Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
against the modern world. He proves that a species of classicism
resting on personal discovery is still possible.
Pictorially, Frost’s apartness from contemporary currents is
striking.... He came on our literary scene, this intensified and
intelligent and subtilized “ordinary man,” in very queer company. There
was Carl Sandburg with his love of the blur, his dreamy slothfulness,
his drifting impressionism, there was Vachel Lindsay, sentimental,
picturesque and declamatory, there was Amy Lowell, shallow and
decorative, there was Edgar Lee Masters, protestant and disillusioned,
and these were the poetic vanguard of Frost’s generation. In the novel
Theodore Dreiser was working up a public appetite for naturalism, and
Sherwood Anderson, recoiling in disgust from American business life,
was starting toward his present trust in objectless wandering and
instinctive laughter. Romantics all, and so were the new critics, J.
E. Spingarn with his gusty estheticism, H. L. Mencken, braying out
his prejudices, and Van Wyck Brooks with his humanitarian approach.
Frost came on with this troop, and they hailed him as a brother. He was
contemporary with them in age and public appearance, and a mistake was
made: it was taken for granted that he belonged in attitude and spirit
and general aim to the so-called “new poetry.”
Today the Middle Generation is beginning to recede whereas Robert Frost
emerges more and more and as a poet differing at the root in substance,
craft and direction from the romantic movement of the last decade.
Where is his kinship in America? Not with that other New England
poet of parts, Edwin Arlington Robinson, for Robinson exemplifies a
withering and retrospective New England and Frost exemplifies the New
England that is still sturdily alive. No, it is rather in the Eldest
Generation in American letters that one finds a similar temper and
approach to Frost’s. One imagines that the elder critics, Paul Elmer
More and Irving Babbitt, casting skeptical eyes over our literary life
today, might single out Frost and say: “Here is a poet who has not
succumbed to the ‘law for thing’: here is a poet who has not bleached
himself with neo-classical dogma: here is a poet who sings afresh in
the great classical tradition.”
Ultimately More and Babbitt diverge, as More seeks to sustain the
religious tradition of classicism and Babbitt to revitalize the
humanistic tradition. It is the latter tradition that includes Robert
Frost.
For speaking in terms of psychology rather than of literature, what
distinguishes Frost is simply good sense. Good sense avoids extremes
both in what it denies and in what it accepts. It does not, for
instance, deny the bulky evidence of the senses and the man of good
sense, therefore, will not accept the lies of idealism. The external
world he will try to see and feel and otherwise sense as clearly and
tangibly as he can: “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”
At the same time the man of good sense will not in his acceptance of
the practical instinctive fact as such fly to an extremely narrow
materialism and atheism. Something inscrutable and ordering very likely
remains: there are overtones in the observer of the fact that he cannot
ignore. Thus, he neither denies God nor the world: he accepts the
latter as demonstrated and the former as probable or at least possible.
What he does trust is his own experience (having good sense he knows
that there is nothing else to trust) and his own experience happens in
Frost’s case to be mediatory in character. Being intelligent, being
deeply emotional, being obliged to make terms with practical life, the
man of good sense casts up a rough balance of the three aspects of his
life and travels, so far as he is permitted so to do, in the center of
the highway.
A fair-minded description of a poet ought to be in itself a placement
and therefore a criticism of that poet. If Frost’s qualities pertain to
good sense, we must not expect him to write on the religious level. In
_The Trial By Existence_, one of the poems in _A Boy’s Will_, he took
up a religious theme, the gathering in heaven of the souls ready for
birth, “the trial by existence named, the obscuration upon earth,” and
the conclusion reached is sensible. As Llewellyn Jones has stated it,
it is “a recognition that suffering is always in terms of what we are,
not an alien something hitting us by chance from without but somehow or
other implicit in our very constitution.” But _The Trial By Existence_
is exceptional in theme and treatment in all of Frost’s range.
Nor must we expect from Frost that rarest and most difficult of
virtues that goes by the prosaic name of commonsense. Commonsense is
a _community_ of judgments, intellectual, emotional and practical,
upon life. It is an exact balance demanding the utmost strenuousness
to achieve and the perfection and harmony of our faculties. Good sense
is a gift: commonsense must be deliberately arrived at, as witness the
efforts of Socrates.
