on the defensive, and the intruder, hurried, rudely questioning and
commanding, mysterious. The dialog quickly develops both the characters
and the situation. The stranger investigates the room and the old
man’s means as though perhaps his motive might be robbery--in case his
suspicion of miserly hoardings finds evidence to go upon. He hints of
violent action, of a necessity for hurry. He is aggressive, reckless,
a factory hand in some sort of trouble. Asa trembles, wishes he were
off, doesn’t dare to resist, unwillingly answers the questions that
build up a picture of his daily life--when he goes to market and what
for, how he carries in his logs, what he believes in, what his history
has been.
Then the stranger reveals he has committed a murder and is in flight.
He was seen once during the day by a wagonload of women. He insists on
donning some of the hermit’s extra clothes and mimicking his behavior.
The proposal is apparently that he hide here in the house and take
turns with the hermit in “stretching his legs” abroad.
Dressed to resemble the old man, the murderer then drags Asa round and
round in a game to get themselves dizzy. “And then when we’re down,”
he says, “I want you should wait till you can see straight before you
speak and try to tell which is which and which is t’other.”
This is the high dramatic moment of the play as they fall moaning from
their whirling and each accuses the other of the crime. The weak old
man faints from terror in the excitement, the stranger clubs him with
his fist and drags him out. The room is empty for a time.
A posse calls and the sham hermit fools it. Its members pass on. It is
“a way out.”
It will be noted that this play has both literary and theatrical form.
The two are not the same: for instance, Eugene O’Neill, generally rated
the best American playwright, often fails to produce a coincidence
of what is visually effective with what is psychologically and
dramatically determined. That Frost has done; the form stands up on the
printed page as well as on the boards: the psychological springs of
action are revealed: the writing is terse and necessary.
Needless to say, these elements of his style--the gift for tones
of voice, the aptitude for concrete images, and the sense of the
dramatic--would not suffice if they did not give rise to full-bodied,
vital and corresponding emotions. Robert Frost is the type--the pure
poet. The outline of his life has shown that he has all of the poet’s
traditional impracticality, though in his case there is no indulgence
in utopian flights. Now, on the basis of his poems, we can add that he
is emotionally centered, and the world is to him predominantly a source
of emotion. It is his _sensibility_, and not ideas and his actions,
that mostly strikes at his emotions, and the result is song inspired
by _natural_ objects which include, of course, people. Yet though his
poetry is clearly not cerebral, neither is it thumpingly emotional.
His personal make-up gives it its flavor--the humor and slyness, the
sense of rural retreat, the friendliness. But to his intelligence goes
the credit for its economy and restraint, its solidity and subtlety,
for its bounding lines. Frost knows sufficiently what he is about in
writing poetry to compose his own _ars poetica_.
“Imagery and after-imagery are about all there is to poetry. Synecdoche
and synecdoche--My motto is that something must be left to God.
“In making a poem you have no right to think of anything but the
subject matter. After making it, no right to boast of anything but the
form.
“A poem must at least be as good as the prose it might have been. A
poem is a box with a _set_ or assortment of sentences that just fit
together to fill it. You are rhyming sentences and phrases, not just
words. They must go into it as unchanged in size and shape as the words.
“A straight crookedness is most to be desired in a stick or a line.
Or a crooked straightness. An absolutely abandoned zig-zag that goes
straight to the mark.
“Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether and I ask myself
what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they
can do something, unless they amount to deeds as in ultimatums or
battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker,
from which there is no appeal. My definition of poetry (if I were
forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.
“All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.
“There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of
dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is
satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second
kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip
it to form.
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a
love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to
find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its
thought and the thought has found the words.
“........ the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work.”
IX. “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL”
_How about being a good Greek, for instance?
That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year._
Some readers,[12] no doubt, were surprised when the poet told them in
his last book, _New Hampshire_:
I may as well confess myself the author
Of several books against the world in general.
There had been no protest, no satire, no revolt to be noticed in his
poetry. On the contrary, here was quietude, good humor and a certain
manly acceptance of circumstance. Yet this author who never whines,
who never seems savagely to resent the present state of affairs, this
author considers himself to have been writing against the world in
general! The surprise was salutary, for the shock directed attention to
the implications of Frost’s confession, the implications of his poetry
_in toto_, and a study of these implications will lead to the quite
sudden realization that the purest classical poet of America today is
Robert Frost.
With Frost in the field as a classicist, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,
conspicuous rivals for the title, begin to look like something else.
