The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 28
terms, of our culture. He cannot give us the sense of belonging in the industrial, scientific, Freudian world in which we find ourselves.” The Collected Poems received a Pulitzer Prize, and more recent critics have pointed out the extent to which Frost engaged in ways that must have escaped Hicks’s radar the very
subjects he seemed to believe were completely absent from Frost’s work. Though Frost was unlikely Freudian, few recent critics would deny his acute and nuanced engagement with psychology.
But the Depression had exacerbated political lines in all areas of American
politics including literary politics. A third Pulitzer Prize had been awarded
for A Further Range in 1936. R. P. Blackmur attacked not only the book but
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Frost, regarding him a technical virtuouso, “at heart, an easy-going versifier of all that comes to hand, and hence never lacks either a subject or the sense of its mastery.”6 Showing his political hand, Blackmur condemned “Build Soil.”
Showing his ignorance, he condemned “Desert Places” as an inferior lyric. The
translator and poet Rolfe Humphries was even more severe with what he saw
as Frost’s weak, reactionary political posturings: “The further range to which Frost invited himself is an excursion into the field of the political didactic, and his address is unbecoming.” Humphries concluded bluntly “A Further Range?
A further shrinking.”7
Leftist attacks on Frost would continue into the 1940s, the most notable
coming in 1944 from literary editor and champion of Faulkner Malcolm Cowley
in a essay entitled unambiguously “The Case Against Mr. Frost.” There are
several interesting aspects of Cowley’s essay, including the fact that it is as much a case against advocates of Frost as it is against Frost himself. In his
leveling criticism against what he takes to be the anti-New Deal poetry of A Further Range, Cowley also concedes:
a poet has the right to be judged by his best work, and Frost has added to
our never sufficient store of authentic poetry. If in spite of this I still say that there is room for a dissenting opinion, perhaps I chiefly mean that
there is a case against the zealous admirers who are not content to take
the poet for what he is, with his integrity and limitations, but insist on
regarding him as a national sage. Still worse, they try to use him as a
national banner for their own moral or political crusades.8
Cowley characterized these supporters of Frost as those who “demand, however,
that American writing be affirmative, optimistic, and, not too critical” and also as those who do not like poetry, especially modern poetry. This would seem
a slightly ironic turn, given the kind of characterizations and support that
came early on from Pound and Amy Lowell. When Cowley criticizes the poetry
directly, he claims Frost was dismissive of scientific matters (a poignantly ironic claim in light of recent scholarship), and for not following in the politically revolutionary paths of his New England predecessors, particularly Thoreau and
Emerson, or at least Cowley’s version of the latter.
Yvor Winters also joined those who felt that Frost’s reputation exceeded
his achievement but for reasons that would seem somewhat opposite to those
put forward by Cowley, at least on the question of Frost’s alignment with
the New England romantic tradition. In his 1948 essay “Robert Frost, Or, the
Spiritual Drifter as Poet,” Winters criticized Frost not so much for his politics but for what he perceived to be his lack of intelligence. Winters took issue
with Frost’s subject matter and style as fit for great poetry; he regarded Frost
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as working within a tradition of romantic sentiment and nostalgic attitudes
toward rural life (Winters did not seem to recognize the deeper ironies inherent in the concept of the pastoral). He also objected to Frost’s interest in ordinary speech:
Frost early began his endeavor to make his style approximate as closely
as possible to the style of conversation, and this has added to his
reputation: it has helped him to seem “natural.” But poetry is not
conversation, and I see no reason why poetry should be called upon to
imitate conversation. Conversation is the most careless and formless of
human utterance; it is spontaneous and unrevised, and its vocabulary is
commonly limited. Poetry is the most difficult form of utterance; we
revise poems carefully in order to make them nearly perfect.9
Aside from these assumptions, Winters objected to Frost’s uncertainties, which he saw inherited uncritically from the romanticism of Emerson and Thoreau.
The only valuable aspects of Frost, Winters believed, were “principles of Greek and Christian thought . . . of which the implications are understood by relatively few of our contemporaries, by Frost least of all; they operate upon Frost at a distance, through social inheritance, and he has done his best to adopt principles which are opposed to them.”10
1947–1963
Reviews of Frost’s last books varied from sharp to polite but reviews did not
in the least diminish serious appreciation of his work, which continued to
grow. Writing in The New York Times, Randall Jarrell said of Steeple Bush,
“that most of the poems remind you, by their persistence in their manner-
isms of what was genius, that they are the productions of somebody who
once, somewhere else, was a great poet,” though Jarrell acknowledged the
brilliance of “Directive,” a poem that almost all critics find not only one of Frost’s best but one of the great meditative lyrics of the twentieth century.11
A reviewer for Time acknowledged the vigor and craftsmanship but bristled at what he regarded as Frost’s “uninspired Tory social commentary,” referring specifically to the dozen concluding poems grouped under the heading
“Editorials.”
