as of
little interest because, on superficial reading, he raises no obvious questions or radical eccentricities about language, gender, race, or politics. Given the very powerful and complex dramatic presence of women in the poetry, the
economic, social, and ethnic tensions in the pastoral narratives, and the intensity of Frost’s intellectual preoccupations, such assumptions can only be the
result of what Walter Pater called “the roughness of the eye.” It may also be
true that however complex or subtle he may be, he can never be the attraction
for some that Whitman or Dickinson may be. However complex his politics,
he will never satisfy those who demand that he should have been a Marxist
or Stalinist. Critics will appear to forgive or at least turn Eliot’s anti-Semitism into a subject of theoretical interest; Frost’s skepticism about the New Deal
and socialism has become some form of unforgivable conservatism akin to
proto-fascism. Critics will dance circles to forgive or to explain as psycho-
logical eccentricity Pound’s fascist radio rants but regard evidence of Frost’s personal ambition or his family tragedies as either indecency or cruelty. Though Frost wrote strange and sometimes wildly innovative poems, his resi
stance to
modernist mantras of the need for a radically new poetics on the grounds of
his perception of the world has rarely merited serious attention – until recently.
Nevertheless, anthologists, poets, and readers appear to recognize what aca-
demics have failed to see – that Frost gives a powerful and compelling vision of the world, with insight into nature and human nature that stirs thought and
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c04.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
10:5
1920s–1940s
165
recognition and brings one continually back to the poems. They are rich in
ways that take years to mine. The freshness and strangeness of both A Boy’s Will and especially the dramatic poetry of North of Boston, Mountain Interval, and New Hampshire established a new boundary and new audiences for American poetry while exploring the range of human existence with concision
and depth.
1920s–1940s
With the exception of the title poem, West-Running Brook (1928) has none of the dramatic pastorals of his earlier books. The title poem is a departure in its philosophical texture, and a number of the poems have a similar, perhaps more
austere quality than readers had previously encountered in Frost’s work.
The 1930s saw the first harsh wave of criticism directed against Frost. It
came, as one might expect, at the height of praise. Frost had already received two Pulitzer Prizes, the first for New Hampshire and the second for Collected Poems. “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
had already achieved iconic status, even if fewer people read the remarkable
formal breakthroughs of the pastoral dramatic poems of the first three books.
West-Running Brook (1928) had baffled some readers with its more austere, philosophical poems. There is little question that both reviewers had some
impatience with Frost’s reputation as a popular poet but one who failed to
hold deeper views or whose views remained either elusive or uncongenial to
those who expected of him a more explicitly political and especially sympathetic response to a leftist agenda. When Frost’s Collected Poems appeared in 1930, Granville Hicks, a Marxist, reviewed it in The New Republic, and found the poetry lacking completely in the subjects of industrialism, the disruptive effects of scientific effects of scientific hypotheses, and nothing about Freudianism. He concluded that Frost could not “contribute to the unification, in imaginative
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 27