Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
Cannéll and Ezra Pound ... the jiu jitsu demonstration Pound made on
Frost’s person in a restaurant..... Pound and Frost invited to luncheon
by two ladies, Pound disgusted by their shallow flow of talk on art,
Pound rising, knocking his chair over as he did so, saying haughtily,
“I leave these ladies to you,” departing to Frost’s consternation....
Pound’s challenge to Lascelles Abercrombie to fight a duel on the score
that Abercrombie’s articles were a public offense--and the amusing
aftermath.
We return to America and Frost tells how editors now snatched for the
opportunity to print the poems which previously for many years had
been vainly offered to their magazines. And you lead him on to tell
how liberal the colleges have been in their attitude toward his way of
conducting classes--a curious chapter in modern education.
Frost goes on to speak of the people he knows: of Lincoln MacVeagh and
Alfred Harcourt when they worked at Holt’s, of Carl Sandburg’s work
and Louis Untermeyer’s visits, of a professor at Amherst he admires
because “he loves the classics and he is a _field_ scientist.” He
expresses his doubts of the “bunko-sciences” (mostly sociological and
psychological in character). He tells of a night spent with Paul Elmer
More at Princeton. He inserts somewhere one of Padraic Colum’s Irish
stories. He relates an experience at Vassar College. He supplied his
audience with broadsheets on which were printed several of the poems he
would read during his lecture. At the close of the talk the roomful of
girls avalanched upon him to autograph the broadsheets. After that he
no longer considered it a good idea to furnish his audiences with the
poems he intended to recite.
The family is mentioned. His son, Carol, and one daughter, Irma, are
married: the oldest daughter, Lesley, runs a book-shop in Pittsfield
but now she is going around the world, managing a bookstall on the
liner: Marjorie has not been well for some time.
It is past two now. One studies Frost’s face in the lamplight. His
“skin and his rebellious hair have now a fine harmony of tone, ‘the
grey of the moss of walls,’ a young and living greyness that, like a
delicate lichen, softens without hiding the hard and eternal shape of
the rock beneath.”[8] And while one studies him, he is perhaps telling
you of the friendship that existed between him and Thomas Bird Mosher.
Mosher early picked out one of Frost’s poems for affection and printed
it in his catalogue, and Frost saw him every so often, saw the sad
decline of this epicure who drolly mourned the loss of his sense of
taste and in desperation had beefsteaks specially sent from Boston to
Portland and specially prepared by the best cooks he could engage only
to find them tasteless for him. But never to the end, Frost reminds
you, did Mosher lose his fine taste for the blue china poetry of the
nineties. Or perhaps he tells you of Aroldo Du Chêne who sculpted his
head, or of J. J. Lankes whose woodcuts so appropriately join in mood
with the text of _New Hampshire_. Frost had admired the feeling for New
England landscape Lankes had revealed in some woodcuts reproduced in
the _Masses_ and the _Liberator_. And Lankes had admired Frost’s poetry
and illustrated several of the poems for his own enjoyment. Then poet
and artist were brought together by Carl Van Doren, then an editor of
the _Century_, in a fortunate collaboration for which each, unknown to
the other, was already prepared.
Somehow the talk shifts again. “I believe,” Frost is saying, “in what
the Greeks called synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole;
touching the hem of the goddess. All that an artist needs is samples.
Enough success to know what money is like; enough love to know what
women are like.”[9] Nature, he explains, does not complete things. She
is chaotic. Man must finish and he does so by making a garden and
building a wall. That garden is art. Wallace Stevens, he says, has made
a formal garden with his poetry.
[10]“One of the real American poets of yesterday,” he goes on to
say, “was Longfellow. No, I am not being sarcastic. I mean it. It is
the fashion nowadays to make fun of him. I come across this pose and
attitude with people I meet socially, with men and women I meet in the
classrooms of colleges. They laugh at his gentleness, at his lack of
worldliness, at his detachment from the world and the meaning thereof.
When and where has it been written that a poet must be a club-swinging
warrior, a teller of barroom tales, a participant of unspeakable
experiences? That, today, apparently is the stamp of poetic integrity.
I hear people speak of men who are writing today, and their eyes
light up with a deep glow of satisfaction when they can mention some
putrid bit of gossip about them. ‘He writes such lovely things,’ they
say, and in the next breath add, half worshipfully, ‘He leads such a
terrible life.’ I can’t see it. I can’t see that a man must needs have
his feet plowing through unhealthy mud in order to appreciate more
fully the glowing splendor of the clouds. I can’t see that a man must
fill his soul with sick and miserable experiences, self-imposed and
self-inflicted, and greatly enjoyed, before he can sit down and write a
lyric of strange and compelling beauty. Inspiration doesn’t lie in the
mud; it lies in the clean and wholesome life of the ordinary man. Maybe
I am wrong. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I haven’t the
power to feel, to appreciate and live the extremes of dank living and
beautiful inspiration.
