Part 4
He had come into his own, so far as eminence counts. In 1916 he was Phi Beta Kappa poet at one of the colleges he had neglected to graduate from, and he read at Harvard for the occasion the poem called _The Axe-Helve_. Since then there has been a shower of honors. In the early part of 1922 he was elected an honorary member of the International P.E.N. Club in the company of Thomas Hardy, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, Selma Lagerlof, and others of western world fame. This international honor was seconded in the same year by the local action of the Women’s Clubs of Vermont in conferring on him the title of Poet Laureate of that state. Very quickly, too, his work has been incorporated in the English literature courses of foreign universities: at the Sorbonne study of Robert Frost’s books is a requirement in the English teacher’s course and from the University of Montpellier, Jean Catel has written, “We are going to study Frost as a poet together with such recognized writers as Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, etc.” Lately critical estimates of his poetry have appeared in Italy.
But Robert Frost was not to be hurried. _Mountain Interval_ came out in 1916 and absorbed most of the balance of his unpublished poems. Then a wait until 1923 when a _Selected Poems_ was brought out, and then _New Hampshire_, the first new book in seven years. It is now four years since _New Hampshire_ and Frost is still unwilling to release another collection. “In a year or two I suppose I’ll have another book ready,” he says.
The tables have been changed since Derry days, but he continues the 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.