14
ORIGINAL RESPONSE
1928–1930
There are a lot of things I could say to you about the art [of poetry] if we were talking, and one of them is that it should be of major adventures only, outward and inward—important things that happen to you, or important things that occur to you. Mere poeticality won’t suffice.
—FROST TO KIMBALL FLACCUS, 1928
With his renewed appointment at Amherst, Frost entered into a pattern in the 1926–27 academic year that would remain in place for over a decade. He would be in residence at Amherst for a limited period each year, during which time he would teach informally, offering seminars or lectures as he saw fit. “What I teach,” he once said, “is myself, my way of seeing the world, of knowing the world.”1 It was an unusual and privileged position for a poet to occupy.
With Vermont as his base of operations, he would travel far and wide in the United States, giving readings and lectures, often for considerable sums of money. “Frost never prepared much, either for class or for a lecture,” one friend recalls. “He was what you might call an intuitionalist. He preferred to talk about what came to him spontaneously.”2 For the most part, he would read his poems and digress in the spaces between them, offering witty remarks or wisecracks interspersed with nuggets of wisdom.
A huge gap opened in this decade between Frost’s private and public lives, with the public life so glitteringly full of achievements and honors, and the private life increasingly laden with grief—illness, family crises. One is especially struck by the Frost children’s dependence on their parents well into their adult lives. Only Lesley seemed able to make her way strongly in the world, although now that Irma was married she became somewhat more settled. Marjorie’s physical and psychological problems only grew more intense as she matured. Carol and Lillian, though hardworking and devoted to each other, were consistently plagued by financial and health problems that seemed out of their control.
The Frosts had for some time halfheartedly entertained the notion of returning to Europe, but it would take them until August 1928 to organize the trip. They were spurred on by Marjorie, who wanted to learn French and gain some experience abroad. Arrangements for this adventure were made by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, the Frosts’ neighbor in South Shaftsbury, who had spent several months near Sèvres during the First World War. She knew a family there who would play host to Marjorie for a limited period.
The Frosts sailed from Quebec to Le Havre on August 4, arriving a week later in Paris, where they lingered for a few days of sightseeing (and a visit to the opera) before taking Marjorie to Sèvres. Frost found himself miserable in France, where everything seemed utterly strange to him. He was looking forward to getting to England, where he intended to visit his old friend John Haines. He wrote to Haines on August 28:
Thus far I have nothing to report of this expedition but bad. We came to France in the hope that it might improve our invalid Marjorie by awakening interest in her to learn the French language. That hope has failed and the disappointment has been almost too much for Elinor on top of everything else she has had to bear for the last two years. I can’t tell you how she has lost courage and strength as I have watched her. She is in a serious condition—much more serious at this moment than Marjorie. We ought by right to abandon our campaign and baggage and retreat to America, but that seems cruel to contemplate with nothing done, none of our friends seen that we wanted to see and have been wanting to see for so long. I have one last resource. I am going to try to find a sort of travelling-companion-nurse for Marjorie to take her off her mother’s hands for a few weeks.3
Frost added; “Of course it is to see you more than anything else that I made this desperate journey across the Atlantic in our old age and worn-out condition. Elinor has had too much on her. I am afraid it will take her a long time to recover. Something radical will have to be done for her, and I will have to be the one to do it. She is in a state past doing anything for herself.”
