Part 6
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.
There are certain all-important questions which only the greatest literature raises and attempts to answer, and these questions it is not appropriate to ask of every poet. Frost makes no pretense of great inclusiveness and great profundities. The canniness of good sense forbids such rash over-reachings of one’s self. But what we have always a right to demand is that the poet should be skilled in his craft, alive in his sensibility, and at least sensible in his conclusions. Robert Frost is all of these, and to those questions that it is proper to ask of him, those questions, that is, that are covered in his own experience, he returns always an answer in true currency equal to the demand.
His comprehensive answer is the _natural_ (not romantic and not religious) vision of life, and it is natural in the sense that it is fitting to man _as he is_. “The poetry of a true real natural vision of life,” said Goethe, “demands descriptive power of the highest degree, rendering a poet’s pictures so life-like that they become actualities to every reader,” and that is what Robert Frost, man of good sense and fine sensibility, has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the long and noble course of American literature.
APPENDIX A
SELECTED BRITISH OPINION ON ROBERT FROST
The following quotations are taken from a little leaflet distributed by David Nutt. Historically, the leaflet is interesting for showing the quick captivation of English critics by _North of Boston_. But more than that, the English writers appear to have succeeded better in stating the emotional character of Frost’s verse than the Americans who have undertaken the same task.--G. B. M.
* * * * *
... A unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of compression and more lightness, unity and breadth. The language ranges from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack of violence make the unaffected verses look like prose, except that the sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as _The Death of the Hired Man_, _Home Burial_, _The Black Cottage_, and _The Wood Pile_, do we realize that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious tenderness.--_The English Review._
* * * * *
... To start with, Mr. Frost is an American poet who noticeably stands out against tradition.... We find very little of the traditional manner of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work; scarcely anything, indeed, save a peculiar adaption, in his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse.... It elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation does. It is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words--to put them, that is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected virtue comes out of them; it is, in fact, poetry composed, as far as possible, in a language of things.... We have heard a great deal lately of the desirability of getting back again into touch with the living vigors of speech. This usually means matters of vocabulary and idiom; and Mr. Frost certainly makes a racy use of New England vernacular. But he goes further; he seems trying to capture and hold within metrical patterns the very tones of speech--the rise and fall, the stressed pauses and little hurries, of spoken language. The kind of metrical modulation to which we are most accustomed--the modulations intended for decorations or purely esthetic expressiveness--will scarcely be found in his verses. But, instead, we have some novel inflections of metre which can only be designed to reproduce in verse form the actual shape of the sound of whole sentences. As a matter of technique, the attempt is extraordinarily interesting.... Naturally, this technical preoccupation bears strongly on the general form of Mr. Frost’s poetry. He uses almost entirely dialogue or soliloquy; he must have somebody talking. We might call these poems psychological idylls. Within their downright knowledge, their vivid observation, and (more important) their rich enjoyment of all kinds of practical life, within their careful rendering into metre of customary speech, the impulse is always psychological--to set up, in some significant attitude, a character or a conflict of characters. The ability to do this can turn a situation which is not very interesting at first into something attractive, as when a rather protracted discourse of two distant relations on genealogy gradually merges into a shy, charming conversation of lovers; or, in a more striking instance, when the rambling speech of an overtasked farmer’s wife works up into a dreadful suggestion of inherited lunacy. If, as we have said, we cannot quarrel with this deliberate method of exposition, it can scarcely be questioned that Mr. Frost is at his best when he can dispense with these structural preliminaries as in the admirable soliloquy of a farmer mending his wall, or in the exquisite comedy of the professor sharing his bedroom with a talkative newspaper-agent, or in the stark, formidable tragedy called _Home Burial_. Though it is difficult to state absolutely the essential quality of Mr. Frost’s poetry, it is not difficult to suggest a comparison. When poetry changes by development rather than by rebellion, it is likely to return on itself. Poetry in Mr. Frost exhibits almost the identical desires and impulses we see in the “bucolic” poems of Theocritus.--_The Nation._
* * * * *
... There is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the least suggesting that Mr. Frost should write vers libre; I am only saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman--But Mr. Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground, and much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman gave the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It is another form of the New England conscience.... He does give you a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of wildnesses--of an America that really matters far more than the land of endless trickery, make-believe, and lying and empty loquacity. That is the face that--Heaven knows why!--America seems to like to present to these parts of the world; but those are the least desirable features. Anyhow, Mr. Frost has called in on us to redress the balance of that particular New World.... He is not a remains of English culture grown provincial and negligible. He is not, in fact, a sentimentalist. Not to be a sentimentalist is to be already half-way towards being a poet--and Mr. Frost goes the other half-way as well, though to describe what that other half is beats me. Here is the little poem--rhymed for a change--in which, as it were, he proffers his invitation to read _North of Boston_.