Eliot’s poetry, for example, has romantic elements: his sentimental
melancholy and wistfulness, the dandyism and obfuscation that cut him
off from a more general appeal. Pound likewise seems to be hewing no
closer to a norm of thought, feeling and conduct: he does not appear
to be making a bridge from the special to the general experience,
to be achieving the “grandeur of generality”: he is given up to the
irritations and discomforts of a sensitive person. Yet a romanticist
tinge does not make a romanticist and _au fond_ Eliot and Pound are
nearer to classicism than they are to romanticism. Still there is an
important difference in kind between them and Robert Frost.
It is this: Pound and Eliot are in the main loyal to the principle of
authority, whereas Frost depends entirely upon personal discovery.
Pound and Eliot give allegiance to literary tradition as a governing
body, seeking only to produce work that, while molded by tradition,
still has sufficient novelty of conception and style to alter somewhat
the existing body of letters. Frost is unconcerned with such a theory
of dictatorship, adjustment and modification: he does not set up a
literary authority to serve. Like the intelligent Greek, he is simply
by nature rather positive, critical and experimental. If he manifests
the classical virtues, if he achieves a nature, an imitation of it, a
probability and a decorum which can suggest those cultivated by the
classical world, it is because he has discovered them in, through and
by his own direct experience. In comparison with him, Eliot and Pound
appear formalistic, and the distinction between them and Frost is the
distinction between neo-classicism and classicism.
It is important to see that the classicism of Robert Frost has been
evolved in a simplified world, the world of the New England farmer.
Such a farmer has a settled routine of living dependent upon the
seasons. He leads a village life in which most of the human factors
at work have the appearance of being tangible and measurable. The
intricacies of commerce and industry, the distress wrought by machines,
the flow of vast crowds, the diversity of appeals of a great city, do
not reach him. Churches are what they were, intellectual currents do
not disturb, and science, arch-upsetter of former values, finds no
opening to intrude. Frost tells of a hugger-mugger farmer who burnt his
house in order to buy a telescope with the insurance money. He gazed
with an unspoiled wonder at the heavens. But for science at large the
attitude is indifference.
“You hear those hound-dogs sing on Moosilauke?
Well, they remind me of the hue and cry
We’ve heard against the Mid-Victorians
And never rightly understood till Bryan
Retired from politics and joined the chorus.
The matter with the Mid-Victorians
Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”
“Go ’long,” I said to him, he to his horse.
In Frost’s New England then many of the complex tormenting questions
that have arisen since the small city and agrarian communities of old
Greece have been lopped away from the problem of living.
“Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”
With this simplified world given, Frost has built his art, as
was pointed out in the preceding chapter, upon the foundation of
observation, and it is by positive and critical observation of things
conceived as discrete that Frost has discovered his Nature.
The end reached by observation as a method, whether it is a poet or a
scientist who employs it, is dualism,--that is, a set of axioms and
laws founded on distinctions. The distinctions are based on appearances
and both they and appearances are treated as reasonably final data.
Of course, something inscrutable remains beyond, “something must be
left to God,” as Frost says, but the fundamental truth or error of
dualism is not plumbed. At any rate, whether or not the real world is
dualistic, certainly the apparent world is.
So in Frost’s poetry we are consistently struck by his acceptance of
the dualistic world and his actual contentment with his lot of joy
and love “dashed with pain and weariness and fault.” Nature we feel
as a sort of friendly antagonist, dangerously strong sometimes, but
on the whole a fair opponent. In combat with her one cannot laze or
cheat: but honest struggle brings fair returns. Especially is the
line between Nature and Man always present in Frost’s mind, though
never insisted upon. For example, he spends no time dilating on the
aloofness or indifference of nature to man. Such a poem as _The Need
for Being Versed in Country Things_ illustrates very well the sense
of demarcation between man and nature which Frost preserves, his
acceptance of nature as lovely and fair, and his awareness of her
unconcern for man’s disasters. In this poem we hear of the burning of a
farmhouse and the decay of its barn. The birds nest in the latter.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
Frost’s poetry contains no taint of the “pathetic fallacy” of the
romanticist which in these days is almost sufficient ground for
suspecting Frost’s classical tendencies.
The man that Frost treats is situated in a tamed wilderness and is
disciplined by it. In New Hampshire the mountains are not high enough,
there is nothing extravagant or unduly wild about nature, nor are the
people of Frost’s poems grandiose or expansive. Their bodies have been
contracted and hardened by sweating toil, their emotions are rock-like,
and their minds achieve a good dogged horse sense.
For art’s sake one could wish them worse
Rather than better. How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?
There is the pinch from which our only outcry
In literature to date is heard to come.
We get what little misery we can
Out of not having cause for misery.
It makes the guild of novel writers sick
To be expected to be Dostoievskis
On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.
* * * * *
It’s Pollyanna now or death.
This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;
And very sensible. No state can build
A literature that shall at once be sound
And sad on a foundation of well-being.
