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As
one of the most popular poets the United States has produced, Frost
would hardly seem to need a Library of America volume to secure
his reputation. This compact 1000-page compendium, however, represents
the culmination of a decade long effort to rehabilitate Frost's
stature in American letters. It gathers all of Frost's verse together
for the first time, including 94 poems that have either remained
unpublished or uncollected. The new volume also restores Frost's
own texts, which have been unavailable for nearly thirty years.
The book also contains three unpublished or uncollected plays and
numerous early short stories as well as the most generous selections
ever of his essays, speeches, letters, and interviews. For students
of American poetry, this is not just an important book; it is an
irreplaceable one.
At
the time of his death in January, 1963, Frost had achieved a degree
of fame unequaled by any modern American poet. He was not merely
a celebrated writer but a public figure who seemed to embody a certain
native national wisdom. In front of television cameras, radio microphones,
or crowded lecture halls, Frost played with poised perfection the
role of the philosophical farmer-poet. His appearance at John Kennedy's
1961 Presidential inauguration still ranks as the most famous public
appearance in the history of American literature.
Frost's
public image was no accident of media coverage. It was the careful
creation of a poet for whom fame eventually became the anodyne for
a private life made desolate by unbearable suffering and loss. Frost's
consumptive father died when he was eleven, and his family left
San Francisco for a precarious existence in New England. The poet's
first son died of cholera at four; another daughter died in infancy.
His only sister went insane, a fate shared by one of his daughters.
His youngest daughter (and favorite child) died agonizingly after
childbirth. Another son committed suicide. As his wife lay on her
deathbed, Frost waited outside the door. She never asked for him,
and she died without their exchanging a word.
Frost
never allowed the public to view these private sorrows. His poetry
seems so compellingly personal that one forgets how seldom it is
overtly autobiographical. His most painful poems, like "Home Burial"
or "'Out, Out—,'" are mostly narratives, which distance their
tragedies by placing them in fictive lives. Fear, guilt, and suffering
cast their shadows across his poetry. In art as in life, however,
Frost resourcefully kept those dark themes in careful balance so
they did not overwhelm him.
Frost's
particular genius was to create a poem that convincingly argues
two opposing views at once. The narrative poems demonstrate this
talent in obvious ways. In "Home Burial," for instance, the husband
and wife talk at bitter cross-purposes failing to recognize the
propriety of each other's grief. If neither person is entirely in
the right, then too, neither is entirely in the wrong. "I make it
a rule," Frost admitted "not to take any character's side in anything
I write." Like Shakespeare, Frost's imagination was capacious enough
to encompass contradiction. He used the friction of irreconcilable
opposites rubbing against each other—sometimes humorously,
more often tragically—to spark the dramatic energy of his narratives.
In
Frost's lyric poems, however, his gift for opposition took a more
complicated turn. On the surface he would create an engaging poem
that memorably argued some sensible point of view. Meanwhile underneath
he would set loose another line of argument that subversively qualified
or rejected the surface message. A careful reading of Frost's most
famous poems suggests how often they mean something almost the opposite
of their popular interpretations. In "Mending Wall," for instance,
the speaker does not agree with the farmer's pronouncement that
"Good fences make good neighbors." Nor does "The Road Not Taken"
unambiguously assert that the choice of paths "made all the difference."
While the Modernists made the surfaces of their poems complex and
forbidding, Frost made his surfaces deceptively simple. On close
examination, however, his seemingly lucid poems often unfold into
imaginative enigmas.
Literary
reputations often undergo drastic revision after an author' death,
but the posthumous devaluation of Frost surely ranks among the extreme
cases in American literature. Frost's appointed biographer, Lawrance
Thompson, had grown to hate his subject. Soon after the poet's death,
he began publishing a scathing three-volume attack—a 2000 page
denunciation all the more compelling for being passionately unfair.
