Part 5
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.”
The situation has taken form at once: Asa Gorrill, the queer hermit, 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.