ROBERT Frost has
been
discovering America all his
life. He has also been
discovering the world; and
since he is a really wise
poet, the one thing has been
the same thing as the other.
He is more than a New
England poet: he is more
than an American poet; he
is a poet who can be
understood anywhere by
readers versed in matters
more ancient and universal
than the customs of one
country, whatever that
country is. Frost's country
is the country of human
sense: of experience, of
imagination, and of
thought. His poems start at
home, as all good poems
do; as Homer's did, as
Shakespeare's, as
Goethe's, and as
Baudelaire's; but they end
up everywhere, as only the
best poems do. This is
partly because his wisdom
is native to him, and could not have
been suppressed by any circumstance; it is
partly, too, because his education has
been right. He is our least provincial poet
because he is the best grounded in those
ideas--Greek, Hebrew, modern
Europeans and even Oriental--which make
for well-built art at any time. He does
not parade his learning, and may in fact
not know that he has it: but there in his
poems it is, and it is what makes them
so solid, so humorous, and so satisfying.
His many poems have been different from
one another and yet alike. They are the
work of a man who has never stopped
exploring himself--or, if you like, America,
or better yet, the world. He has been
able to believe, as any good artist must, that
the things he knows best because they
are his own will turn out to be true for other
people. He trusts his own feelings, his
own doubts, his own certainties, his own
excitements. And there is absolutely no
end to these, given the skill he needs to
state them and the strength never to be
wearied by his subject matter. "The object
in writing poetry" Frost has said,
"is to make all poems sound as different as
possible from each other." But for
this, in addition to the tricks any poet knows,
"we need the help of
context--meaning--subject matter. That is the greatest help
towards variety. All that can be done
with words is soon told. So also with meters.
. . . The possibilities for tune from
the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the
rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And
we are back in poetry as merely one
more art of having something to say,
sound or unsound. Probably better if sound,
because deeper and from wider
experience."
Frost is one of the most subtle of
modern poets in that department where so much
criticism rests, the department called
technique; but the reason for his subtlety is
seldom noticed. It is there because it
has to be, in the service of something
infinitely more important: a report of
the world by one who lives in it without any
cause to believe that he is different
from other persons except for the leisure he has
given himself to walk about and think as
well as possible concerning all the things
he sees; and to take accurate note of
the way they strike him as he looks. What they
are in themselves is not to be known; or
who he is, either, if all his thought is of
himself; but when the two come together
in a poem, testimony may result. This is
what Frost means by subject matter, and
what any poet had better mean if he
expects to be read.
Frost is more and more read, by old
readers and by young, because in this crucial
and natural sense he has so much to say.
He is a generous poet. His book confides
many discoveries, and shares with its
readers a world as wild as it is wide--a
dangerous world, hard to live in, yet
the familiar world that is the only one we
shall ever have, and that we can somehow
love for the bad things in it as well as
the good, the unintelligible as well as
the intelligible.
Frost is a laconic New Englander: that
is to say, he talks more than anybody. He
talks all the time. The inhabitants of
New England accuse one another of talking
too much, but all are guilty together,
all are human; for man is a talking animal,
and never more so than when he is trying
to prove that silence is best. Frost has
expressed the virtue of silence in
hundreds of poems, each one of them more
ingenious than the last in the way it
takes of suggesting that it should not have been
written at all. The greatest people keep
still.
There may be little or much
beyond the grave,
But the strong are saying
nothing until they see.
Joking aside, Frost is a generous giver.
He is not, thank heaven, one of those
exiguous modern poets--Joseph Wood
Krutch has called them costive--who hope
to be loved because they have delivered
so little: the fewer the poems the better the
poet. The fact is that the greatest
poets have been, among other things, prolific:
they have had much to say, and nothing
has prevented them from keeping at it till
they died.
