Books: A Lover’s Quarrel With the World

His face might have been carved out of a Vermont hillside (and may yet be carved into one). No man seemed more natively American. “The death of Robert Frost leaves a vacancy in the American spirit,” said President Kennedy. But ironically, Robert Frost was 40 years old, with his life nearly half over, before the people of the U.S. recognized him as a poet, and then they learned it from the British. For those 40 years, he was an isolated man. isolated physically on a bleak farm in New-England, isolated poetically as he slowly worked out his grindstone-plain style. Yet, as it falls to few men and almost never to poets, Robert Frost lived on to enjoy the plaudits and perquisites of immortality in his own lifetime.

At the 1960 presidential inauguration, blinking in the cold sunlight like Tiresias. the blind seer of old, he took a great bard’s ancient place beside the spiritual and temporal princes of his world. The voice, as it was whenever he “said” his verses, seemed far from poetic—dry, spare, matter-of-fact. But in the silence that followed any poem Frost spoke, an attentive listener was likely to find himself still a captive of its cadences. “The land was ours before we were the land’s …”

Chimes & Symbols. Like many another poet, Frost wrote his own epitaph:

I would have written of me on my

stone:

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Characteristically, his epitaph sounded simple and straightforward. Characteristically, too, it was not as simple as it seemed, but a kind of shorthand for the complexity that lay beneath.

By and large, his public ignored the Frost who quarreled with the world. They knew and praised instead the Frost who was a praiser of country things—the joy in swinging birches or treading leaves, the ornery bite of a grindstone against an ax blade, the road not taken, those woods lovely, dark and deep. For readers who like to shake a poem as children shake a piggy bank until the coin of meaning jingles out. Frost had pots of jingly messages. “Good fences make good neighbors.” he said, and many a listener never noticed that he contraposed this with: “Something there is that does not love a wall.”

And he could make the familiar small change of language chink and chime into high melody. His verse often seemed as easy to read as McGuffey’s Reader, but it contained universalities that obscure symbolists rarely attempt. In a time when despair is popular. Frost was grimly, gallantly optimistic. He saw man as a rider, “Mounted bareback on the earth … his small fist buried in the bushy hide”: But though it runs unbridled off its

course, And all our blandishments would seem

defied, We have ideas yet that we haven’t tried.

Farmyard Logic. Just as Americans buy Christmas cards of New England churches on village greens they have never seen. Frost spoke to something ancestral (and perhaps vanishing) in the American spirit —the rugged self-reliance of the frontier. Frost seemed a throwback to an earlier time when philosophical and social questions could be handily submitted to farmyard logic. Just because of this, many latter-day critics who set the fashions regarded him slightingly—as a kind of James Whitcomb Riley with muscles. Intellectuals today tend to look on the age of anxiety as an urban affair, a unique fix man has just now got himself into. Frost’s genial parsing of the components of the world in terms of bears and blueberrying, they feel, just won’t do. Yet they are aware of another Frost, the Frost of that small, chilling masterpiece called Design, which offers a vision, in miniature, of active malevolence in the world. After finding a moth killed by a white spider lying in wait and masked by a white flower that usually is blue. Frost asks:

What had the flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent healall?

What brought the kindred spider to that height

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—If design govern in a thing so small*

Frost’s poetry offers a continual, often contradictory questioning of, mulling over, joking about, Frost’s (and man’s) place in the world and what can or cannot be known (and done) about it. Heroic pronouncements, grandiose, soul-satisfying finalities, were not his style. “There may be much or little beyond the grave.” he wrote. “But the strong are saying nothing until they see.” Survival for the individual, he felt, was a difficult job. a thing to be handled alone and with prudence. If he himself, like the woodchuck, lasts:

It will be because, though small As measured against the All, I have been so instinctively thorough About my crevice and burrow.

Frost believed that the fix man finds himself in, whatever it is, is not something new, or something to whine about, or something that is likely to change.

Poems by Lamplight. Frost was so completely a part of the present-day life of America that it was often hard to realize that he had been born during the Administration of Ulysses S. Grant. Another paradox: this professional Yankee was born in San Francisco, the son of a transplanted New England editor-politician. But his father died when Frost was eleven, and his mother took him back to what was to become his native soil. He tried two colleges (Dartmouth, Harvard), and quit both. In the years that followed, he scrabbled out an existence on a New Hampshire farm, working the rocky soil and scratching out poems in the evening by lamplight. The experience shaped his poetry and his thinking, but failed to impress U.S. publishers. And in 1912, at the age of 38, he took a chance, sold the farm, sailed with his growing family for Britain. There he met Ezra Pound and was unawed, sold his first book, and three years later returned to the U.S. in triumph. In the long later years, he won the Pulitzer Prize four times, taught at Amherst and Dartmouth, was a familiar figure on the lecture circuit. He became a sort of traveling cracker-barrel sage who could produce an aphorism at the drop of a question. Asked his opinion of free verse, he said: “I would as soon play tennis without a net.” Asked whether literature was an escape, he snapped: “The weak think they are escaping; the strong think they are pursuing.” In his latter-day person as unofficial poet laureate, he journeyed to Russia and talked to Khrushchev, whom he pronounced “a grand old ruffian,” and added with characteristically evenhanded egotism: “We were charmed with each other. I could talk out to him, and he could talk out to me.”

A poet’s own generation cannot issue him a passport to immortality, even when it would like to. Robert Frost was no literary revolutionary, like Walt Whitman or T. S. Eliot. But he is more controlled and artful than Whitman, less narrowly contemporary than the early Eliot, wider-ranging than that fellow precisionist, Emily Dickinson. Some of these had strengths that were not his, as he had strengths that were not theirs. His own generation can only be sure that he belongs in high company.

* From Complete Poems of Robert Frost, copyrighted by Robert Frost and Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.