Even Thompson's index was designed to discredit his subject. It
included copious entries under headings like "Cowardice," "Jealousy,"
"Rage," "Revenge," and even "Badness." Frost's admirers felt betrayed
by Thompson's revelations of egotism, envy, and ambition. Soon the
same reviewers who had once celebrated the personable poet now derided
him as a monster. "A more hateful human being." opined one outraged
critic, "cannot have lived." (So much for Hitler and Stalin.)
Frost
had never been fashionable among academic critics. His conservative
poetics and populist sympathies stood at odds with the experimental
and elitist credo of Modernism. By the time the final volume of
Thompson's malicious biography was published posthumously in 1976,
Frost had become a remote and anomalous figure to scholars saturated
with High Modernism and the avant-garde. He was a master of formal
poetry in an age of free verse, a narrative poet in a period that
dismissed the very notion of poetic storytelling, and a popular
poet at a time when serious poets and the public were reportedly
not on speaking terms. Although his work never entirely vanished
from the reading list, he was increasingly treated as a minor poet.
Not
until William Pritchard's boldly revisionist Frost: A Literary
Life Reconsidered appeared in 1984, did the tide turn in the
poet's favor. Critics recognized the imbalance in Thompson's biography.
The full complexity and diversity of the poems was rediscovered.
Meanwhile the revival of form and narrative among younger poets
demonstrated that Frost remained a powerful and positive influence
on American poetry. Today Frost's influence on new poetry is stronger
than it was at any point in his own lifetime. The scholars are only
now beginning to catch up.
One
egregious consequence of Frost's scholarly neglect was the unavailability
of accurate texts. After his death, an editor zealously repunctuated
the poems to make them appear more conventional—adding and
removing commas, hyphens, question marks, etc. This situation lay
unnoticed by scholars for years until Donald Hall calculated that
1364 changes had been made, mostly without any justification. Altering
commas and question marks may seem trivial until one remembers that
punctuation is the author's instruction on how to read a poem aloud.
Frost's prosody was explicitly auditory—based on matching and
counterpointing formal meters with American speech rhythms (what
he called "the sound of sense"). Change the punctuation, and one
changes the sound. Meticulously edited by Mark Richardson, the new
collection is the only available text that prints Frost's poems
as the author intended.
For
most readers the greatest interest in the new Frost volume will
be the appearance of the 94 previously unpublished or uncollected
poems. With the inclusion of these works, Frost's poetic oeuvre
now stands complete—except for a few brief and mildly obscene
obiter dicta, which remain suppressed or unverifiable. Reading
through the uncollected mature work, one is struck by how canny
the poet's judgment was concerning his own writing. There are no
lost masterpieces among the new work. There are, however, many poems
worth savoring. "On the Sale of My Farm," and "New Grief," both
written around the time of A Boy's Will are moving if modest
additions to his canon. There are also some witty exercises in free
verse (clearly parodies of Pound) done in 1913. Although mostly
minor, this huge crop of new work adds depth and perspective to
Frost's poetic identity.
One
cannot help but note how many of the uncollected poems are bawdy.
Frost surely understood that it was best for his carefully managed
public image to keep these poems under wraps. While today this ribaldry
humanizes Frost, the Eisenhower-era was not quite ready for its
national bard to publish double-entendres . The title of
Frost's 1957 epigram, "Sym-ball-ism," gives a malicious wink at
the Freudian critics then so fashionable, but the poem itself —
appropriately enough for the verse of a chicken farmer—concerns
the more enduring theme of "country matters:"
The
symbol of the number ten—
The
naught for girls, the one for men—
Defines
how many times does one
In
mathematics or in fun
Go
as you might say into zero.
You
ask the heroine and hero.