“Men have told me, and perhaps they are right, that I have no
‘straddle.’ That is the term they use. I have no straddle. That means
that I cannot spread out far enough to live in filth and write in the
treetops. I can’t. Perhaps it is because I am so ordinary. I like the
middle way, as I like to talk to the man who walks the middle way with
me. I have given thought to this business of straddling, and there’s
always seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something tricky.
I see a man riding two horses, one foot on the back of one horse, one
foot on the other. One horse pulls one way, the other a second. His
straddle is wide. Heaven help him, but it seems to me that before long
it’s going to hurt him. It isn’t the natural way, the normal way, the
powerful way to ride. It’s a trick.
“I am an ordinary man, I guess. That’s what’s the trouble with me. I
like my school and I like my farm and I like people. Just ordinary, you
see.”
He pauses. “What I have said,” he reflects, “sounds a little too moral.
My point always is that a poet may live as vile a life as he pleases,
but then his poetry ought to be of a vile beauty. I hate dis-integrity.
I hope I have some range in the appreciation of beauty. I can see it
all the way from exquisite through homely and mean even to vile. What I
am unsympathetic with is a wide discrepancy between life and art.”
The college clock strikes three. It is Frost’s usual bedtime. Tomorrow
he will be up around eleven, a student or two will call with some
writings for him to read, at one o’clock we are to be driven to a farm
house for a “real New England luncheon,” later there will be a walk.
“Frost,” Waldo Frank has remarked, “is not only a beautiful poet. He is
a beautiful person.”
VIII. “A SENSIBILITIST”
_“I’m what is called a sensibilitist,
Or otherwise an environmentalist.”_
The poetry of Robert Frost is of one piece with his life and even with
his physical appearance. Like the latter, it makes the impression
of solid substance from which mounts a lyric flame whose light
confers meaning on the mass. And it resembles his life in that the
extraordinary in the shape of event or experience is usually quite
absent: the materials are restricted and common. “Common in experience:
uncommon in writing” is the true formula for practically all of Frost’s
poetry.
Whence arises his distinction in expression? The answer must first be
made in terms of sensibility. The art of Robert Frost is built upon
the foundation of observation: it is the poetry of observation, an
emotional response, lyrical, dramatic, humorous, tragic, to what he has
seen and heard.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter, darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
This is the type of sheer observation that abounds in Frost’s works,
and one reads line after line that requires no help for vividness from
specially constructed images or even from simile and metaphor which are
in their turn composed of other definitely observed things.
The temperament of Frost, as befits an observer, is passive and
plastic, and his impressionability depends in the first place for its
intensity upon the keenness of his ear and his eye. In fact, his style
can almost be entirely explained by saying that he is a remarkably
close listener and a very sharp see-er.
Take his versification. What is it but a disciplined and ingrained
habit of listening to the tones of speech in New England from the
time he was fascinated by Charley Hall’s talk back in Windham to
the present? The poems, although they adhere to the molds of blank
verse and rhymed lyrics, are “talk poems.” The feat has been that of
conforming living speech to metrical forms by taking advantage of the
flexibility inherent in all metrical forms, so that Llewellyn Jones, a
conservative student of versification, is right when he says:
“Technically, it is the outstanding feature of all Mr. Frost’s verse
that he makes it speak in human tones. He has never written a line of
free verse that does not scan--if the reader knows how to scan English
verse as it should be scanned and not as Latin or Greek verse should
be scanned. The reason some people have thought Mr. Frost’s verse
very licentiate and why others have said that he writes free verse
is because he subordinates his metrical pattern to the cadences of
human speech. His metrical ictus is always there but it is not always
emphasized, and he is never afraid to let a logical or word accent come
in a weak place metrically. His verse is at the opposite pole from
that of Swinburne, who gallops to an anapaestic tune in a manner which
is quite alien to human speech. On the other hand: ‘I shan’t be gone
long.--You come too’ is pure and unadulterated human speech which just
happens to fit into the metrical scheme of the poem. Only, such a thing
‘just happens’ so often in Mr. Frost’s work that we know that it does
not just happen at all but is the work of an exceptionally sensitive
and gifted poet. And indeed Mr. Frost is so sure of the natural
speech-tones in his work that he says that no one who reads his verse
naturally can read it wrong. But on the other hand those who read it
with a preconceived notion in their minds of how a verse should scan
often find it a little difficult.”
Frost himself settled the matter when he said to Miss Sergeant:
“They call me a dialect poet.... Not so you’d notice it. It was never
my aim to keep to any special speech unliterary, vernacular or slang.
I lay down no law to myself there. What I have been after from the
first, consciously and unconsciously, is tones of voice. I’ve wanted to
write down certain brute throat noises so that no one could miss them
in my sentences. I have been guilty of speaking of sentences as a mere
notation for indicating them. I have counted on doubling the meaning of
my sentences with them. They have been my observation and my subject
matter.