The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 29
The new Harvard edition of Frost’s complete works marks a new stage in
Frost scholarship. For the first time in more than forty years, significant unpublished material is being made available that is beginning to inspire reevalu-
ation of Frost’s reputation. The Notebooks of Robert Frost (2007), edited by Robert Faggen and published unexpurgated, provides few drafts of Frost’s
published poems but offers extensive insight into Frost the thinker as he
ranged over such diverse subjects as politics, science, prosody, history, and
religion for more than half a century. The notebooks revealed Frost’s apho-
ristic style, apparent also in the “dark sayings” that permeate the poetry.
Their appearance has dispelled almost any notion that Frost did not push the
boundaries of poetic thought. Writing about the Notebooks, critic Adam Kirsch observed:
Lionel Trilling insisted on calling Frost, to his face, “a terrifying poet.”
Really, he had less in common with Longfellow than with Sophocles,
“who made plain . . . the terrible things of human life.” Trilling’s remarks
came in for what seems now like a surprising amount of criticism . . . If
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Reception
Trilling had read The Notebooks of Robert Frost . . . he would have smiled to see how they completely vindicate his view of Frost . . . without
warning, Frost will suddenly jot down a phrase that seems to open onto
an abyss, showing how truly “terrifying” his wasteful, inhuman universe
can be. Frost is known as a master of metaphor, and many of his poems
take the form of extended metaphors. Yet when he writes, “I doubt if any
thing is more related to another thing than it is to any third thing except
as we make it,” he shows how the power of metaphor can turn on the
poet, plunging him into a world of sheer perspectivism where there is no
essence, only likeness. If we can make anything resemble anything else,
then we are doomed to perish from the very excess of significations. This
is the terror that has always loomed behind the willful optimism of the
Emersonian tradition, and which Frost, very much like Nietzsche, was
able to exhume from the corpse of Emerson’s gentility. Perhaps not even
Nietzsche ever captured the terror in an image as striking and bottomless
as Frost’s: “We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant.” At such
moments, Frost’s Notebooks, like his best poems, remind us that there
has never been a more genuinely mystical American writer.15
Some of the most powerful advocacy for Frost’s work has come from English-
language poets and from European exiles living in the United States. Seamus
Heaney, one of Ireland’s most acclaimed contemporary poets, writes in a pas-
toral tradition that acknowledges the inheritance of Wordsworth and Frost.
Heaney himself grew up on a farm in County Derry and the accuracy and
hardness of Frost’s evocations of farm life attracted him. Ultimately, Heaney
found, referring specifically to the conclusion of “Home Burial,” “the rising
note out of the fallen condition is the essential one which Frost achieves in his greatest work.”16 The pressure of intellect in Frost releases, according to Heaney, the powerful, deep wellsprings of sound and language. Heaney’s younger contemporary, Paul Muldoon, who also grew up in Northern Ireland and now
lives and teaches in the United States, admires Frost greatly for the adven-
turousness and playfulness of his language and drama. Muldoon alludes to
such trickster figures in his own work as the farmer of “The Mountain” or
the narrator of “Directive.”17 Derek Walcott, while acknowledging some of the
politically backward or at least temporally defined aspects of Frost’s social perspectives, credits him immensely with a revolution in the pentameter line: “He wrote free or syllabic verse within the deceptive margins of the pentameter.”
Pointing to the first lines of “Mending Wall” as an example, Walcott saw “as
monumental a breakthrough for American verse as anything in Williams or
Cummings . . .” He added “This happened with equal force with Yeats, but
with Frost it is more alarming, since Yeats contracted the pentameter to
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Frost and the postmodern
173
octosyllabics for propulsion’s sake, for ‘that quarrel which we call rhetoric,’
for the purposes we call political passion, but Frost achieved this upheaval
within the pentameter. He accomplished it, that is, without making his meter
as wry and sarcastic as Williams’s, or as pyrotechnic as Cummings’s, or as
solemn and portentous as Stevens.”18
The most influential of the three essays in the volume has been Brodsky’s “On
Grief and Reason,” for several reasons: it first appeared in The New Yorker, with a relatively wide circulation and then as the title essay in his final collection of prose. But more to the point, the essay focused almost entirely on one
poem, “Home Burial” (although he gives “Come in” close devotion also). Set
against Jarrell’s detailed reading of the same poem several decades earlier, it made a strong case for Frost’s power in writing dramatic dialogue, in creating “a tragedy of communication,” and in his evocation of the “terror of uncertainty,”
by which Brodsky meant to distinguish him from the sense of tragedy suggested
when Trilling called him a terrifying poet. Brodsky’s reaction to Frost seemed all the more remarkable because he first encountered him while serving time
on a work farm in the Soviet Union.