The
uncollected works fall into four categories: juvenilia, occasional
poems, light verse, and mature poems. The juvenilia is the most
numerous category, and it illustrates Frost's growth from a competently
versifying high school student to the perfect lyricist of A Boy's
Will. Frost was no Wunderkind. As these early poems illustrate,
his development was slow and deliberate, beset by false steps. He
loved tradition well enough that it took him twenty years of private
labor to shake off the easy music and lofty attitudes of Victorian
Romanticism. As late as 1907 (when he was thirty-three), Frost could
still begin a poem with:
We
shrine our fathers as their wars recede
With
the heroic dead that died of old,
We
shall strew flowers for them year after year;
They
shall have flowers themselves more than they need!
The
single most compelling new poem is probably "The Middletown Murder,"
a 93-line narrative written in 1928. The poem presents an adulterous
affair that ends in a grotesque shooting. Written in rhymed couplets
(rarely a secure measure for Frost's serious poems), the narrative
wavers unsuccessfully between psychological realism and black comedy,
but the story and characters are memorable. The total effect seems
un-Frostian, which is to say that the poem shows Frost exploring
new territory—more explicitly sexual, more provocatively violent,
less densely textured, and almost cinematically fast. Frost knew
the experiment didn't work, but it is fascinating to imagine him
successfully hammering out this new mode.
The
book also includes an intelligently detailed 27-page chronology
of Frost's life. This biographical prècis provides
invaluable perspective on the poems and prose. It also points out
a central paradox in Frost's career—the great poet of New England
was born and raised through childhood in San Francisco. Critics
have made little of this curious fact, but it strikes me as central
to the poet's imaginative identity. Frost's sensibility was deeply
shaped by his first eleven years in California. It is particularly
instructive to note that the early experience of this future farmer-poet
was thoroughly urban. He lived in the apartments and hotels of San
Francisco, California's only big city in the late 1870s. He never
saw snow or dramatic seasons. The first woodlands he visited were
not birch forests but the oaks and redwoods of the Napa Valley.
Even
Frost's family roots were only partially in New England. The poet's
mother was Scottish. Born in Leith near Edinburgh, she emigrated
at twelve to Columbus, Ohio. Only his New Hampshire father came
from the region with which Frost ultimately made his deep and decisive
identification. Even his father's Yankee identity is problematic.
During the Civil War William Frost ran away from home to try to
enlist on the Confederate side. He was unsuccessful, but his Copperhead
sympathies remained with the South. It is no accident that the great
bard of Yankee New England bears the ironic name of Robert Lee Frost.
When
the eleven-year-old Frost followed his father's body to Massachusetts
in 1885, he saw the region with fresh and foreign eyes. This Western
city-boy had never seen a New England autumn or a snowfall. Unlike
a native, he took nothing in this new landscape for granted. The
flora, fauna, weather, and folkways of the Northeast were new to
him, and yet their connection to his dead father gave them a deep
resonance. Frost's position was, therefore, half-in and half-outside
the region. This situation is not an unusual one for the defining
poet of a particular place—Constantine Cavafy, Alexandria's
great poet, for example, spent much of his childhood in Liverpool
and Constantinople. The newcomer has to make conscious sense of
a place in ways a native never bothers. Frost was an elective New
Englander, and a convert is always more passionate about the new
faith than someone born to a religion.
The
Library of America volume may also finally secure Frost's place
as one of the century's wisest poetry critics. Because Frost's critical
style differed so radically from standard academic writing, his
importance here has also been missed by most scholars. The editors
of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, for example, state
fatuously, "Unlike Yeats and Eliot, he has almost nothing to say
in prose." A reader not looking for standard academic criticism,
however, will find Frost's prose contains some of the most eloquent
and insightful statements ever made about the art of poetry. He
was never particularly interested in analyzing individual poems
or literary trends. Frost's chosen subject was the purpose of poetry
in human life. On this theme he has few peers in terms of both profundity
and originality.
Poetry,
Frost remarked, "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish
us to forget." The new Library of America collection decisively
ends the impoverishment of Frost studies. Presenting the author's
work completely and accurately for the first time, it fully restores
a great poet to American literature. We have had many versions of
Frost. At last we have the real thing.
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