There are certain all-important questions which only the greatest
literature raises and attempts to answer, and these questions it is
not appropriate to ask of every poet. Frost makes no pretense of great
inclusiveness and great profundities. The canniness of good sense
forbids such rash over-reachings of one’s self. But what we have always
a right to demand is that the poet should be skilled in his craft,
alive in his sensibility, and at least sensible in his conclusions.
Robert Frost is all of these, and to those questions that it is proper
to ask of him, those questions, that is, that are covered in his own
experience, he returns always an answer in true currency equal to the
demand.
His comprehensive answer is the _natural_ (not romantic and not
religious) vision of life, and it is natural in the sense that it is
fitting to man _as he is_. “The poetry of a true real natural vision of
life,” said Goethe, “demands descriptive power of the highest degree,
rendering a poet’s pictures so life-like that they become actualities
to every reader,” and that is what Robert Frost, man of good sense and
fine sensibility, has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be
treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the
long and noble course of American literature.
APPENDIX A
SELECTED BRITISH OPINION ON ROBERT FROST
The following quotations are taken from a little leaflet distributed
by David Nutt. Historically, the leaflet is interesting for showing
the quick captivation of English critics by _North of Boston_. But
more than that, the English writers appear to have succeeded better in
stating the emotional character of Frost’s verse than the Americans who
have undertaken the same task.--G. B. M.
* * * * *
... A unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit
that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one
hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so
of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and
relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of
compression and more lightness, unity and breadth. The language ranges
from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and
intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack
of violence make the unaffected verses look like prose, except that the
sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to
the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as _The Death
of the Hired Man_, _Home Burial_, _The Black Cottage_, and _The Wood
Pile_, do we realize that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious
tenderness.--_The English Review._
* * * * *
... To start with, Mr. Frost is an American poet who noticeably stands
out against tradition.... We find very little of the traditional manner
of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work; scarcely anything, indeed, save a
peculiar adaption, in his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse....
It elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation
does. It is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life
much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words--to put them, that
is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected
virtue comes out of them; it is, in fact, poetry composed, as far as
possible, in a language of things.... We have heard a great deal lately
of the desirability of getting back again into touch with the living
vigors of speech. This usually means matters of vocabulary and idiom;
and Mr. Frost certainly makes a racy use of New England vernacular. But
he goes further; he seems trying to capture and hold within metrical
patterns the very tones of speech--the rise and fall, the stressed
pauses and little hurries, of spoken language. The kind of metrical
modulation to which we are most accustomed--the modulations intended
for decorations or purely esthetic expressiveness--will scarcely be
found in his verses. But, instead, we have some novel inflections of
metre which can only be designed to reproduce in verse form the actual
shape of the sound of whole sentences. As a matter of technique, the
attempt is extraordinarily interesting.... Naturally, this technical
preoccupation bears strongly on the general form of Mr. Frost’s poetry.
He uses almost entirely dialogue or soliloquy; he must have somebody
talking. We might call these poems psychological idylls. Within their
downright knowledge, their vivid observation, and (more important)
their rich enjoyment of all kinds of practical life, within their
careful rendering into metre of customary speech, the impulse is always
psychological--to set up, in some significant attitude, a character or
a conflict of characters. The ability to do this can turn a situation
which is not very interesting at first into something attractive,
as when a rather protracted discourse of two distant relations on
genealogy gradually merges into a shy, charming conversation of
lovers; or, in a more striking instance, when the rambling speech of
an overtasked farmer’s wife works up into a dreadful suggestion of
inherited lunacy. If, as we have said, we cannot quarrel with this
deliberate method of exposition, it can scarcely be questioned that
Mr. Frost is at his best when he can dispense with these structural
preliminaries as in the admirable soliloquy of a farmer mending his
wall, or in the exquisite comedy of the professor sharing his bedroom
with a talkative newspaper-agent, or in the stark, formidable tragedy
called _Home Burial_. Though it is difficult to state absolutely
the essential quality of Mr. Frost’s poetry, it is not difficult to
suggest a comparison. When poetry changes by development rather than
by rebellion, it is likely to return on itself. Poetry in Mr. Frost
exhibits almost the identical desires and impulses we see in the
“bucolic” poems of Theocritus.--_The Nation._
* * * * *
... There is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent
instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the
least suggesting that Mr. Frost should write vers libre; I am only
saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman--But
Mr. Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground, and
much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman
gave the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to
shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It
is another form of the New England conscience.... He does give you
a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows
and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of