THE PASTURE
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away-- And wait to watch the water clear, I may; I shan’t be gone long--You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young He totters when she licks it with her tongue. I shan’t be gone long--You come too.
Why is that beautiful and friendly and touching and all sorts of things? I don’t know. I suppose, just because Mr. Frost is a poet.--Ford Madox Hueffer in _The Outlook_.
* * * * *
This is an original book which will raise the thrilling question, What is poetry?... Few that read it through will have been as much astonished by any American since Whitman.... He has trusted his conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply.... In his first book, _A Boy’s Will_, there is this piece, entitled _Mowing_:--
There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself: Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound,-- And that was why it whispered and did not speak. It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers (Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
Those last six lines do more to define Mr. Frost than anything I can say. He never will have “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf”: he can make fact “the sweetest dream.” Naturally, then, when his writing crystallizes, it is often in a terse, plain phrase, such as the proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” or--
Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build; From the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone;
or
Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.
But even this kind of characteristic detail is very much less important than the main result, which is a richly homely thing beyond the grasp of any power except poetry. It is a beautiful achievement, and I think a unique one, as perfectly Mr. Frost’s own as his vocabulary, the ordinary English speech of a man accustomed to poetry and philosophy, more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even in a letter, almost entirely lacking the emphatic hackneyed forms of journalists and other rhetoricians, and possessing a kind of healthy, natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats’.--Edward Thomas in _The New Weekly_.
* * * * *
In its quiet and unsensational way, Mr. Robert Frost’s _North of Boston_ is the most challenging book of verse that has been published for some time.... Mr. Frost has turned the living speech of men and women into poetry.... To me it seems that _Home Burial_ and _The Fear_ are the most absolute achievements in the book; but that may only be because they come nearest to the kind of thing I wish to see done in poetry; and the other pieces in the book all contain notable qualities, and qualities which have been too long absent from English verse. Mr. Frost has a keen, humorous sense of character.... Tales that might be mere anecdotes in the hands of another poet take on a universal significance, because of their native veracity and truth to local character.--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson in _The Bookman_.
APPENDIX B
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
BOOKS BY ROBERT FROST
_A Boy’s Will_. London: David Nutt. 1913
_North of Boston._ London: David Nutt. 1914
_North of Boston._ New York: Henry Holt. 1914
_A Boy’s Will._ New York: Henry Holt. 1915
_Mountain Interval._ New York: Henry Holt. 1916
_Selected Poems._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923
_New Hampshire._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923
PRINCIPAL ESSAYS ON ROBERT FROST
Amy Lowell: _Robert Frost_ in _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_.
Waldo Frank: pages 158-162 in _Our America_.
Louis Untermeyer: _Robert Frost_ in _A New Era in American Poetry_.
Edward Garnett: _Robert Frost_ in _Friday Nights_.
Clement Wood: _Robert Frost_ in _Poets of America_.
Llewellyn Jones: _Robert Frost_ in _First Impressions_.
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: _Robert Frost_ in _Fire Under the Andes_.
Percy H. Boynton: _Robert Frost_ in _English Journal_, Oct., 1922.
G. R. Elliott: _The Neighborliness of Robert Frost_ in the _Nation_, vol. cix, p. 713-715.
Carl Van Doren: _Quintessence and Subsoil_ in the _Century_, February, 1923.
John Freeman: _Frost_ in the _London Mercury_, vol. xiii, pages 176-187.
Charles Cestre: _Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson_ in _Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine_, vol. xiv, pages 363-388.
Jean Catel: _La Poesie americaine d’aujourd’hui_ in the _Mercure de France_, March 15, 1920.
Albert Feuillerat: _Robert Frost_ in _Revue des Deux Mondes_, tome xvii, pages 185-210.
APPENDIX C
ROBERT FROST ON EDUCATION
The following extracts are from a talk which Robert Frost gave at Wesleyan University in December, 1926. They were taken down in shorthand by a reporter for the _New Student_ and thus preserve the exact verbal flavor of Frost’s conversation as well as the best direct statement of his educational aim that I have encountered.--G. B. M.
“The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have. That is much harder than anything else in the world to get--it’s the freedom of my material. You might define a school boy as one who could recite to you, if you started him talking, everything he read last night, in the order in which he read it. That’s a school boy. That’s just the opposite of what I mean by a free person. The person who has the freedom of his material is the person who puts two and two together, and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time, and brought together. One little thing mentioned, perhaps, reminds him of something he couldn’t have thought of for twenty years. That’s the kind of talk I’d rather give.
“I’d rather be perfectly free of my material--reach down here in time and off there in space, and here’s my two and two put together. Here’s my idea, my thought. That’s the freedom I’d like to give.