Such opposites as Jarrell and W. H. Auden as well as Robert Lowell in the
last decade of Frost’s life wrote some of the most powerful, perceptive, and
lasting appreciations of his work. Jarrell wrote two essays, “To the Laodecians”
and “The Other Robert Frost,” which he published in his collection Poetry
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and the Age (1953). Those essays along with a lengthy, detailed study of his favorite Frost poem, “Home Burial,” emphasized greatly the psychological and
largely tragic vision in Frost’s work which no one had really done before.
Jarrell emphasized such poems as “Provide, Provide,” “Neither Out Far Nor
In Deep,” “Design,” and “The Most of It,” to counter the misimpression some
may have, however, misguided, of a somewhat sentimental Frost. At Frost’s
eighty-fifth birthday dinner, Lionel Trilling had created something of a scandal by asserting this poet was “anything but” a writer “who assures us by his affirmation of old values, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling.” Also pointing to
“Design,” and “Neithe
r out Far Nor in Deep,” Trilling called Frost a “terrifying poet.”12
An émigré to the United States since just before World War II, W. H. Auden
was keenly aware of both the American and English literary landscapes. In
an essay from the late 1940s, published in The Dyer’s Hand, Auden characterized Frost as “a Prospero poet,” mature and controlled. He writes apprecia-
tively of Frost’s pastoral poems, such as “The Generations of Men” and “The
Ax-Helve,” as well as the shorter lyrics. Rather than characterizing Frost as
tragic or terrifying, Auden saw him as wise, as he explained by comparing him
to both Yeats and Hardy by their self-epitaphs:
Hardy, Yeats, and Frost have all written epitaphs for themselves.
Hardy
I never cared for life, life cared for me.
And hence I owe it some fidelity. . . .
Yeats
Cast a cold eye
On life and death
Horseman pass by.
Frost
I would have it written of me on my stone
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
Of the three, Frost surely comes off the best. Hardy seems to be stating
the Pessimist’s Case rather than his real feelings. “I never cared . . .”
Never? Now, Mr. Hardy, really. Yeats’s horseman is a stage prop; the
passer-by is much more likely to be a motorist. But Frost convinces me
that he is telling neither more nor less than the truth about himself. And
when it comes to wisdom, is not having a lover’s quarrel with life more
worthy of Prospero than not caring or looking coldly?13
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The young Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop were strong admirers of the
skill of Frost’s work, though Bishop found Frost’s attitude toward life hard to take. In his Paris Review interview of 1961, Lowell pointed to the strength of Frost’s narrative poems:
nobody except Frost can do a sort of Chaucerian narrative poem that’s
organized and clear. Well, a lot of people do them, but the texture of
their verse is so limp and uninspired. Frost does them with great power.
Most of them were done early, in that North of Boston period. That was a miracle, because except for Robinson – and I think Frost is a greater poet
than Robinson – no one was doing that in England or America. His
“Witch of Coos” is absolutely there. I’ve gathered from talking to him
that most of the North of Boston poems came from actual people he knew shuffled and put together. But then it’s all important that Frost’s plots are
so extraordinary, so carefully worked out though it seems that they’re
not there. Like some things in Chekhov, the art is very well hidden.
The three-volume Thompson biography, a work that Robert Lowell aptly
called “tone-deaf” and “poisonous,” fed a prurient interest in knocking down
an image of Frost as a wholesome man but maintaining a na¨ıve view of him
as a triumphant post-Emersonian poet of American individualism. After the
first wave and controversy of the Thompson biography had subsided, a new
wave of scholarly assessment rode on the crest of the centennial of Frost’s birth.
