Especially in American circles, Robert Frost remains particularly adored. I'm not entirely sure why this is because Frost seems to me-- in this age that asperses to be ironical and sophisticated-- a figure very much out-of-synch with contemporary aesthetic thought. As many of you realize, though, "contemporary aesthetic thought" isn't necessarily something this blog much values. Many hold Frost as the best poet of the twentieth century, an assessment I find highly spurious given that several poets (Yeats, Eliot and Stevens, most notably) so eclipse Frost in technical mastery, "vocal" range, and interpretive density. Frost also comes with a lot of baggage. One often gets the sense that as soon as one's read a dozen or so of his poems, one's read them all, with all the others being variations on the "it's winter on the farm, and it's time to walk through the snow, go out and chop some wood, and Billy, you come too" sort of thing. Leaves; trees; snow; horses; grass; rustica ad nauseum. Then there's the sage-folksy-wisdom-mask that wears well for a few readings but becomes very tiresome very quickly. Still then there's the relatively limited vocabulary with which Frost works that can leave less-than-patient readers bored and/or frustrated; some claim this engenders a kind of elementality to Frost's poetry, but even such elementality, however one justifies it, can be overused to the point of banality. Further, there's certainly very little in the way of technical invention in Frost: he pioneered very little formally, an irony not lost on those that eschew the "Frost as pioneer" mythology. And then there's the allegoricism that so appeals to what some would call "sentimental" readers but which elicits disdain from others; poems like "The Road Not Taken," with it's "making the right decision in the woods" scenario, and "Mending-Wall"'s "good fences make good neighbours" moralism tend to draw much fire from those that would like to dismiss Frost as little more than a glorified Hallmark poet. That, for example, "The Road Not Taken" is one of the most broadly MIS-understood poems of the twentieth-century hardly ever seems to warrant mention; it is not, in fact, about having made any sort of "right" decision or anything of the ilk. But herein lies the problem. Rave on, Doctor J? Listen to Frost
Frost's deceptive simplicity has created as many problems for his own poetic reputation that one no longer knows exactly what to do with him. So many of the charges above aren't fair-- but they aren't un-fair, either. The ironies with Frost are manifold. A stunningly clear voice, he's also one of the most broadly misunderstood; a frank voice, he's often deceptive, for good and for ill; even when he's deceptive, though, one wonders how much to allow to such deception, that is, to credit a subversive process or intent to material that might simply be as simple as it seems. In some circles, the playful poet is winking at us, checking to see that we're reading him more attentively than he knows the plurality of his readers are; in others, the hack poet has built such a reputation of grandfatherly wisdom about him that we see more wisdom, and "poetic" qualities, in his words than are intrinsically there; and in yet others, he's the poet so obviously moralistic, and yet so obviously not, and that ends up rhapsodizing in apparently harmless curlicues that can speak on all sides of all things at any given time and end up, like Wildean art, affirming nothing. Frost, like many of his contemporaries, would have had readers believe that he didn't substantially attend to reading his peers, but it's obvious that he did, and some poems are obviously responses to other, as "Directive" is a response to Eliot's "Little Gidding." And on and on and on. I guess this leads to the ultimate Frostian irony: for a poet so concerned with establishing that his verse could only be read in certain ways that he as the poet had determined, he was also the poet that proclaimed that a poem was entitled to anything the poem would hold; with this contradiction, or apparent contradicition at least, we have Frost as the architect of his own cultural misprision. It's as if for every "careful" or "proper" reading one might provide a poem, one has to wait for the trap to open up beneath us, the ways in which the poem rejects that very reading, or at least needles us with the question, "You're not really thinking it's that simple, are you?"
All that said, it gets increasingly to assess Frost's genius. The Canadian poet and scholar Eli Mandel once said of Leonard Cohen that he understood the fakery that was involved in being truly sincere, and it's a statement I think that applies to Frost as well. It becomes difficult to tell the pose from the poseur, and while this cultivates an ambiguity that can make Frost endlessly ponderable, there's also a degree conmanship at work too that makes one wonder how much interpretive and critical credence we should accord him. Frost can be wonderfully sincere, carefully insincere, manipulative insincere in acting sincere and even -- wait for it-- disarmingly sincere about his insincerity. In a way, this could be a particularly American spinning of the Yeatsian principle of poetic masks-- and both Yeats and Frost were influenced, albeit awkwardly, by Ezra Pound. It also probably does not help us that Frost cultivated the image of the grandfatherly poet even when he most certainly was no such thing. In the end, Frost may have created an oeuvre that defeats criticism. I'm still bothered by the nagging sense that there is at least the possibility that all of Frost's poetry constitutes a kind of satire on poetry itself, though that sense is seldom more than an itch of curiousity not too far removed from conspiracy theorism.
I'm sure most of what I've written here would cause no end of debate among Frost's admirers and his detractors, and in the end I don't mean to be incendiary. Fact is: I don't know what to do with him. I'm willing to accord him much-- but I'm also not willing to "let go" of some of that baggage I noted above that comes with reading him. I think that a lot of the more famous lyrics have now lost much of their value except, perhaps, as junior-school instruction pieces and incantatory exercises ("Fire and Ice" and "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping By Woods On A Snow Evening" having lost their charm for me, and most serious readers, long ago). But then there are some other wonderful poems, "Directive" perhaps being the greatest, "The Wood-Pile" being a better-than-average oeuvre piece, and some deserving more close examination than have tended to receive. Of the latter type of poems, the main one I'm offering here is "An Old Man's Winter Night," a poem perhaps more than most that demonstrates the cheeky seriousness I described earlier. The tiny clause "through the thin frost" should give you a sense at least of poetical self-winking: the outdoors "looked darkly in at him," him being it seems the intangible soul of the poet (oy...) "through the thin frost," with the figure of Frost, the man, the corporeal being, merely the prism through which that soul is perceived.
