Books: Pawky Poet

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On the Vermont hills about Ripton, the red fires of autumn smoldered on the swamp maples and sumac, crept inward from branch tips, inched downward into the valley where the river brawls through the gorge. From a slab-wood cabin with its back set firmly against the valley’s shoulder, cooking his own meals and dependent on no man, 76-year-old Poet Robert Frost last week faced the world. It is the vantage point he likes best.

His Vermont neighbors take no special notice of the heavy-set man with the big head of unkempt white hair. Occasionally they meet him on a back-country road, trudging along with an oddly catlike grace, wearing an old blue denim jacket and blue sneakers. They recognize the heavy, big-knuckled hand shaped to axhelve and pitchfork, the heavy shoulders hunched to the swing of a scythe. Vermonters find nothing outlandish or alarming about Robert Frost.

Neither do U.S. readers, to most of whom the word “poet” still carries a faint suggestion of pale hands, purple passions and flowing ties. They understand what he writes—or understand enough of it to like what they understand. They find his dialogue poems as invigorating as a good argument, his lyrics as engaging, sometimes as magical, as Mother Goose. In a literary age so preoccupied with self-expression that it sometimes seems intent on making the reader feel stupid, Robert Frost has won him by treating him as an equal.

In short, Robert Frost is a popular poet. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times, has been showered with degrees and honors. In the U.S. his books have sold about 375,000 copies in all editions. Does that mean that he must be damned as a second-rate one? Says Frost philosophically: “Who knows what will survive? The limit of my ambition is to lodge a few pebbles where they will be hard to get rid of.”

Of living U.S. poets, none has lodged poems more surely where they will be hard to get rid of. At its best, Frost’s crabapple-tart verse distills into the pure liquor of lyric poetry. Stopping by Woods is one of the loveliest poems ever written. Every U.S. schoolboy knows Birches. His lines carry the tone and temper of New England’s dour and canny folk, often have the tren chancy and inevitability of folk sayings. Frost has made “good fences make good neighbors”* part of the language. Chores are “doing things over and over that just won’t stay done”; home is “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

But Frost is a poet with few disciples. Today’s bright young men look to the intricate, mannered, literary methods of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for their models. They grudgingly admire Frost as a kind of 19th Century relic, resent his commanding popularity, and smart under the reproach: “If Frost can make himself intelligible, why can’t you?”

The Road Less Traveled By. Robert Frost, a rugged individual from New England, is used to the road less traveled by; it was the road he picked for himself. Scrubbing his white hair with a thick hand and glaring amiably from fierce blue eyes, he says: “I want people to stand me off and I want to stand them off.”

Frost has been standing people off all his life—the family who wanted him to become a lawyer, the editor who wanted him to change his style, the scientists who told him man is an accident of atoms, the theologians who told him that man is in a hopeless fix.

Though Robert Frost’s paternal ancestors have been New Englanders for eight generations, the man who speaks with the voice of New England was born in exile—a continent’s width away in San Francisco.* His father, a brilliant, erratic rebel who graduated high in his class at Harvard, had run away from a law career to edit a San Francisco newspaper, and became a Republican-hating Democrat. Frost remembers his father as “a wild man” who gave him many a whipping, remembers eating many of his lunches in saloons while his father talked politics at the bar. Young Robert was nervous, could not sleep, suffered from biliousness and scrofula, was more often out of school than in. “I wasn’t considered a very good bet,” he says.

His mother, an orphaned immigrant from Scotland, was brought up by a wealthy uncle in Ohio. Well-educated and an earnest supporter of Henry George’s single tax (George was a close family friend), Isabella Frost tried to fill the gaps in her son’s erratic education, reading him poetry and Scottish history.

Hole in the Bucket. When he was eleven, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving the family penniless. His mother brought Robert and his sister (two years younger) back to New England. Grandfather Frost, an overseer in a Lawrence, Mass, woolen mill, received them without enthusiasm. “We were the hole in the bucket,” says Frost. His mother went to work teaching school, and young Robert trudged to high school in his grandfather’s cut-down suit. He worked in the mills, nailed shoes, helped farmers. He began to read Latin and Greek avidly, wrote his first poem (in blank verse, about Cortes in Mexico), played on the football team and tied for class honors with a girl named Elinor Miriam White.

While Elinor went to college, young Robert restlessly tried Dartmouth for a couple of months (“A great fellow for poking fun,” a classmate remembers), went back home, tried editing a weekly and wrote a column in the Lawrence Sun-American. He sold his first poem (My Butterfly) to the Independent, and a check for $20 arrived from New York along with a lady editor eager to take him back for lionizing. He refused to go. He was only 20, but even then he had learned when to stand people off.