Out of a settled social framework, an honest necessary struggle
for existence, and a fair amount of well-being, something like a
representative man can emerge. There are balances and checks to trim
down his uniqueness while at the same time there is permitted a
moderate scope for his emotional and reflective life. In such a state
the acquisitive impulse gets no favoring head start and instead of
haste we find reticence and deliberation characteristic.
Thus Frost discovers what Professor Irving Babbitt would call a sound
model for imitation. Professor Babbitt has labored to show that
imitation as the ancients understood it was a fresh and imaginative
process. It is just so with Robert Frost. His choice of words, his
rhymes, always escape the commonplace: we are awakened by the exact
perceptions of a new discoverer. But the more important point is that
this stirring-up is followed by a conviction of the naturalness or the
obviousness of Frost’s statements. Why, we murmur, has this not been
said before? Again we are repeating Poe’s useful test question for the
workings of the imagination.
One cannot be certain just what content the term, the imagination,
contains today. Modern psychology has cleared away some of the rank
underbrush which has cluttered our view of the imagination, though
it has planted other bushes to confuse us at the same time: but at
least we habitually distinguish imagination from fancy. Perhaps by
pure imagination we mean something not far from a total sweeping
flash-like view taken by a human being at unusual moments. At any
rate Frost’s imagination is based on the view of a man who is using
_more_ of his equipment than most of the moderns do. The meaning is
simply that Frost does not seem to write almost exclusively from
one of three centers,--from the intellect or the emotions or the
instinctive center,--but from a sort of rude partnership of all three.
The conditions of his erstwhile livelihood (farming) brought into
at least partially coördinated play his body and his emotions, and
in addition he is capable of thought. In this growth he is again a
parallel, though distant, to the ancient writers, and gives a start to
the speculation as to how far the conditions of modern mechanized life
throw into disuse portions of the necessary equipment of a fully aware
human being. Certainly, Frost’s lines give one more of an impression
that a whole man is writing them than do the sharply intellectualized
or bubbling emotional lines of most of his contemporaries.
The moot interpretation in the doctrine of imitation has always
been the meaning to be attached to universals. One may rightly be
skeptical as to the coincidence of the views of the idealists with the
original meaning of Aristotle. But whether Aristotle is interpreted
idealistically or not, Frost’s use of universals arising from a welter
of particulars is covered in the minimum definition that could be
offered. His poems, _Mending Wall_ and _The Grindstone_, are prime
examples: in these poems the particulars are vividly and concretely
seen and they can stand the most rigid literal interpretation. Yet no
less present and vivid in them is a wider significance or rather there
are wider significances. Thus, among other things conveyed in _The
Grindstone_, we are deeply aware that a sense of the inertia of nature
has been induced. We are aware of the aching strain of making nature
malleable and the tear and wear made on the straining human being
by time. For readers of Frost it is not necessary to add that this
creation of universal significance is accomplished directly without an
atom of didacticism.
Although the doctrines of nature and imitation as exemplified in the
works of Robert Frost have been so briefly dwelt upon, does it seem
requisite to develop the contiguous statement that Frost is an observer
of the law of probability and the law of measure or proportion or
decorum? It is simply stating an easily recognizable fact which any
reader may verify by going through Frost’s writings that it is the
probable sequence and not the improbable but possible sequence that
he develops. He is a poet of the customary in man and nature, not the
exploiter of the remarkably arresting and wonderful. Nor does his
feeling for decorous proportion require argument beyond saying that
he does not commit the mistake of the neo-classicists who have been
properly accused by Professor Babbitt of confusing the language of the
nobility with the nobility of language. Frost’s people are humble, but
they speak a language and utter feelings appropriate to them: they are
restrained by conventions which are inherently worthy of respect, and
the result is decorum in the true sense.
The study of these considerations should explain why Frost declares
that he has written several books against the world in general. For
since Rousseau romanticism has been in the ascendency. A new conception
of nature as impulse and temperament has supplanted the old nature as
a strict model, a “return to nature” has come to mean “letting one’s
self go.” For imitation has been substituted the self-expression of
the spontaneous original genius, for the law of probabilities has
been exchanged the law of wonderful possibilities, and for decorum we
have the doctrine of expansiveness. Science has abetted the growth
of naturalistic emotionalism, and neither humanism nor religion has
been able to stop the tide of writing designed for the expression of
uniqueness rather than of generality.
Against this efflorescence of the interior world, the neo-classicists
have striven in vain, for their position does not rest solidly enough
upon experience and personal discovery. They have been debilitated by
the blight of Scaliger’s rhetorical question, why imitate nature when
Virgil is a second nature?
Frost however quietly takes his place beside the antique Greeks and
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.