Yeah. I know. Sounds like a stretcher. But welcome to Frost. No wonder criticism, for all its efforts, doesn't know what the hell to do with him-- or rather keeps trying to figure out what to do with him, with little real success. I, sadly, offer no better. Read and be partial again with all confusion.
Read "Directive"
Directive
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
Read "The Wood-Pile"
The Wood-Pile
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
No, I will go on farther -- and we shall see."
The hard snow held me, save where now and then
One foot went through. The view was all in lines
Straight up and down of tall slim trees
Too much alike to mark or name a place by
So as to say for certain I was here
Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.
A small bird flew before me. He was careful
To put a tree between us when he lighted,
And say no word to tell me who he was
Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather --
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled -- and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis
Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
What held it though on one side was a tree
Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,
These latter about to fall. I thought that only
Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks
Could so forget his handiwork on which
He spent himself, the labor of his ax,
And leave it there far from a useful fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
Read "An Old Man's Winter Night"
An Old Man's Winter Night
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.
See also Robert Lowell's "Robert Frost," though it's usually now printed as "Robert Frost At Midnight."
Useless Whose Line Is It Anyway-syle points to anyone but RK who knows the riddle to calling this entry "His Secret Ministry."
Robert Frost At Midnight
Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone
to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs,
his voice musical, raw and raw--he writes in the flyleaf:
"Robert Lowell from Robert Frost, his friend in the art."
"Sometimes I feel too full of myself," I say.
And he, misunderstanding, "When I am low,
I stray away. My son wasn't your kind. The night
we told him Merrill Moore would come to treat him,
he said, 'I'll kill him first.' One of my daughters thought things,
knew every male she met was out to make her;
the way she dresses, she couldn't make a whorehouse."
And I, "Sometimes I'm so happy I can't stand myself."
And he, "When I am too full of joy, I think
How little good my health did anyone near me."
UPDATE: Cezanne's Apples: RK's comments on Frost were too good to risk someday getting lost with some sort of Enetation screw-up, so I'm attaching them here. RK tends to read Frost with a greater sense of ease (or comfort? I'm not sure what the best word is here) than I do, though I'm not sure our individual thoughts on him entirely exclusive of another; call me a slightly confused townie not sure how cagey the old man is. In a strange way, we prove each others' points: RK asks with a jibe, "Man, he can't possibly just mean what he says," to which the answer is, of course, yes; but some us, this blog included, as much as we want to leave matters there, hear other things, perhaps paranoiacally. That so many people come to the same conclusion, though, makes one wonder if Frost isn't playing a kind of Twain-ish game of playing upon the notion that he may or may not be meaning just what he says. *shrug* Anyway, RK's remarks: read 'em. Cheers.
Nice title, Dr J. Am I really the only one? [Ed: likely the only one to know the source, anyway.] RF has to me always been a poet abused by clever academics. Man, he can't possibly just mean what he says. Gotta be something real, real, like, deep. As Lowell would have said, Eyewash.
Frost (to me, anyway) is to poetry what Constable was to painting. The world we see and touch is the real one. That's what 'country' means. A plank is a plank, a horse is a horse. In that sense, he is the cleverest of all pastoral poets. He writes about the country, but drops the knowingness of the townie, even to the point of not idealising. He lets you -- the reader of Poetry -- be the townie and recognise yourself as such in the unease you get when reading a poet who writes about exactly what the words say.
'The Road Not Taken' is, to me, one kind of perfect poem. It is about what it's about. If -- and most of us can't help it -- we see a further meaning in it, well, so we might have if we had been there. This is just as true of 'Stopping by woods on a snowy evening', which is related to Wilhelm Müller's 'Der Lindenbaum' in Schubert's ultra-famous song of that name. Very simple. It is what it is. And if you -- clever, sensitive Poetry Reader -- sense more in it, well, if you had been on that horse, in that sleigh, or under that linden tree, you might hava felt the simple experience and ALSO the 'further', because that's how humans feel.
Now Dr J will tell me if I'm wrong [Ed: Doc J doesn't think you're wrong on this at all.], but my feeling is that WC Williams took this idea of Frost's and combined it with a keen sensitivity to modern (pictorial) art. The latter, famously, stopped the canvas being a window on to a scene beyond, and made art of the canvas itself, covered in colours. In other words, the painting is what it is. WC Williams made the poem be what it is, which is horribly difficult given the fact that the smallest component part of a poem -- the word -- is always already about something, unlike a blob of paint. So what does WCW do? He reads Frost, sees what this old man has done as a predecessor (like Picasso with Cezanne), and writes about plums in the icebox -- a poem which refuses all clever-clever interpretation by members of the Academic Cult, and is unforgettable. Like a painting by Rothko. Or a Cezanne bowl of apples.
What I find fascinating about both these poets (at least in this vein) is their deliberate (I assume) refusal of overtones. There is no reverb in the words, not even much music (more in Frost: the repetition of 'miles to go'). And yet compared to some of the English anti-Romantics of the London Magazine school of the Fifties (Roy Fuller & co), they do reverberate, they aren't flat, there is a magic somewhere, it's poetry.
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