pattern. Therefore, in 1915 he purchased a farm on a hill just outside
of Franconia, New Hampshire. In 1920 he moved to Vermont where he had
purchased a large farm at South Shaftsbury in the district presided
over by that ardent Vermonter, Dorothy Canfield. He is still the
farmer and poet. And teacher, too, for that element in him retains its
energy. From 1916 to 1919 he was a member of the faculty of Amherst
College, this poet without a scholarly eminence in the orthodox sense,
without a college diploma even (though now he holds honorary degrees
from three institutions of higher learning), but he was encouraged to
conduct classes in literature and philosophy in his own freehand way.
In teaching literature he assumed that the conspicuous landmarks would
be seen in other courses. He could therefore ramble in the lesser known
regions of good writing, dwelling always in his informal presentation
on the enjoyment of books and slyly encouraging honesty of initiative
in writing.
Then President Burton of the University of Michigan called Frost to
fill the new Fellowship in the Arts which he established in 1921. The
appointment was for one year, but was extended to two, at the close of
which Robert Bridges, the British Poet Laureate, was appointed Fellow
for the following year. But in 1925, so welcome had Frost been on
the Michigan campus, he was called back to Ann Arbor to hold a life
fellowship in poetry founded entirely for him.
It was not long, however, before the magnetic pull of New England soil
and the fact that two of his children had made their homes in the east
drew him away from the attractive post at Michigan. He resigned and
came back to the ruggedly lyrical Green Mountains of Vermont in 1926,
with the plan of distributing his “teaching” efforts among several
colleges.
Thus during the academic year, 1926-1927, Frost was “boarded around”
by the various colleges who competed for his residence on the campus.
He traveled about, to Wesleyan University for two weeks, to Amherst
for ten, to Michigan for a few weeks, to Dartmouth for a visit, and so
on, mingling in each place with students and faculty, giving lectures
and readings, consulting with literary aspirants, imparting a fresh
emotional quality to the collegiate routine that is too usually strange
to it. But it is unlikely that he will “tramp about” so much in another
year, as Amherst claims his _presence_ (Frost does his teaching by
simply being what he is) for an entire term during the next collegiate
year.
* * * * *
Imagine that you have been invited to be the guest of Robert Frost
for a few days. Let the place be Amherst. He is staying there for a
month or two in a house rented from a professor now on his sabbatical
year. As you alight from your taxicab late in the afternoon, a well
filled out man of good height steps on to the porch, and you are
aware that the note this waiting personality strikes is quiet yet
vivid. A large boned rugged frame, a strong neck, and poised on its
full column a head so modeled that it gives the strength of the body
a lyrical accentuation. This head has been described as a faun’s and
the eyes and mouth are sometimes said to have an elfin quality, and
indeed it is true that one might think of faunishness and sly flitting
elves in glancing at it. That is fanciful, though, and not really in
correspondence with the sensitivity, the fluent gravity, the friendly
lines of the countenance now welcoming you. The words and manner are
simple: there is a trace of shyness which attests that the simplicity
is not an affectation and yet there is also ease.
You enter and Mrs. Frost, quiet, sweet, intelligent and devoted,
greets you. Talk begins, dinner is served. Mr. Frost has been out of
touch with the centers of literary life. He asks questions, about the
_Dial_, about William Carlos Williams, about that and this eddy in the
literature of the day. Patently, he is out of it, he doesn’t follow
the magazines and supplements and current books with any assiduity,
apparently he prefers to hear--in country fashion--from the lips of the
people he meets what is going on.
After coffee, you settle down in the living room for a long evening’s
talk, you playing alternately the crisp rôle of questioner and the
respectful one of listener, and Frost “in his dry, sly, halting
way,” as Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant puts it in her vivid portrait of
Frost, talks and ruminates, tells stories, offers critical notes, and
speculates. The speculative note in his conversation is important, for
it signifies that the growing ends of his mind and feelings still carry
him on. There is no impending death here of sensibility or thinking, no
dogmatism, in short, that closes off further possibilities of enlarging
his experience.
Perhaps he speaks of his Indian-fighting ancestor, Major Charles Frost,
and how for years he looked on him with a little disapproval as a black
sheep in the family whom other people honored for his treacherous
conduct at the Indian conference. Frost, you perceive, sympathizes with
the Indians: he doesn’t like unfair play. But lately he has learned
that Major Frost objected to the stratagem and entered into it with
great reluctance: he is glad to think a little better of the early
settler.
He drifts into reminiscence of San Francisco days and that grim father
of his. Sometimes his father would give him some change and commission
him to bring back cigarettes. But on one awful occasion the quarter
slipped from his hand as he was running to the store and fell into one
of the cracks of the board sidewalk then the prevalent style in San
Francisco. In vain did his small hands try to recover it, and passersby
were able to do no better. Frantic, he went to the store, fearfully
explained he had dropped his money, and begged for a package of
cigarettes. Laughter from the clerk and the men standing about. Nothing
to do but return home in trepidation and tell his mother. Father was
working in his study and by now no doubt impatient for a smoke. His
mother also stood in fear of father’s anger, but in the present case
she decided that Robert must go in and tell of the loss. Only first let
them pray, mother and son, that Robert should be let off easily. Then
Robert went in and reported. His father glanced up for a moment from
something he was writing, said brusquely, “Never mind,” and turned back
to complete his sentence.