Contrary to a certain legend, good poets
get better with age, as Thomas Hardy for
another instance did. The Collected
Poems of Hardy are a universe through which
the reader may travel forever,
entertained as he goes by the same paradox as that
which appears in the Complete Poems of
Frost: the universe in question is
presented as a grim, bleak place, but
the longer one stares at it the warmer it
seems, and the more capable of
justifying itself beneath the stars. By an almost
illicit process it manages in the end to
sing sweetly of itself--not sentimentally, or
as if it leaned upon illusion, but with
a deep sweetness that truth cannot disturb.
For truth is in the sweetness: a
bittersweetness, shall we say, but all the better
preserved for being so.
And this is the case, whether with Hardy
or with Frost, because the poet has never
grown tired of his function; has always
known more, and known it better, as time
passed; and has found it the most
natural thing in the world to say so in new terms.
My object in living is to
unite
My avocation and my
vocation.
The poet in Frost has never been
different from the man, or the man from the poet;
he has lived in his poetry at the same
time that he has lived outside of it, and
neither life has interfered with the
other. Indeed it has helped; which is why we
know that his poems mean exactly what he
means, and might say in some other
language if he chose. But he has chosen
this language as the most personal he
could find, toward the end that what it
conveys should be personal for us too. We
need not agree with everything he says
in order to think him wise. It is rather that
he sounds and feels wise, because he is
sure of what he knows. And the extent of
what he knows would never be guessed by
one who met him only in anthologies.
He is powerful there, but in the
Complete Poems we find a universe of many
recesses, and few readers have found
their way into all of these. Some of them are
very narrow, it would seem, and out of
the ordinary way; in the language of
criticism they might even be dismissed
as little "conceits"; but the narrowest of
them is likely to lead further in than
we suspected, toward the central room where
Frost's understanding is at home.
The sign that he is at home is that his
language is plain; it is the human vernacular,
as simple on the surface as
monosyllables can make it. Strangely enough this is
what makes some readers say he is
hard--he is always referring to things he does
not name, at any rate in the long words
they suppose proper. He seems to be
saying less than he does; it is only
when we read close and listen well, and think
between the sentences, that we become
aware of what his poems are about. What
they are about is the important
thing--more important, we are tempted to think,
than the words themselves, though it was
the words that brought the subject on.
The subject is the world: a huge and
ruthless place which men will never quite
understand, any more than they will
understand themselves; and yet it is the same
old place that men have always been
trying to understand, and to this extent it is as
familiar as an old boot or an old back
door, lovable for what it is in spite of the fact
that it does not speak up and identify
itself in the idiom of abstraction. Frost is a
philosopher, but his ideas are behind
his poems, not in them--buried well, for us
to guess at if we please.
2
We can guess that his own philosopher is
Heraclitus, who said: "If you do not
expect it, you will not find out the
unexpected. . . .Let us not make random
guesses about the greatest things....The
attunement of the world is of opposite
tensions, as is that of the harp or bow.
. . .What agrees disagrees. . . . Strife is
justice. . . . The road up and the road
down is one and the same. . . . The
beginning and the end are common . . . .
A dry soul is wisest and best. . . . For
men to get all they wish is not the
better thing. . . . It is the concern of all men to
know themselves and to be sober-minded.
. . . A fool is wont to be in a flutter at
every word." Yet the guess could be
wrong, for Frost does not say these things,
however strongly his poems suggest them.
The suggestion may be nothing but a
coincidence: the two men see the same
world, and its end is like its beginning;
down is up and up is down, the new is
old and the old is new, and strife is justice.
At least we know nothing of justice if
we know nothing of strife. It is tension that
maintains our equilibrium; if opposites
could not feel each other in the dark there
would be no possibility of light. Good
fences make good neighbors--each knows
where he is and what confines him.
Without a wall between them, each would
confuse himself with the other and cease
to exist; or if there were fighting, it would
be too close--a mere scramble, in which
neither party could be made out. Distance
is a good thing, and so is admitted
difference, even when it sounds like hostility.
For there can be a harmony of separate
sounds that seem to be at war with another,
but one sound is like no sound at all,
or else it is like death. Let each thing know
its limits even as it strains to pass
them. No limit will ever be passed, since indeed
it is a limit. Which does not mean that
we shall never stare across the void between
ourselves and others. People, for
instance, who look at the sea--
They cannot look out far,
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a
bar
To any watch they keep?