It annoyed Frost, in France, that he could not speak French, especially when it came to the newspapers. He was vividly aware, however, that U.S. Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg was in Paris negotiating a treaty that was called the Pact of Paris. This document was full of idealism in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, who (unlike Frost) was deeply skeptical of the use of force in international relations. Frost, if anything, was a populist in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt, and he denounced this latest treaty to Elinor and other friends, convinced that one should avoid promises about not wielding a big stick when necessary. Nevertheless, he could not help but admire Wilson’s character: “He had calibre,” he wrote home to Otto Manthey-Zorn on August 20, “he saw as vastly as anyone that ever lived.”4
In September, with Marjorie safely in the hands of her French guardians, the Frosts left for England. They rested in London, keeping to themselves, before going on to visit Haines in Gloucestershire. Frost wrote home to John Bartlett that he was “no real traveller.” He was, however, extremely eager to see Haines, and to reminisce with him about Edward Thomas. Haines recalled that they took “walks in the Cotswolds together, and, later, sat on Churchdown Hill whilst he expounded the inner origin of his poetical themes, and, once again, we climbed May Hill and gazed round that astounding ring of country from the Brecon Beacons to Shropshire, and from the northernmost Cotswold to the Channel’s rim … but the wraith of that dead friend was ever before us.”5
It had long been a wish of Frost’s to visit Ireland, and he did so not long after arriving in London. He took a steamer across the Irish Sea by himself, leaving Elinor (who was feverish with a mild case of what she called “the usual British influenza”) behind; he was met by Padraic Colum and George William Russell (who wrote under the initials A.E.), two Irish poets whom he had known for some years. (He stayed in Dublin with the poet Constantine P. Curran, Colum’s friend.) The high point of this sojourn was a dinner with Yeats, whom Frost had admired for so many years (but encountered only once before, in 1913). Yeats recognized Frost, in both senses, and greeted him warmly.
The dinner with Yeats included A.E., and Frost later told Mertins that “he had his first experience in listening to genuine conversation when he heard A.E. and Yeats talk together in Ireland.” Mertins points out that the link between poetry and conversation was essential to Yeats: “Whenever Frost in after years had occasion to refer to that visit to Eire [in 1928], it was not of the Irish landscape, or of Irish farming, or of the Irish peasanty, or of the Sinn Feiners, or of the Eire Republic, or of de Valera that he talked. These things scarcely formed a backdrop. It was always of the other-worldly conversation he held with the two Irish mystics—men of the older Ireland—such talk, he said, ‘as nowhere else on earth have I ever heard the like of. These men took ordinary conversation and lifted it into the realm of pure literature.’”6
Frost later said: “During the meal Yeats spoke up and said, ‘You know I was the first poet in modern times to put that colloquial everyday speech of yours into poetry. I did it in my poetic play The Land of Heart’s Desire.’”7 This sort of comment, from a lesser poet, might have stirred a sense of rivalry; Frost, however, had nothing but admiration for Yeats, and he understood that his remark was meant as a gesture of solidarity.
Back in England, Frost made the literary rounds, visiting such old friends and acquaintances as Lascelles Abercrombie (who had grown old and diabetic), Wilfrid Gibson, John Cournos, John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, and Edward Garnett—the latter a critic who had championed both Frost and Thomas. He and Elinor also spent a night with the old poet Walter de la Mare and his wife. “De la Mare is the best of the best,” he wrote back to Ted Morrison.8 For old times’ sake, they went out of their way to visit Helen Thomas, whose memoir of her life with Edward Thomas had recently been a minor sensation—largely because of her accounts of their marital troubles. Frost, as might be expected, found the memoir distasteful, although he was polite about it. Writing home to Cox, he said the book was “a good piece of work in a way, but it took a good [deal] of squirming on her part to justify it.” He wondered if Helen “wasn’t in danger of making E.T. look ridiculous in the innocence she credited him with.”9
Frost wrote to John Haines about these comings and goings in his usual wry voice:
We saw Helen Thomas and that ended one passage in our lives. She delivered herself of several choice things. The reason she didn’t want Edward’s letters published was because he wasn’t interesting in his letters. She sometimes rejoiced he wasn’t alive to see the state England was in. She needn’t be afraid I shall ever publish his letters to me. She may be right about the state of England; it seems a poor sort of country where a woman has to give up living with a man married to someone else for fear of losing her pension. I decided before I had lectured to her long that Edward had worse enemies to his memory than poor old Wilfrid [Gibson]. It needed only that decision to make it easy to visit Wilfrid at Letchworth. He has since sent me a poem in which he stoutly excuses us all for looking so horribly old after such a terrible war. I couldn’t see that he had aged much. He must have meant his wife and us. I don’t want to be excused for looking horribly old. I want it denied I look horribly old.10
While staying in London in early October, Frost telephoned Harold Monro at his Poetry Bookshop, now moved to Great Russell Street (near the British Museum); the normally reserved Monro seemed both surprised and thrilled to hear from him, and proposed that Frost read at the bookshop. As an enticement, he promised that T. S. Eliot would attend the performance. Frost, who had been scornful of Eliot’s poetry in public for years, was nonetheless intrigued and agreed to read on the evening of October 18. Unfortunately, Eliot sent his regrets on the day of the reading. An embarrassed Monro hastily arranged a dinner party with Eliot for the following night.