“It depends so much on the disconnection of things. There’s too much sequence and logic all the time, of reciting what we learned over night. There’s an attempt in the honor courses to get toward what I mean. I don’t know what the honor courses will do toward it.
“I think what I’m after is free meditation. I don’t think anybody gets to it when he’s in anybody’s company--only when his soul’s alone. I do it when I wake up in the morning, when I’m starting an idea, and restarting. Sleep is probably a symbol of the interruption, the disconnection that I want in life. Your whole life can be so logical that it seems to me like a ball of hairs in the stomach of an angora cat. It should be broken up and interrupted, and then be brought together by likeness, free likeness.
“You might ask me this question: how am I going to find time? I would so run a course by self-withdrawal. I would begin a course by being very present, and then slowly disappear. A sort of vanishing act. I’d rather melt away just as I stood there, and leave a fellow more and more alone, and let him feel deserted, like a baby in a room alone.
“I know a good story, with a man’s name. I don’t mind using names. A fellow named Conrad Aiken, one of our very best poets, though not one of our most read, was once told in school to interpret something from some French dramatist. He went home and got so much interested in doing it that he didn’t come back to class for three weeks, but by that time he had the whole play done in verse. He was sent to the office, on the matter of cuts. He ran away on that. He came back afterwards to please an uncle, he told me. We always pleased our uncles. Is that freedom to do more than you ought to? He’d done more than a man might be asked to do in his whole college course. If a man did that for me, I’d give him A in every course.”
INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 65, 81
_Academy_, 64
_Alastor_, 29
Amherst, 73, 75, 81
Anderson, Sherwood, 110
Aristotle, 107
_Arms and the Man_, 54
_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 58, 66, 70
_Axe-Helve, The_, 72
Babbitt, Irving, 34, 106, 109, 111, 112
Bartlett, John, 40, 51, 57, 59
Baseball, interest in, 56
Beerbohm, Max, 60
Bennett, Arnold, 60
_Black Cottage_, 39, 80
_Blueberries, The_, 90
“Bobbie,” the London, 61
_Bottle Imp, The_, 53
_Boy’s Will, A_, 18, 30, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 80, 113
Bridges, Robert, 74
Broadsheets, autographed, 82
Brooks, Van Wyck, 72, 111
Bryant, W. Cullen, 29
Buckley, blind boss, 26
_Bulletin_, 22
Burton, Pres. of Univ. of Michigan, 74
Cadwalla, Bertha, 13
Canfield, Dorothy, 73
Cannan, Gilbert, 61
Cannéll, Skipwith, 80
Carpenter, E., 60
Catel, Jean, 73
_Century, The_, 58, 83
Chapin, James, 70 note
Chesterton, G. K., 60
Chicken farm, 25
College, 32, 34, 72, 75
Colum, Padraic, 81
Columnist, 33
_Comus_, 47
Conrad, Joseph, 60
Convention talks, 48
_Country of the Blind, The_, 53
Cox, Sidney, 51 _et seq._, 57
_Critic_, 46
Dartmouth, 32, 75
_Death of the Hired Man, The_, 80, 94
Derry, 36 _et seq._
_Dial, The_, 76
Dreiser, Theodore, 110
_Dr. Faustus_, 47
Du Chêne, Aroldo, 83
_Eclogues_, 80
Eliot, T. S., 100, 101
England, trip to, 60 _et seq._
_English Review_, 61
_Emile_, 52
_Endymion_, 29
Farming, 36, 38, 65, 73
_Fear_, 94
Fellowship at Michigan University, 74
_Fire Under the Andes_, 79, 80, 82, 83
_First Impressions_, 71
Flint, F. S., 63
Football, interest in, 43
Ford, Ford Madox, 61
Forst, 11
_Forum, The_, 58
France, Anatole, 72
Frank, Waldo, 71, 72, 86
_Friday Nights_, 70
Frost, Bertha, 15
Frost, Carol, 38, 82
Frost, Elinor Bettina, 38
Frost, Elliott, 36
_Frost Genealogy in Five Families_, 15
Frost, Henry, 12
Frost, Irma, 38, 82