Czeslaw Milosz, another Nobel Laureate émigré, a friend and admirer of
Brodsky’s, recognized Frost’s “superb ear,” “powerful intellect, unusual intelligence,” and that he was “well-read in philosophy.” He saw Frost’s strategy as one of “such enormous deceptiveness that he was capable of hiding his skepticism behind his constant ambivalence, so that his poems deceived with their
supposedly wise affability.”19 For Milosz, Frost’s poetry ultimately concealed “a grim, hopeless vision of man’s fate.” Milosz, who wrestled more often with the work of Robinson Jeffers, tended to resist what he considered the aesthetics of indirection and concealment as well as a tragic and nihilistic vision of human history.
Frost and the postmodern
The story of Frost’s reception in the past and future can, in a limited way,
be captured in an interview with literary critic Charles Bernstein, published
in The Antioch Review. Bernstein has written primarily on avant garde and modernist writers. When in the interview he started discussing modernist
writers who use the vernacular and “nonstandard and decentered Englishes,”
the interviewer assumed he was not talking about Robert Frost. Bernstein gave
a rather lengthy reply about the pleasures of teaching Frost and how much a
poem such as “Mending Wall” was misunderstood by readers. Bernstein points
to a recurrent theme in Frost’s reception: the way the poetry continues to speak
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Reception
in its complexity beneath or against what it appears to be doing at first. Frost seemed to have a genius for being misunderstood:
A funny thing happens when you become a professor of poetry as I am:
you end up teaching Frost with great pleasure. You also realize that there
is a Robert Frost who is no more assimilable than his more overtly
radical contemporaries to a nonpoetry culture, that is to say a group of
people who don’t read poetry. Appearances to the contrary, whose
woods these are we really have no idea but in closer listening. Two
prosodies diverged in a striated field, and I – I took the hired man, I took
the hand of the hired man and did the polka in the dark, if polka governs
in a thing so marked . . .
I find myself going back to some of Frost’s most famous poems.
“Mending Wall” is a fascinating fabrication, a metricalized, colloquial
voice that breaks the vernacular over its lines, as theme synthesizes
sound. As a first-wave modernist, Frost is at the center of the conflict
between dialect and meter, traditional prosody and its others. This is
one reason he is such an enduring poet – because he continues to speak
to our enduring condition in poetry, our one-hundred-years-and – and
still-counting cris de vers . . .
Maybe Frost is not just “our” best-loved poet but also one of the most
misread American poets. Else how to explain the image of Frost as the
sage coiner of words of wisdom, who thinks that putting up walls will
make your life better. There’s something about the refinement of that
poem that has precipitated an acceptance of it that flies in the face of its
explicit content . . . It’s so successful as to almost completely destroy its
meaning, although of course it doesn’t: the meaning is still there.20
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Notes
1 Life
1. John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 84. Walsh provides the most detailed account of Frost’s time in England.
2. Robert Graves, “The Truest Poet,” Sunday Times, February 3, 1963, 26.
3. D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1960), 16. Pound was writing to Harriet Monroe, the American editor of Poetry.
4. Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship, ed. William Evans (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1963), 58.
5. Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965), 177.
6. Letter to Gertrude McQuestern, undated. Boston University Library. Quoted in Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), 144.
2 Contexts
1. Robert Frost to Lesley Francis Frost, 1934, Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost, ed. Arnold Grade (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1972), 161.
2. Ibid., 162.
3. Ibid., 163.
4. Interview by Harvey Breit with Frost in The New York Times Book Review, November 27, 1949.
5. William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” Pragmatism in William James: Writings 1902–1910, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Library of America, 1987), 509.
6. William James, “Pragmatism and Humanism,” Pragmatism in William James, ed.
Kuklick, 599.
7. Irving Babbitt, “Bacon and Rousseau” and “What is Humanism,” Literature and the American College (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1908).
8. Josiah Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 274–275.
175
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Notes to pages 23–81
9. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 117.