The conversation at the dinner centered on Monro, who had done a good deal to promote the careers of both Frost and Eliot (although, in Eliot’s case, he had been reluctant at first). Frost was polite throughout the dinner, as was Eliot, but Eliot’s put-on English accent and Anglophile manners did not impress Frost; indeed, it only fueled his distaste for Eliot, encouraging him in later years to make derogatory remarks about the poetry and the man. “He was always against Eliot,” Richard Eberhart recalled. “He considered him a snob, and a fake. Those were the worst things you could be in Frost’s way of thinking.”
Elinor, meanwhile, had gone back to Sèvres by herself to get Marjorie, returning just in time for two dinners that had been scheduled in Frost’s honor, one by the English Speaking Union and another by the P.E.N. Club. Unfortunately, he fell ill just before the dinners; as often happened when he was either overworked or stressed by too much contact with the public, he succumbed to what he and Elinor usually called “the grippe”—a complaint marked by a tightening of the chest, a racking cough, and night sweats. In the days preceding these bouts, Frost would usually plunge into a state of depression, whereupon his body’s resistance would fall; the grippe would then come on, and he would take to his bed for a week or more. This is what happened in London, and Elinor (herself still in poor health) was forced to look after him. “Robert and I are both struggling,” she wrote home to Edith Fobes. “We can hardly wait to return.”
In all, the European trip was something of a failure, given that its purpose had been to give a boost to Marjorie and Elinor. Both had proved unequal to the demanding aspects of travel. In early November, in a note to John Haines, Frost foresaw an early conclusion to their journey: “This may as well end the expedition. It has been too much of a strain anyway. I wish I could promise to see you again, but it wouldn’t be honest as things are. I’ve made Elinor unhappier … than I think I ever made her before. She’s too sick for a jaunting party and I should not have dragged her out of her home.”11
Before sailing home, on November 15, Frost called on the current poet laureate, Robert Bridges, at his home in Boars Hill, near Oxford. He had met Bridges before, most recently in Michigan in 1925. The English poet, however, was now eighty-four, and weak; much to Frost’s disappointment, he showed little interest in him or his theories of poetry. They sat before a coal fire with “lukewarm cups of tea on their laps” as Bridges talked at length about his own final book, which he proposed to call The Testament of Beauty. Frost thanked Bridges for his hospitality but took his leave as quickly as was polite—an anticlimactic end to a less than perfect journey.
* * *
After a rough crossing on the SS Olympic, Frost parted company with Elinor and Marjorie, who went back to South Shaftsbury while he turned south from New York to lecture in Baltimore and North Carolina. On his way back, he stopped to see his editor in New York, where West-Running Brook had only just been published. By the time he got back to Vermont, in early December, he was thoroughly exhausted. He arrived in South Shaftsbury as the winter’s first serious snowfall was just beginning.
The situation at home was even more complicated than usual. Marjorie had suddenly decided that she should study nursing and had written off to the well-regarded Johns Hopkins Nurse Training School, in Baltimore; the school immediately accepted her for the winter term, beginning in February. Her parents, of course, wondered if she could possibly manage a demanding course of study. In any case, carried forward by her enthusiasm, they agreed to support her financially.
Irma, who had been married now for two years, had left her husband and returned home to Vermont with a baby son in the spring of 1928. Her husband had later followed her east, hoping to patch things up. He agreed to remain in Vermont, and the Frosts decided to help them out by buying a small farm near Bennington. Now, as Christmas of 1928 approached, Irma’s troubled marriage once again upset everyone as she complained to her parents that life with John Paine Cone was barely tolerable. She predicted that soon everything would collapse on her.