Frost and Elinor White were married in 1895. A woman of competence and quiet charm, Elinor managed the money and her impractical husband, listened to his poems. Two years after their marriage,

Frost got his grandfather to send him to Harvard. He wanted to read more Latin and Greek, but the irritations of academic “busy work” exasperated him beyond his limited patience—an exasperation which has made his relations with the academic world both stimulating and stormy. He quit after two years. His grandfather bought him a farm in Deny, N.H. and turned him loose. For twelve years, while Elinor bore children,-Frost raised chickens, taught school, battled the grudging soil, fought back encroaching witch grass and sheep laurel. Working long after the children were in bed and the chores done, he slowly wrung out a lean, spare and personal idiom.

The poets who helped form the idiom spoke with classical tongues. He read Theocritus and Vergil, Horace and Catullus. (In any possible hereafter, says Frost, he would like most to dine with Theocritus). Keats and Shelley were uncongenially flowery. He learned the dramatic lyric from Browning, decided that what he wanted was “the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words.” He set himself such exercises as:

The cat is in the house.

I will put the cat out.

She will come back.

Then Frost would rewrite the sentences:

There’s that cat got in.

Out you go, you cat.

She’ll get right back.

The result was a deceptively artless poetry of common speech. But behind the apparent artlessness was a cracker-barrel Socrates with a sense of humor—a pawky humor that was partly serious when it seemed most irreverent, gently mocking when it seemed most grave.

Under Thatch. In 1912, Frost sold the farm and, partly because his wife confessed to a yen to “live under thatch,” and partly because living was cheap there, they sailed for England. At 38, he had never talked to another poet.

One night, sitting before the fire in the house they had taken near London, Frost sorted through his poems and arranged some of them into a rough order. He called it A Boy’s Will. To his astonishment, the first publisher he tried accepted the book. In literary London, dominated by William Butler Yeats’s misty grand manner and Ezra Pound’s staccato snatches, Frost’s cool voice was a refreshing contrast.

Ezra Pound could recognize an original talent. He tried to take over the newcomer, wined & dined him, tossed him fraternally over his head in a restaurant to demonstrate his prowess at jujitsu, invited him to join the sessions where Pound and other poets like Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle rewrote each other’s poetry. Pound tried rewriting a Frost verse, announced triumphantly, “Well, I’ve got you by four syllables. You did it in 53 and I got it down to 49.” Frost never even looked. “I’ll bet you’ve spoiled all my nice little rhymes,” he snorted, and fled London.

Among the thatched cottages of Dymock, Gloucestershire, Frost found himself more congenial company in a group of poets which included Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson and Edward Thomas. Thomas, who was soon to be killed in World War I, became his closest friend. In that country of slow streams, red marl and ancient orchards, Frost took his children picnicking, spent days tramping the country looking for flowers. Wilfrid Gibson records long evenings in his cottage, while Frost “kept on and on and on in his slow New England fashion . . . holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips.”

There Frost put together North of Boston. In its blank verse, the people of New England spoke and laughed and suffered. There was The Death of the Hired Man, as moving and compassionately humorous a story as there is in the English language ; the agonized Home Burial; the haunting pastoral The Mountain (“I ain’t braggin’ too hard, but it’s as good as I ever do,” says Frost); the local big man (“Though a great scholar, he’s a democrat,/ If not at heart, at least on principle”).

Lover’s Quarrel. In 1915, Frost returned to the U.S. broke, to find a U.S. edition of North of Boston just out and himself famous. He celebrated in characteristic fashion: he went to New Hampshire and bought a farm.

Amherst made him a full professor, and Frost began a long lover’s quarrel with education. Some consider him the greatest teacher they have ever known. He goaded students to “keep from knowing more than they knew how to think with,” tore into such sacred cows as science (“. . . we are sick with space./ Its contemplation makes us out as small/ As a brief epidemic of microbes”) and Platonism (“The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else’s bed”).

To the young, who want answers, he posed only questions. There was almost no theory that could not stand revision, he told them. “All truth is dialogue,” he insisted. “We were not given eyes or intellect . . . for wisdom that can have no counterwisdom.” He has mocked theorizing man as a caged bear who

. . . sits back on his fundamental butt

With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,

(He almost looks religious but he’s not), And back and forth he sways from cheek

to cheek,

At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,

At the other agreeing with another

Greek . . .

Laurels & Asteroids. If Robert Frost were just a poet of bucolic New England, he would be neither much noted nor long remembered. Frost is a humanist who has simply used New England for his materials. Like a woodsman, a good mechanic, a stonemason, who learn through their hands, Frost turns & turns his images lovingly. He explores and studies the implications of simple things. His apple-gulping cow becomes a homely image of all rebels. A snowstorm becomes a symbol of all the world’s perils, an oven bird a philosopher in a diminished world, a fallen tree the obstacles that all men face.