It is human to want to know more than we
can. But it is most human to know what
"cannot" means.
Frost never says these things either;
his poems only suggest them, and suggest
further things that contradict them. His
muse, like the truth, is cantankerous; it
keeps on turning up fresh evidence
against itself. And yet we cannot miss the
always electric presence of
opposition--two things or persons staring at each other
across some kind of wall. Frost has no
interest in doors that do not lock, in friends
who do not know they are enemies too, or
in enemies who do not know how to
pretend they are friends, and even
believe it as far as things can go. His drumlin
woodchuck sits forth from his habitation
like one who invites the world to come
and visit him; but he never forgets the
two-door burrow at his back. So Frost
himself can reflect upon the triple
bronze that guards him from infinity: his skin,
his house, and his country. If he is
greatly interested in the stars, and no poet is
more so, the reason is that they are
another world which he can see from this one,
and accept or challenge as the mood of
the moment dictates. They burn in their
places as he burns in his, and it is
just as well that neither fire can consume the
other; yet each of them is a fire, and
secretly longs to mingle with its far neighbor.
The great thing about man for Frost is
that he has the power of standing still where
he is. He is on the earth, and it is
only one of many places, and perhaps every
other place is better. But this is his
place, where in spite of his longing to leave it
he can stay till his time comes. Like
any other distinguished person, Frost lives in
two worlds at once: this one, and
another one which only makes it more attractive.
The superiority of the other one is what
proves the goodness of the one we have,
which doggedly we keep on loving, as
doggedly it tolerates and educates us if we
let it do so. Wisdom is enduring it
exactly as it is; courage is being familiar with it
and afraid of it in the right
proportions; temperance is the skill to let it be; and
justice is the knowledge that between it
and you there will always be a lover's
quarrel, never to die into cold silence
and never to be made up. The main thing is
the mutual respect.
Not that Frost wants us to think he
knows everything.
If, as they say, some dust
thrown in my eyes
Will keep my talk from
getting overwise,
I'm not the one for putting
off the proof.
Let it be overwhelming, off
a roof
And round a corner,
blizzard snow for dust,
And blind me to a
standstill if it must.
His vision is the comic vision that
doubts even itself. But it remembers all it can of
what it always knew, and rests, in so
far as the mind can ever rest, on the sum of
its memories. The comic genius ignores
nothing that seems true, however
inconvenient it may be for something else
that seems as true.
The groundwork of all faith
is human woe. . . .
There's nothing but
injustice to be had,
No choice is left a poet
you might add,
But how to take the curse,
tragic or comic.
The choice of Frost is clear. His humor,
an indispensable thing in any great poet,
is in his case the sign that he has
decided to see everything that he can see. No man
of course sees all the world, but the
poorest man is the one who blinds himself.
The man with his eyes open has the best
chance to understand things, including
those things his ancestors have said.
The minister says of the old lady who used to
live in The Black Cottage:--
One wasn't long in learning
that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War
was for,
It wasn't just to keep the
States together,
Nor just to free the
slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn't have believed
those ends enough
To have given outright for
them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched
the principle
That all men are created
free and equal.
And to hear her quaint
phrases--so removed
From the world's view today
of all those things.
That's a hard mystery of
Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course
the easy way
Is to decide it simply
isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a
fellow say so.
But never mind, the
Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a
thousand years.
Each age will have to
reconsider it. . . .
For, dear me, why abandon a
belief
Merely because it ceases to
be true.
Cling to it long enough,
and not a doubt
It will turn true again,
for so it goes.
Most of the change we think
we see in life
Is due to truths being in
and out of favor.
There it is. One couldn't say half so
much if one were tragic.
Froast
Copyright (c)
1951 by Mark Van Doren. Permission to reproduce granted by Charles and John Van
Doren, executors. All
rights reserved.
The Atlantic
Monthly; June, 1951; "Robert Frost's America"; Volume 187, No. 6;
pages 32-34.
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