Lesley, too, was having marital problems; she had married (somewhat defiantly) while her parents were abroad. Dwight Francis had been married before. His daughter Lesley Francis recalls: “My father was the son of Henry Francis, a well-to-do industrialist. Before the family lost all their wealth in the Depression, they had given Dwight a good deal of money to start his own business. He was very good-looking, very handsome, Harvard-educated; he had been a flyer in Canada, and had married a woman called Kay, who was only seventeen, in Paris. The marriage lasted just one year, and there were no children. He was something of a playboy, but that oversimplifies it; he was quite serious about each of his marriages. But he was out of my life before I was born. He went on to marry several more times—and each love was the love of his life. With my mother, he hit upon a very bad time; with the Depression, he lost all his money, as did his father, who was completely devastated. My father suddenly had to go to work and found a job in real estate. Things eventually got a little better for him, and he had three sons by his third wife, all of whom did well.
“Lesley, my mother, was terribly in love with him, but the marriage only lasted from 1929 until 1931. Apparently my father would suddenly want to go skiing in the Alps or do something frivolous, and my mother got tired of this. She said, ‘Go ahead, but don’t come back.’ He didn’t. Mother got no alimony, nor any child support, but she had total custody of her children. Father was banished from our existence, and I didn’t actually meet him until I was a teenager. My mother didn’t remarry until 1952, when she married Joseph W. Ballantine—a diplomat and China expert.”12
Frost was barely settled again when Lesley appeared in South Shaftsbury with tales of marital woe, saying she might soon get divorced. Although neither she nor Irma got divorced at this time, it was clear—much to their parents’ chagrin—that in both cases it was inevitable. Frost was a self-professed believer in monogamy who was always distressed when news of divorce surfaced among his acquaintances. Indeed, it was during this period that Louis Untermeyer and his wife, Jean, underwent a rocky patch that led to a divorce. They remarried a short while later, but not before Untermeyer had married and quickly divorced another woman—a bizarre interval that displeased Frost, who had written scoldingly to Untermeyer from England, “My judgment on you is that you have wronged yourself in all this business of alternating between two wives. You have been acting against your nature under pressure of the bad smart talk you have listened to and learned to share in the society you have cultivated in your own New York salons (so to call them.) I’ve heard the mocking when I have been there and heard you lend yourself to it till I was ready to bet what would happen. None of it was right or wise or real. What I dread most now is that you will go on the assumption that, though it was folly and landed you in tragedy, it was on the way somewhere and somehow prepared you for a greater and fuller life. Shut up. To hell with such comforts. It was all time and energy lost, as I have said before.”13 He gave similar warnings to both Lesley and Irma, but to no avail.
* * *
Frost often went on long walks with a local mail clerk and beekeeper named Charles Monroe, and it was on one of their walks in 1928 that Monroe showed him a little farm that he could not resist, “a poor little cottage of five rooms, two ordinary fireplaces, and one large kitchen fireplace all in one central chimney as it was in the beginning.” It was located on 153 acres, with fifty in woods (mixed stands of maple, pine, and paper birches), the rest rolling pastureland. As Lawrance Thompson notes, “There was a special fascination, for Frost, in any country real estate with a ‘for sale’ sign posted on it.”14
The tiny eighteenth-century house had a lovely view to the west, toward New York. It was not far from Buck’s Cobble, a well-known local promontory with astounding views of the Green Mountains and the Taconics. Looking east, one could actually see the peak of Mount Equinox. The asking price for the farm was only $5,000—a price Frost could easily afford, even as the rest of the country was going bankrupt. His fortunes had, indeed, risen in marked contrast to those around him, now that he was making a sound income from the combination of his Amherst salary, his royalties, and the substantial fees he could command on the lecture circuit. The Depression was not, for him, a significant factor, although he could see its effects on his children, which meant that he experienced this dark period in American economic history indirectly.
The reasons for moving to a new farm at this time were clear: Stone Cottage had been given to Carol and Lillian, and it was unseemly for the elder Frosts to remain there indefinitely. They had rented a place called Shingle Cottage, in North Bennington, for the past year, as a way of staying out of the way, but they wanted a place of their own. Stone Cottage had also become a frequent gathering place for the whole Frost clan, and the noise and commotion there were such that Frost’s nerves were often strained. He wanted peace, and he could afford it now.