Courage, says Frost, is the human vir tue that counts most—courage to act on limited knowledge, courage to make the best of what is here and not whine for more: “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” Frost is something of a philosophical an archist. Liberals and reformers move him to sly mirth. He has no confidence that the earth can be improved through social action or scientific gimcrackery: “One can safely say after from six to thirty thou sand years of experience that the evident design is a situation here in which it will always be about equally hard to save your soul. Whatever progress may be taken to mean, it can’t mean making the world any easier a place in which to save your soul.”

In a world where much is unknowable, Frost takes refuge in what is knowable, matter-of-fact and practical. “It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.” One of his favorite books is Robinson Crusoe : “I never tire of being shown how the limited can make snug in the limit less.” For himself, Frost asks a wall against intrusion of knowledge, or people, a fence “between too much and me.” What is beyond those fences, says Frost, is no man’s business. It is “the canyon of Ceasing to Question What Doesn’t Concern Us.”

On its least terms, this may seem like planning small, keeping your socks dry, and bowing to superior wisdom. At its broadest, it may be taken as sound sense for an age bewildered by knowing less & less about more & more: “We are too much out, and if we don’t draw in/ We shall be driven in.”

Robert Frost has had more need than most men to draw in. Of the tragic deaths and illnesses in his family, the most crushing was the death of his wife in 1938. The shock to Frost was so great that he took to his bed with pneumonia. But he pulled through. Restored to his tough humor, when he underwent an operation for hemorrhoids he issued a bulletin: “I am resting on my laurels after an operation for asteroids.”

These days he makes his winter headquarters in Cambridge, travels a regular winter circuit of colleges, lecturing (fee: $200-$300) and reading his poems (in a voice Padraic Colum once likened to the barking of an eagle), spends a couple of months in Florida where he has a small house in Coral Gables, summers at his Vermont farm, which he shares with the Morrison family: Harvard Lecturer (and poet) Theodore Morrison* and his wife Kathleen. Both at Cambridge and Ripton, “K,” serves as a sort of combined secretary, manager and friend, handles Frost’s correspondence, types his poems, fends off unwanted callers, fusses over his diet and clothes, tries to see that he gets to bed at a reasonable hour.

All summer long, there is a steady stream of friends visiting at the farm. Frost receives them slumped in the ancient Morris chair he bought 40 years ago, talking in his twanging New England voice, a rascally twinkle in his blue eyes. When the Morrisons are there, Frost takes his meals with them at the main house 50 yards down the hill from his cabin.

Cluttered Attic. A late riser, Frost eats a breakfast of watered milk and a raw egg flavored with lemon. Afternoons, he walks the hills or potters around the farm (he is helping his tenant farmer, Stafford Dragon, build an extra room on the main house). Last week he was spending his evenings reading Catullus (in Latin), dipping into travel books (“they keep your imagination kind of stretched wide”) or writing in his slow longhand. Frost writes nearly all his poems straight through at a sitting. “A poem can’t be worried into existence,” he says.

The poems he has been writing in the last few years are the gleanings of a lifetime-cluttered attic. Where once he had magical insights, he is content now to write mostly shrewd and quizzical “editorials.” A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) Frost calls “kind of religious quips.” Nobody but Frost would call these sardonic and compassionate verse-dramas quips.

This week, Robert Frost will head west for Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, where poets, scholars and editors will gather to do him honor. They will swap ideas, discuss “The Poet and Reality,” see a production of A Masque of Mercy, and pay their respects to their old friend.

How good a poet is Robert Frost? It is the kind of uncatchable, dragonfly question he might put out himself. And it is best answered in his own deceptively homely terms: he is good enough to have lodged a few pebbles where they’ll be hard to dislodge.

At his lyrical best, Frost owns a discipline of manner, an immaculate matching of thought and image, a native American voice unsurpassed by any American poet since Walt Whitman. For all his scorn of technical talk, he is as artful a technician as U.S. poetry has known.

Other contemporary poets have had greater influence—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden. Each, in various measure, has more accurately expressed the fashionable tumults and shoutings of their time. Many of those tumults Frost has simply ignored. But when the time itself has passed into history, it may appear that Robert Frost, quarrying away at the granite of his New England mind, has chosen the more durable material.

*All Frost’s poetry by copyright permission of Henry Holt & Co.

*For years, Frost thought he was born in 1875, but a letter of his father’s printed in a Harvard Class of 1872 report sets the date as 1874.

*The Frosts had six in all: two sons, four daughters. They lost their first son when he was three, one daughter soon after birth. -No kin to Harvard’s professor of history, Samuel Eliot Morison.