Frost, John, 17
Frost, Lesley, 36, 38, 82
Frost, Lt. Wm., 17
Frost, Major Charles, 13, 15, 16, 77
Frost, Marjorie, 38, 82
Frost, Nicholas, 13, 14
Frost’s Garrison House, 13
Galsworthy, John, 60
Garnett, Edward, 70, 71, 91, 93
George, Henry, 26, 78
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, 65, 66
Goethe, 93, 114
_Golden Room, The_, 66
Grahame, Cunninghame, 60
_Grindstone, The_, 107, 108
Hall, Charley, 35, 88
_Hamlet_, 80
Harcourt, Alfred, 81
Hardy, Thomas, 72
Harvard, 34, 72
_Heretics_, 51
Holt, Henry and Co., 69, 81
Holt, Mrs., 66
_House-Keeper, The_, 80
Howe, Mark de Wolfe, 58
Hudson, W. H., 60
Hueffer, Ford Madox, 61
Hulme, T. E., 65
_Independent, The_, 30
International P.E.N. Club, 72
_Into My Own_, 28
James, Henry, 61
Jones, Llewellyn, 71, 89, 113
_Jumping Frog, The_, 53
Lagerlof, Selma, 72
_Land of Heart’s Desire, The_, 47
Lanier, Sidney, 30
Lankes, J. J., 70 note, 83
Lawrence, D. H., 61
Lewis, Wyndham, 61
_Liberator, The_, 83
Lindsay, Vachel, 110
Literary formula, 48
Longfellow, H. W., 84
Lowell, Amy, 69, 71, 110
Mabie, Hamilton W., 59
Mackenzie, Compton, 61
MacVeagh, Lincoln, 81
_Masses, The_, 83
Masters, Edgar Lee, 110
Mencken, H. L., 111
_Mending Wall_, 107
Merriam, Rev. Charles, 39
Michigan University, 74, 75
Mill, worker in, 32
Montpellier University, 73
Moody, Isabelle, 22
More, Paul Elmer, 81, 111, 112
Morrison, Henry, 48
Mosher, Thomas Bird, 82
_Mountain Interval_, 70 note, 73
_Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe_, 53
Munro, Harold, Poetry Book-Shop, 63
_My Butterfly_, 30
_Need for Being Versed in Country Things_, 103
_New Age, The_, 61
_New Era in American Poetry, A_, 71
_New Hampshire_, 70 note, 73, 99
New Hampshire State Normal School, 51
_New Republic, The_, 69, 91
_North of Boston_, 15, 65, 69, 70
Nutt, David, 62, 63, 69
_Old Kittery and Her Families_, 13
O’Leary, Dan, 79
_Once by the Pacific_, 91
O’Neill, Eugene, 96
Oppenheim, James, 72
Orage, A. R., 61
_Our America_, 71
Pebble incident, 48
Pepperell, Sir William, 17
Phi Beta Kappa, 72
Pinkerton Academy, 36, 39, 40-51, 80
Plato’s _Republic_, 52
_Playboy of the Western World_, 54
Poe, Edgar A., 29, 106
Poet Laureate, 72
_Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_, 60, 70 note
_Poets of America_, Politics, 25
Pound, Ezra, 31, 59, 61, 63, 64, 80, 100, 101
Princeton, 81
Production of plays, 47, 54
Pulitzer Prize, 70 note
Quarter, the lost, 78
Reporting, 33
Revolvers in San Francisco, 23
Robinson, Edward A., 111
Rolland, Romain, 72
Rousseau, J. J., 109
_Runaway, The_, 90
Sandburg, Carl, 81, 110
San Francisco, 22, 77, 78
Santayana, G., 34
_Saturday Review of Literature_, 99
Scaliger’s rhetorical question, 110
_Scribner’s_, 58
Sergeant, Elizabeth S., 77, 79, 82, 83
_Selected Poems_, 70 note, 73
_Sentinel_, 33
_Seven Arts, The_, 72, 94
Sex hygiene, 53
Shaw, G. B., 60
Shoe-making, 33
Sill, Edward R., 29
Silver, Ernest L., 42, 51
_Sohrab and Rustum_, 53
Sorbonne, 72
South, tour through, 33
Spingarn, 110
Stackpole, Everett S., 13, 15
Stevens, Wallace, 34, 84
Storer, Joseph, 16
Swedenborgianism, 26, 32
Swinburne, A. C., 89
Teaching, 33, 40-51, 55, 73, 74
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, 71
Tennis, interest in, 56
Thomas, Edward, _Poems_, 67
_Times Literary Supplement_, 65
_Tom Brown’s School Days_, 29
_T. P.’s Weekly_, 61
_Trial by Existence, The_, 113
_Tuft of Flowers, The_, 80
Untermeyer, Louis, 71, 81
Valedictorian, 27, 28
Van Doren, Carl, 83
Vassar College, 81
Virgil, 34, 80
Ward, W. Hays, 30, 31
_Way Out, The_, 72, 94
Week-end party, 55, 56
Wells, H. G., 60
Wesleyan University, 75
White, Elinor, 27, 28, 32, 79
Williams, W. Carlos, 76
_Witch of Coos, The_, 70 note, 94
Wood, Clement, 71
_Youth’s Companion_, 58
FOOTNOTES