Three substantial volumes entitled Robert Frost: Centennial Essays (1974–1978) circled a wide range of subjects from biography and religion to modernist contexts to focused scholarship on individual poems. Frank Lentricchia, one of the contributors to that project, would publish an expansion on his argument as
Robert Frost and the Landscapes of Self (1975). Lentricchia took issue with both George Nitchie’s (explored in Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost, 1960) and Winters’s view that Frost had no guiding approach to nature, and with
Reuben Brower’s Emersonian interpretation of Frost’s imagination constitut-
ing the world. Instead, Lentricchia pointed to the importance of Frost’s early engagement with the work of William James and James’s post-Kantian, skeptical thinking, which allowed for a transformative engagement with an already
accepted environment, “social and natural”; Lentricchia’s sophisticated advo-
cacy grew larger with the publication of Richard Poirier’s Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977). Poirier, a new critic and a student of Brower’s, underscored the need for viewing Frost in a pragmatist tradition extending from
Emerson through James. Poirier also caught the interest of a growing number
of academic readers concerned with language theory and hermeneutics who
had turned their attention to Stevens by asserting:
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Frost seems to me of vital interest and consequence because his ultimate
subject is the interpretive process itself. He “plays” with possibilities for
interpretation in a poetry that seems “obvious” only because it is all the
while also concerned with the interpretations of what, in the most
ordinary sense, are the “signs” of life itself, particular and mundane
signs which nonetheless hint at possibilities that continually elude us.
Poirier focused especially on Frost’s domestic poems as figurative sites or
boundaries for “extravagance,” the title of his late essay on Emerson. Poirier dismissed as unimpressive such Frost poems as “Death of the Hired Man,”
“Directive,” and “West-Running Brook,” and focused attention on others he
regarded as psychologically more perceptive, such as “Home Burial” and “The
Fear,” as well as shorter lyrics, such as “Design,” that put Frost, as Poirier argued, in direct line with James, or other, neglected poems, such as “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” which were regarded as daring or extravagant.
An important tradition of understanding Frost’s relationship to New
England literary culture had been growing since the publication of Reuben
Brower’s landmark The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (1963).
John Lynen’s The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (1964) took a significant step in the direction of interpreting the symbolic mode of Frost’s landscapes. Both John
C. Kemp’s Robert Frost and New England (1979) and George Monteiro’s Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance (1988) took deeper looks at the question of Frost’s regionalism and his debt to the nineteenth-century American poetic
traditions.
Frost criticism developed greatly in the late 1990s from a variety of scholars working independently and then, some, collaboratively. Judith Oster’s Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet (1991) combined close readings and reader criticism to highlight the tensions and ambiguities of many of Frost’s
works. Katherine Kearns’s Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite (1994) was a groundbreaking reading of Frost in terms of antinomies of gender: “For Frost,
anything that expends itself in generation necessarily winds down accelera-
tively to death, but unlike nature and unlike women, men are possessed of
the (potential) rationality by which they may hold this process in abeyance.”14
Karen Kilcup’s Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (1998) described the complex ways Frost’s poetry participated in complex and culturally resonant literary traditions which appealed to the voices of women and men.
Mark Richardson’s The Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997) portrayed Frost working within the tension of “formity” and “conformity,” a heroic desire to build his imagination within the context of the public realm. Richardson also paid close attention to Frost’s concepts of fate and freedom as portrayed in such poems
as “The Trial by Existence.” In the same year, Robert Faggen published Robert
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Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (1947), arguing that Frost’s engagement with science in general and Darwin in particular was a defining question for
his poetic mythology and his relationship with modernism in general. Faggen
placed Frost’s interest in pragmatism within the general problem of evolution
and natural selection and read his pastoral themes in terms of technology, animal analogies, gender relations, and problems of theodicy. Frost, in Faggen’s
view, uncovered not a new world but a world of ancient struggle and skeptical, uneasy knowledge. Robert Bernard Hass’s study Going by Contraries (2002) also argued that Frost’s engagement with science was crucial to his poetic vision. In contrast to Faggen, Hass argued that Frost saw the findings of science as less threatening, more ultimately part of the play of metaphor and, therefore, one
of the humanities. In Hass’s view, Frost was clearly able to make an extremely strong apology for poetry’s cultural ascendancy.
Several volumes of focused essays also added considerably to the under-
standing of Frost’s work. Roads Not Taken (2001), edited by Earl Wilcox and Jonathan Barron, collected fresh approaches to Frost’s poetry including highly insightful takes on “The Black Cottage” as well as groundbreaking work on
Frost’s politics and some of the first really insightful looks at the cold war poems. The Cambridge Companion to Frost (2001) brought to full focus Frost’s complex relationship to ancient traditions, the extreme difficulty of biographical approaches to his work, and Timothy Steele’s study, probably the finest in print to date, of Frost’s metrical practice and its relationship to what he meant by “the sound of sense.”