A poet and friend, Wade Van Dore, was offered a chance to live in the house and make some repairs—although professional carpenters would be working to add a bathroom and do the necessary renovations. Van Dore took the offer, anticipating a lot of free time for his own writing. It was in response to a poem by Van Dore that Frost wrote “The Most of It,” one of his most complex and interesting poems. Van Dore was a lover of nature in the most conventional sense, and had written a poem called “The Echo” in which he lamented that the only response he could manage to rouse in nature was the faint echo of his own. Van Dore recalled, “I often confided in him my strange adventures in silence and loneliness in the lake country north-west of Lake Superior; but, aside from a great answer I might have desired from nature, was I crying out for his and not someone else’s sympathy after failing to find complete fulfillment in a great wilderness? The dark and primitive feeling of his poem suggests that he took my seeking as something that touched him personally.”15
Frost wrote his poetic response to Van Dore in an inspired blaze of composition, “all in one afternoon,” as he later said:
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.
This richly textured poem appears, on the surface, to turn the notion of correspondence (which Frost originally got from Swedenborg—who was also an important source for Emerson, who reframed the idea for American readers) on its head; the speaker wants more than his “own love back in copy speech” when he calls across a lake—as did Van Dore in “The Echo.” Echo is not enough. Frost—or the speaker in the poem—seeks “counter-love, original response,” but no response is forthcoming except the “embodiment” which comes “As a great buck”—a mystifying “as” if ever one existed.16 This embodiment charges out of the water “with horny tread” and lands “pouring like a waterfall”—a terrifying force, utterly inhuman.
This is certainly one of Frost’s darker poems, especially with “and that was all” coming as the final utterance. Randall Jarrell called it “a poem which indicates as well as any I can think of Frost’s stubborn truthfulness, his willingness to admit both the falseness in the cliché and the falseness in the contradiction of the cliché; if the universe never gives us either a black or a white answer, but only a black-and-white one that is somehow not an answer at all, still its inhuman not-answer exceeds any answer that we human beings could have thought of or wished for.”17 In its beautifully controlled, argumentative compactness, matched by a wonderful spareness and ingenuity, “The Most of It” stands well above the usual run of Frost poems from this period. It is worth noting that Frost decided to sit on this poem, holding it in reserve for a later date. It finally came to light in A Witness Tree (1942). As ever, this habit of holding back poems for a later volume makes it virtually impossible to analyze Frost in terms of his progressive development: he did not, like most poets, grow and shift; rather, like a tree, he added rings.
Meanwhile, J. J. Lankes, the woodcut artist whose illustrations had so greatly enhanced the physical aspect of Frost’s books, was allowed to build himself a small shack on the new property for the summer. Lankes needed to get away from his large family for a while to get some work done. But he would have to share the farm with Van Dore—a juxtaposition bound to create sparks. Indeed, the two housesitters did not get along at all. Lankes wrote home to his wife in Virginia, “Just now 3 stonemasons are working, 1 teamster, two plumbers … then there is Wade. Altogether not a quiet place. I’ve been lending a hand … unloading stone, doing a little mowing—and such. Frost comes every day (except Sunday—he does not show up at all). He always comes into the studio and work is impossible for all the talk.”18
Frost spent his usual ten weeks in residence at Amherst early in the year, then spent a month on the road in the late spring, lecturing and reading his poems at college campuses. The crowds everywhere were “large and more than respectful,” he noted, as if amazed by his own success. Returning to Shingle Cottage in May, he was eager to enjoy a summer in the out-of-doors. The call of the new farm was irresistible, and he eagerly supervised Van Dore in the planting of five hundred red pine seedlings bought from the state of Vermont for a nominal fee. He helped the younger man transplant young elm and maple trees near the house itself, and worked intermittently with the stone masons. He also spent a good deal of time with Carol at his old farm, often doing errands in town for his son. Lankes records one particularly nice story about going with Frost into Bennington to deliver an order of sweet peas to the Catamount Inn. The doorman curtly told Frost that he was not to enter through the front door but to use the delivery door. Lankes remarked, “I’ll bet that particular hostelry never had a guest nearly as important as Frost enter the main gate.”19
Frost was not, in the late twenties, writing many poems, or many good ones. He was highly conscious of this, and fretted over his lack of productiveness, blaming it on “all the teaching and lecturing I do” and on family troubles. His Collected Poems was scheduled for publication in 1930, and he grew more anxious as the months passed, wondering how the critics would regard it. He understood only too well that taste is fickle, and that poets with huge reputations in one decade can pass into oblivion the next. The success of the modernist movement, especially of Eliot and Pound, threatened him. He must also have measured himself against Edna St. Vincent Millay, E. A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, Carl Sandburg, and dozens of other well-known poets, including Don Marquis, Anna Hempstead Branch, Odell Shepard, and Dana Burnet—all Frost’s immediate contemporaries and rivals. If one examines William Bliss Carman’s popular Oxford Book of American Verse (1927), one sees that Frost is struggling to hold his own with the above names. (An interesting side note is the fact that Wallace Stevens, now regarded as Frost’s chief contemporary, was not even represented in Carman’s book; it would take at least another two decades for his achievement to be fully recognized.)