10. John H. Timmerman, Robert Frost and the Ethics of Ambiguity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002) provides an interesting argument for the positive relationship and influence of Santayana on Frost’s poetry and thought.
11. Santayana wrote in Scepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 52: “Every part of experience, as it comes, is illusion. And the source of this illusion is my animal nature, blindly laboring in a blind world. Such is the ancient lesson of experience itself, when we reflect upon experience and turn its illusions into instruction: a lesson which bird-witted empiricism can never learn, though it is daily repeated.” Frost seemed to reject Santayana’s extreme view of experience as producing merely a choice between illusions.
3 Works
1. One of the best full-length treatment’s of Frost’s prosody is Timothy Steele’s “Across the Spaces of the Footed Line: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost,” in The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 123–153.
2. For an extended look at Frost’s sonnets see Richard C. Calhoun’s “By Pretending They Are Not Sonnets,” in Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost, ed. Earl Wilcox and Jonathan Barron (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 217–235.
3. The last line of William Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps Up” (1807).
4. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial By Existence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 325.
5. From a recorded talk, Robert Frost Reads from His Own Work, Carillion Records (1961), Yale Series of Recorded Poets. Produced by the Yale University Department of English and Audio Visual Center, ed. R. W. B. Lewis, recorded May 19, 1961 in the Pierson College Lounge, Yale University.
6. One of the first full-length discussions of Frost and the ancient pastoral tradition was John F. Lynen’s The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964).
7. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Lathem (London: Penguin Books, 1951), 148.
8. William Empson, Some Versions of the Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), 11–12.
9. Frost to F. S. Flint, July 6, 1913. The letter is reproduced in full in Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 82.
10. Ibid., 83.
11. For the best discussion of the history of the phrase in American culture see Brian Dippie’s The Vanishing American: White Indians and US Indian Policy (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1982).
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Notes to pages 81–153
177
12. Matthew Dennis, Red, White, and Blue Letter Days (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 81–118.
13. P. G. Wiggin, “French Canadians in New England,” The New York Times, October 13, 1901.
14. See Helen Bacon’s discussion of this poem in relation to Euripides and the Dionysiac lore of Maenadism in “Frost and the Ancient Muses,” in The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, ed. Faggen, 75–100.
15. Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day, ed. James Nelson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 16. This interview was conducted in 1952 by Bela
Kornitzer at Frost’s home in Ripton, Vermont.
16. Unpublished letter from Frost to Theodore “Ted” Baird, a member of the Amherst College English Department, October 16, 194
6. Amherst College Archives. Frost
was responding to an essay Baird had sent him, “Darwin and the Entangled Bank,”
published in The American Scholar (1946). Baird praised Darwin’s writing as being as good as Carlyle’s. Frost makes specific reference to Darwin’s journal entry for January 20, 1833 about “Yammerschooner,” a Fuegian word for “give me,” and
“Lampalagua,” the name of a boa constrictor. The other two American works to
which Frost refers are Thoreau’s Walden and Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast.
17. See George Monteiro’s “The Facts on Frost,” South Carolina Review, Fall 1989, 87–96. Monteiro provides an interesting discussion of how Frost’s account of a spider’s behavior as accounted in J. Fabre (whom Frost read) may diverge from
some aspects of Frost’s poem.
18. B. J. Sokol, “Bergson, Instinct, and Frost’s ‘The White-Tailed Hornet,’” American Literature 62, no. 1 (1990), 44–45.
19. George Monteiro, “Robert Frost’s Solitary Singer,” New England Quarterly, March 1971, 134–40.
20. Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 53–62.
21. See William H. Pritchard’s “Diminished Nature,” Massachusetts Review, Spring 1960, 475–92.
22. Czeslaw Milosz, Road-Side Dog (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), 21.
23. For differing recent discussions about Frost and science see Robert Bernard Hass, Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002); Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin; and Guy Rotella, “Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg, and Bohr,”
American Literature 59, no. 2 (1987), 167–89.
24. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Great Short Works of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Wendell Glick (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 304.
25. Richard Proctor, Our Place Among the Infinities (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 9–10.
26. Ibid., 5–6.
27. Ibid., 34.
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Notes to pages 155–174
28. See Jonathan Barron’s essay on Wordsworth’s “The Ruined Cottage” and Frost’s