Books: The Muse

COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT FROST— Holt ($5), Blue Ribbon*($1.69).

COLLECTED POEMS—Robert Graves—Random House ($2.50).

From Homer on, hardly a serious poet has been without a guardian conscience which he called his Muse. To the Greek poets, the Muses were goddesses who led a life apart from the bullheaded and goatish gods but were, like them, bland absentees. After paganism, when Christianity started trying to hatch out a more personal and better world, the Muse turned from goddess to angel—like Dante’s Beatrice, who spoke to him from heaven. But with the Renaissance, poets found their angels nearer home and less angelic: in Elizabethan times, on the streets and in the Court; in the 18th Century, in the boudoir or the salon; among the Romantics, anywhere outdoors. But whether divine, semi-divine or human, the Muse was always a woman.

The Muse of Robert Frost, No. i of living U. S, poets, has been his wife. Since her death, a year ago, he has gathered practically all his published poetry (about a third of what he has written) in his Collected Poems. In the book’s characteristically half-evasive, half-outspoken foreword, The Figure a Poem Makes, Frost says: “It [a poem] begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.” Frost’s book begins in knowledge and ends in perplexity; but the figure it makes is Frost himself.

Robert Lee Frost, a ninth-generation New Englander (whose Yankee father expressed his Southern sympathies by naming his son after General Robert E. Lee), was born in San Francisco, where his father had become embroiled in politics, in 1875. After his father’s death, his schoolteacher mother moved the family back to New England. Frost went to high school in Lawrence, Mass. At school, a passage in Virgil’s Georgics suddenly made him understand what it was to be a poet. He began to write; but meanwhile, after Dartmouth proved too academic for him, he set out to make his living in a Lawrence mill.

When he was 20 he married Elinor Miriam White and two years later entered Harvard for a final wrestle with culture. Two years were enough; he quit and began to teach. He also made shoes, edited a weekly paper (the Lawrence, Mass. Sentinel), finally became a farmer.

For eleven years he and his wife lived in Derry, N. H. in almost complete isolation. Four children were born and he wrote constantly, but except for a few poems printed in the (now defunct) Independent, a religious weekly, none of his poetry was published. He scraped a barer and barer living from his farm. But meanwhile he was writing his intensest poetry. This intensity was the natural consequence of living face to face, side by side with a living Muse:

*Omits Frost’s foreword.

I left you in the morning,

And in the morning glow,

You walked a way beside me

To make me sad to go.

Do you know me in the gloaming,

Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?

Are you dumb because you know me

not, Or dumb because you know?

Almost all of Frost’s earlier poems were attempts to make himself more completely known to this womanly presence who was his chosen judge. But never once did his wife give his poems a word of praise, though she knew them like the palm of her hand. Frost’s early poems read like invocations of a conscience which, if it left him, would leave him lost—yet whose presence made every day, however perfect, a judgment day. But even these early poems show Frost almost as willing to play hide-&-seek with judgment as to face it.

We make ourselves a place apart Behind light words that tease and flout, But oh, the agitated heart Till someone find us really out.

At the end of this period—when his farm finally sank under him, Frost took to schoolteaching again — the Frosts thought of moving into even deeper isolation, considered going to Vancouver. At this juncture Mrs. Frost made the only romantic remark her husband ever heard her make: “Let’s go to England and live under thatch.” Frost sold his farm and the family sailed for England in September 1912. There, in a thatched cottage in Beaconsfield, he began to associate with literary professionals (Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Edward Thomas). In England he published his first book of poems, A Boy’s Will (1913).

A Boy’s Will, containing several of the best lyrics in U. S. literature, attracted some attention. A year later he published North of Boston, a “book of people” so full of New England scenery and New England tones of voice that even foreigners could get the lay of the landscape and the hang of its inhabitants. His U. S. reputation thus established by his English success, when Frost returned to the U. S. in 1915 he found himself regarded as a famed American poet. In the next 22 years he received honorary degrees from 13 colleges, was thrice awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

He became Poet in Residence successively at Amherst, University of Michigan and Harvard. Crowds turned out, as they still do, to hear his lectures and readings of his own poetry. In a creaking, cranky voice as of one grinding his own poetic ax, and with the mannerisms of a Yankee hired man who knows more than he lets on and somewhat despises his boss for knowing less, he dropped hints that poetry was the most important thing in the world. Then he would read from his own poems, as evidence.

The theme of Robert Lee Frost’s life is a conflict between staying and going. Staying, for him, has meant standing by a poetic conscience such as has been given to few American poets—in complete disregard of any lesser audience. Going has meant playing the artist more than the man—and winning a public success which he never intended and partly distrusts. Frost did most of his staying in his first three books (A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval)—and his later books contain many poems that testify to his ability to stay. But he has written many poems about going, too—poems that unsay the unspoken contract between him and his Muse:

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

As they wear onward, Frost’s Collected Poems show an increasing self-complacence of poetic purpose: from the initial effort to write true things acceptable to his Muse to writing good things acceptable to himself—no small achievement, since Frost is a hard man to please. As the craftiest artist among American poets, he has attracted an audience who like his poems’ sound and sense—without quite knowing which is which. Sometimes Frost seems to strike a perfect balance, as in his famous Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop -without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

In this perfect anthology-piece the autobiographical sense of the word “promises” is more theatrical than sincere: the only real promise that Frost has ever tried to keep has been to be himself.