As the thirties approached, so did an interest in radical politics. The case of Sacco and Vanzetti had become a focus, and intellectuals rallied around these anarchist-idealists who were to be executed for murder in 1927; among those rushing to support them was Edna St. Vincent Millay, who wrote a famous poem in their defense called “Justice Denied in Massachusetts.” Genevieve Taggard, an influential critic and poet and a friend of Frost’s, had also joined the Sacco-Vanzetti protest. Frost felt distinctly at odds with his times, and worried that his conservative political ideas would damage his reception as a poet. As ever, he wanted to think of himself as a “lone striker,” and could not bear the notion of being associated with any school or “ism.” He claimed to loathe socialism, communism, anarchism, and even humanism.
But he understood more than most writers the importance of keeping his name afloat in certain circles, so—with great reservations—he accepted an invitation to lecture at the New School for Social Research. The lectures were scheduled for the first three months of 1931, but Frost worried in advance about sitting cheek-by-jowl with so many leftist intellectuals (he assumed, quite rightly, that the New School was a hotbed of radicals and progressives of one kind or another). In a letter to Frederic G. Melcher, he said: “I’m not afraid of the radicals … nor of the Jews. I may be a radical myself and there is a theory that the Scotch were Jews and another that the Yankees were Jews. I am a Scotch Yankee.”20
Frost was not, like T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, a genuine anti-Semite, but he shared the attitudes of his generation of Yankee populists toward both Jews and blacks. He was also suspicious of nearly all foreigners, a prejudice reinforced by his most recent visit to France. Party affiliations just do not apply to Frost, who was neither a Republican nor a Democrat in any consistent or recognizable way. But one cringes to see him making remarks that, by the standards of today, would be judged either racist or anti-Semitic.
On the subject of Frost’s prejudices, Peter J. Stanlis is helpful: “You may recall a famous remark that Jonathan Swift says in a letter to Alexander Pope (September 29, 1725): ‘I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals: For instance, I hate the tribe of lawyers, but I love Counsellor Such-a-one, and Judge Such-a-one: so with physicians—I will not speak of my own trade—soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest. But principally I hate and detest that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth. This is the system upon which I have governed myself for many years.’ I think that Frost is very much like Swift; he loved particulars and disliked abstract categories. This is at heart the basis of his hatred of all sentimental responses to life. It also underscored his belief in self-interest far above claims of social benevolence.”21
* * *
While Frost was not writing poems as regularly as he had when he was younger, his mind now turned powerfully to the art of poetry. He delivered a lecture called “Education by Poetry” to the Alumni Council at Amherst College, on November 15, 1930. It was recorded stenographically, then revised by Frost before publication in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly (February 1931). Based on a lecture he had given at Bryn Mawr College a few years before, it represented Frost’s most complete and suggestive statement on the use of poetry to date.
“Poetry begins in trivial metaphors,” he says, “pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.” He cautions his listeners that “unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.” Interestingly, Frost cannot even talk about metaphor without employing it himself.
Frost believed that the “greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter.” In formulating this, he (consciously or not) is redeploying an aesthetic common to the German Romantics, especially Goethe, who famously wrote: “Whoever has truly grasped the meaning of history will realize in thousands of examples that the materialization of the spirit or the spiritualization of matter never rests, but always breaks out, among prophets, believer, poets, orators, artists, and lovers of art.”22 Frost is not, in his thinking on metaphor, an innovator, but he grapples seriously with ideas and reformulates them in his own Yankee style. His core ideas are, in essence, Romantic—often with an Emersonian tinge, although even here Frost’s natural melancholy and resistance to enthusiasm of a certain kind have a darkening effect on his Emersonian streak. Metaphor is, for him, transformative but not a form of religious alchemy holding out a transcendental promise of redemption. Earth is always “the right place for love.”