There was something deep between Frost and his father. The man was
mentally alert: he had stood second in his class at Harvard and he had
been an associate of Henry George. He was ambitious, as his political
activity reveals. And he was, despite his consumption, strenuous,
engaging in long swims and once in a six day walking race with the
champion, Dan O’Leary. He won that, too. O’Leary had sworn that he
could give him a liberal handicap and then walk him down. When O’Leary
failed to do so, he claimed that Frost’s father had violated walking
rules, but afterwards he became his friend. But above all--and this is
the really deep bond--his father seems to have planted tragedy into his
son’s view of the world: so deeply did he do this that to this day his
father’s character excites a species of awesome regard in the son.
And now, in reply to a question, Frost is speaking of school days in
Lawrence, of first adventures in reading poets, of meeting Elinor
White who tied him for scholarship honors. And he points out how his
grandfather, according to his light, loyally stood by him, how he sent
him twice to college, backed him patiently in various endeavors to
make a living, and finally gave him a farm--which he didn’t succeed in
managing expertly. “Never earned a cent, save from and through verse.
But for my first twenty years at it I earned a total of two hundred
dollars,”[6] he remarks without bitterness.
The poem that he read before the Men’s Club of the Central
Congregational Church at Derry, the poem that was so instrumental in
landing for him his job at Pinkerton Academy, was, he tells you, _The
Tuft of Flowers_ in _A Boy’s Will_, “Yes,” he says with a smile to
interpret the remark, “_The Tuft of Flowers_ got me my first real job.
Whole family owe their life to this poem and they’d better believe
it.”[7] _The Black Cottage_, _The House-Keeper_, and _The Death of the
Hired Man_ all date, he goes on to inform you, from 1905 before he
joined the Pinkerton faculty, and he adds that “Virgil’s _Eclogues_ may
have had something to do with them.... I first heard the voice from a
printed page in a Virgilian _Eclogue_ and _Hamlet_.”[7]
The talk shifts the scene to London ... the fooleries of Skipwith
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.
“I know what I want to do most. I don’t do it often enough. In _The
Runaway_ I added the moral at the end just for the pleasure of the
aggrieved tone of voice. There are high spots in respect of vocal image
in _Blueberries_:
There _had_ been some berries--but those were all gone.
He didn’t say where they had been. He went on:
‘I’m sure--I’m sure--as polite as could be.’”
It is plain to see why Frost calls himself an “anti-vocabularian,” for
the speech materials he attends to are limited in number of words. But
there is a gain here: the right limitation of vocabulary will produce
honesty of vocabulary, will insure, that is, some personal content in
experience for the words one employs, and this matching of vocabulary
and personal experience gives force.
If Frost’s ear gives a natural life to his verse, his eye gives it a
clarity, a definiteness, a firmness of outline that produces a strong
feeling of actuality. Edward Garnett in his essay on Frost lifted out
from his better known poems a number of images and held them toward
the reader for inspection of their purity and hardness. We may take
a recently published poem, _Once by the Pacific_,[11] with the same
purpose in mind, the more so as this poem lies on Frost’s usual plane
of excellence and is not quite among his best.
The shattered water made a misty din,
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The sand was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent.
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was spoken.
Here we _see_ rows of waves growing taller as we gaze out from the
shore, and beyond above the fitfully glowing horizon the strands of
clouds disordered by the wind. (“Great waves _looked over others_
coming in.... The clouds were low and _hairy_ Like _locks blown
forward in the gleam of eyes_.”) Already the scene is massive, and we
are being prepared for the introduction of a cosmic word in the last
line. The rest of the poem is devoted to heightening this anticipatory
mood. We stand on the sand which is backed by a cliff which is backed
by a continent: thus the scale of the struggle is enlarged to huge
dimensions. The falling darkness of one night is similarly magnified:
“not only a night, an age.” And then the poem is ready to leave its
symbolic frame altogether in the last two lines. “There would be more
than ocean water broken Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was
spoken.”
It is this simplicity and coherence of imagery that creates the
concreteness of Frost’s vision. At the same time, grandiose though the
theme is, the language is utterly like talk: the waves “thought of
doing something to the shore that water never did to land before ...
you could not tell, and yet it looked as if the sand was lucky” ... God
will say, “Put out the light.”
If Frost is thus faithful in the use of his own eyes and his own ears,
it follows, since they cannot be universal in scope, that he will write
about his own locality. He will be obliged to be American, New England,
indigenous, to be an “environmentalist,” to do things with the “native
touch” Edward Garnett spoke of, because the very process of his writing
poetry commits him to it.
But this is not all the story. The third conspicuous element in his
style is his sense of situation, his sense of drama. This, too, has
been often illustrated by the critics of Frost, and Edward Garnett has
quoted in connection with it one of Goethe’s offhand remarks: “A lively
feeling of situations and an aptitude to describe them makes the poet.”
Frost has qualified in this way many times--in _The Death of the Hired
Man_, in _Fear_, in _The Witch of Coos_, among many others. And he has
given us one “straight” example of drama in the one act play, _A Way
Out_, printed in the _Seven Arts_.
The scene is “a bachelor’s kitchen bedroom in a farmhouse with a table
spread for supper. Someone rattles the door-latch from outside. Asa
Gorrill, in loose slippers, shuffles directly to the door and unbolts
it. A stranger opens the door for himself and walks in” and takes a
survey. “Huh,” he says. “So this is what it’s like. Seems to me you
lock up early. What you afraid of?” And Asa replies in a piping drawl:
“’Fraid of nothing, because I ain’t got nothing--nothing’t anybody
wants.”