Harvest time in Frost’s career as an artist was New Hampshire—his fattest book and one that contains almost all his characteristic art-forms: a long conversation piece, aphoristic verses, autobiographical riddles, lyrics, blank-verse “novels”—all written in words of archaic clarity and rasping directness. Frost’s later books (West-running Brook, A Further Range) are aftermath. In them the poet goes over & over his familiar field, gleaning it with unhurried but anxious care. He has always been able to count on picking up proverbial lines almost as good as his famous: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in”—or “Good fences make good neighbors.” Sometimes he regains the tenderness of earlier days, but in tones grown halting and husky with experience:

MOON COMPASSES

I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause

Between two downpours to see what there was.

And a masked moon had spread down compass rays

To a cone mountainin the midnight haze,

As if the final estimate were hers;

And as it measured in her calipers

The mountain stood exalted in its place.

So love will take between the hands a face . . .

And Frost has learned to state his case with almost perfect simplicity :

TREE AT MY WINDOW Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the

ground,

And thing next most diffuse to cloud, Not all your light tongues talking aloud Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and

tossed,

And if you have seen me when I slept, You have seen me when I was taken

and swept And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with

outer, Mine with inner, weather.

His Yankee humor is as self-contained as ever, but as a social or political commentator he tends to carp and crack like General Smedley D. Butler, whom he fleetingly resembles. Otherwise Frost, at 64, resembles nobody but himself: a grey, wonderfully good and faintly rascally poet whose Muse is dead, a man with no particular place to go, no particular place to stay, and one always occupied with the complicated task of simply being sincere.

What Robert Frost began with, Robert Graves has spent his life arriving at. Having dug for poetry for 25 years, he has now published his findings in Collected Poems. The book, to its author, represents “a struggle: the struggle to be a poet in more than a literary sense.”

That struggle has been going on since before the War. Graves published his first book of poems (Over the Brazier) in 1916, when he was serving (he was thrice wounded) as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers in France. In the next ten years he wrote ten books of poems — most of which greatly pleased the public as well as the critics, but little of which pleased him. His Collected Poems contains hardly 15% of his published work. Having failed to learn poetry (to his own satisfaction) by writing poems, he took to writing books of poetic science (On English Poetry, Poetic Unreason, Another Future of Poetry, Contemporary Techniques of Poetry). “My essays on the psychology of poems,” says Graves, “gained wide currency and have done corresponding mischief.” At the end of his blind alley Graves met Laura Riding (TIME, Dec. 26), with whom he has worked in close association ever since:

His early poems are the attempts of a violent and clumsy aristocrat to assume the traditional humility and grace of English poetry. The effect was bizarre, picturesque and, to those who were blind to the tragic earnestness of the effort, piquant:

Love without hope, as when the young

birdcatcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s

own daughter,

So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.

Not many of Graves’s early poems are so innocently hopeless. Most of them show, beneath their expertly simple surfaces, an uglier and uglier realization of personal stalemate. Graves’s pre-1926 poems, widely acclaimed as charming effusions of honest 20th-century innocence, are crawling with gargoyles—the guardian devils of violence, clumsiness, goatishness which Graves was stroking with one hand and trying to drive off with the other.

Since his meeting with Laura Riding, Graves has put both hands to the single work of “self-humbling honesty.” His charming and candid autobiography (Goodbye to All That) and his honestly wrought and best-selling historical novels (I, Claudius, etc.) have been turned out with heavy labor but left-handed facility. His right-handed energies have gone into writing poems that give traditional key words of English poetry a new lease of sense. Frequently denounced as a literary renegade for renouncing the picturesque dishonesties of his earlier work, Graves frequently falls, in his Collected Poems, into picturesque denunciations of the world of his denouncers. But his best later poems are the increasingly untainted work of one who is finishing up with disowning his own evil, and has well begun on owning his own good.

The climate of thought has seldom been

described.

It is no terror of Caucasian frost, Nor yet that brooding Hindu heat For which a loin-rag and a dish of rice Suffice until the pestilent monsoon. But, without winter, blood would run

too thin; Or, without summer, fires would burn

too long. In thought the seasons run concurrently.

Thought has a sea to gaze,not voyage on;

And hills, to rough the edge of the bland sky,

Not to be climbed in search of blander prospect;

Few birds, sufficient for such caterpillars

As are not fated to turn butterflies;

Few butterflies, sufficient for the flowers

That are the luxury of a full orchard;

Wind, sometimes, in the evening chimney’s; rain

On the early morning roof, on sleepy sight;

Snow streaked upon the hilltop, feeding

The fond brook at the valley-head

That greens the valley and that parts the lips;

The sun, simple, like a country neighbour;

The moon, grand, not fanciful with clouds.