“I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking,” Frost says. Anticipating what scientists have increasingly been saying about their own discipline, he is convinced that even scientific thinking depends on metaphor. With typical whimsy, he writes:
The other day we had a visit here, a noted scientist, whose latest word to the world has been that the more accurately you know where a thing is, the less accurately you are able to state how fast it is moving. You can see why that would be so, without going back to Zeno’s problem of the arrow’s flight. In carrying numbers into the realm of space and at the same time into the realm of time you are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are in trouble. They won’t mix. The two don’t go together.
Frost also understands the connection between metaphor and belief: “The person who gets close enough to poetry, he is going to know more about the word belief than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays.” He outlines the various forms of belief as self-belief, as when a young person is convinced of his own value, even though he has not yet shown it to the world; love-belief, as when one has a belief in someone else, and in the relationship that will (one firmly believes) follow from that situation; and literary-belief. The latter is what must occur every time a poem or story is written: the author trusts in the thing-to-come, which is “more felt than known.”
These three forms of belief, in Frost’s argument, are closely related to God-belief; “the belief in God is a relationship you enter into with Him to bring about the future,” he suggests. Here he comes about as close to stating explicitly his religious feelings as anywhere else in his writing. For him, religion, like art, is an opportunity for belief, a structure that allows the possibility of creation, which begins in emptiness and absence but ends in wholeness and presence.
* * *
Frost was at the height of his intellectual powers as 1930 approached, although much of his best work lay behind him. He seemed to know this, which made the reception of his Collected Poems so much more vexing. The book collected him, and if critics didn’t like it, he might have fewer and fewer opportunities to impress them in the future. The situation was made worse by the fact that E. A. Robinson’s Collected Poems had won a Pulitzer the previous year, and the critics often played Robinson against Frost, sometimes to the detriment of Frost.
He had been seriously upset by some of the reviews of West-Running Brook, where the suggestion had been put forward that he was an escapist, a poet out of touch with his times. One critic attacked “Acquainted with the Night,” for instance, because of the “one luminary clock” that “proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.” “Frost evidently believes it is the artist himself that matters and not the time in which he happens to live,” this anonymous reviewer wrote.23 As might be expected, Frost was annoyed by the suggestion that he was out of step, or that he was burying his head in the sand. He regarded his poems as fierce gestures in the direction of sanity, as attempts to wrest a “momentary stay against confusion” from the chaos of life. For him personally, each poem was a victory over depression, anxiety, fear, and sloth.
A number of the early reviews of his Collected Poems picked up on the anti-Frost line that had begun to emerge with West-Running Brook. In the New Republic, Granville Hicks—an important voice in critical circles—maintained that Frost’s poetry ran “counter to the consensus of opinion of the critics of all ages as well as to the temper of his own era.” He complained that the poems contained “nothing of industrialism” and failed to note the “disruptive effect that scientific hypotheses have had on modern thought.” There was no mention of Freud anywhere, or even a sense that Frost had absorbed any Freudian ideas. These apparent blind spots in Frost meant he could not “contribute directly to the unification, in imaginative terms, of our culture. He cannot give us the sense of belonging in the industrial, scientific, Freudian world in which we find ourselves.”24
Fortunately, a phalanx of supporters, led by Genevieve Taggard in the New York Herald Tribune, rose to Frost’s defense, seeing in his work “universal experience portrayed concretely, in locality, in Yankee accent.”25 In the end, this capacious book solidified his reputation, appealing to a wide range of readers with varying degrees of critical sophistication. Much to his surprise, he was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for this collection. And on November 13, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, sponsored by Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, and Wilbur Cross (over the objections of Robert Underwood Johnson, who had long disliked Frost and his poetry). This was an important milestone for Frost, who had belonged for many years to the lesser National Institute of Arts and Letters. At last, it seemed, the heights of Parnassus had been scaled.