CONCLUSION
In the first stanza of “Revelation,” an early poem, Frost writes:
We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone really find us out.
As Theodore Morrison, the husband of Kay, mused in an appreciative essay that appeared four years after the poet’s death, “Frost wanted to be found out—by the right people in the right way.”1 One might say that Frost’s life was a complicated game of deception and revelation, of creating masks and winking through the eyeholes in them. His poems, even his life, often seem an elaborate construction, remarkably interdependent.
The poetry itself is marked by an unbelievable, even visionary, clarity. As he asked bluntly in “Riders,” “What is this talked-of mystery of birth / But being mounted bareback on the earth?” Frost was indeed a roughrider, a man with roots in the American Wild West—a boy from San Francisco whose own father, William Prescott Frost, was lured by fantasy, by the “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf” offered by the prospect of riches and glory on the frontier. But tragedy came early, and by the age of eleven Frost had lost a father, and lost a way of life.
The recklessness of his father, however, remained an essential part of his nature. He saw himself as an individualist out to conquer the world, a gambler who risked everything in trying to make a life of poetry. “All or nothing,” he once told an interviewer, “that is how I wanted it, how I have lived.” His poems are full of outsiders, wanderers on the fringe of town at the edge of night, characters who plunge into the woods alone. William Frost’s sense of adventure, his wildness, his skepticism, and his heroic self-conception remained a highly visible part of his son’s character.
Against that worldly figure rose Isabelle Moodie, his Swedenborgian mother, an otherworldly creature who left her son an opposing model of selfhood. “He lived, more than anyone I ever knew, in the spirit,” recalled Rabbi Victor Reichert. “The outside was bluff, the inside was deep and true. He was always in search of God—or some quality that could be identified with that word.” That hunger for the absolute is evident from first to last. In “Kitty Hawk,” for instance, one of his last important statements in poetry, he writes:
But God’s own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Frost wanted to go “deeper and deeper into matter,” risking spirit in substantiation. His poems might be considered a lifelong homage to the things of this world, those facts which are “the sweetest dream that nature knows.” As he writes in “In Hardwood Groves,” “However it is in some other world / I know that this is the way in ours.” Earth, for him, was the “right place for love,” and he kept his eye fixed firmly here, allowing himself occasional flights only because he understood, even liked, the oppositional tug of gravity. Like the mythical hero Antaeus, he derived his strength from attachment to the ground.
In the tradition of Emerson, his most significant literary ancestor, Frost read nature as a symbol of the spirit, but he read nature more closely than did Emerson, for whom nature was more of an abstraction than a daily reality. Frost was an obsessive student of his physical habitat, and he went “botanizing” with a vengeance, learning the names of things wherever he lived or traveled. Like many close readers of nature, he could not avoid generalizing from observation; as he wrote in “The Onset,” “I know that winter death has never tried / The earth but it has failed.” He understood the opposite, too, that “leaf subsides to leaf,” as he said in “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The cycles of nature are cycles of destruction and regeneration, but destruction is real as well as painful, and it must be accounted for.
Frost’s skepticism was rooted in a belief in God that varied in its conventionality. As he wrote to Louis Untermeyer early in their friendship, “I discovered that do or say my damnedest I can’t be other than orthodox in politics, love, and religion: I can’t escape salvation.”2 But Frost was a skeptic as well, using his skepticism as a way of protecting his religious faith. It is easy to look at “For Once, Then, Something” or “Design” and imagine that Frost scorned religious faith; but even those poems are cannily made to keep the “wrong” people from understanding exactly what he thought and felt about some important things (as he suggests in “Directive”). Doubt is an integral part of genuine faith, and Frost explored the theology of doubt with astounding honesty and passion. But his many doubts never added up to a denial of basic things of the spirit, since spirit was a vital part of his dualism, along with matter.
Frost had a rich, complex intellectual life, and was fascinated by Darwin, Bergson, William James, and many others; as might be expected, the reading and thinking he did affected the shape of his poems. As Robert Faggen says, “The figure a Frost poem makes, as he says, ‘from delight to wisdom,’ is often one from enthusiasm and desire for insight to skepticism and uncertainty, compromise that steps back from assertion or statement to point toward something, perhaps chilling, beyond our passion.”3 “My poems,” Frost wrote to a friend in 1927, “are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.”4 He referred to this as his “innate mischievousness.”
Almost uniquely among the modern poets, Frost was interested in science, and he knew a great deal about physics, astronomy, botany, and geology. “Science is nothing but practical experience carried to a greater extent,” he wrote in his notebooks. “It pushes knowledge from miles to light years. It teaches us on the job what is possible in material strength, speed and finish, what is sufficient to do and think.”5 In effect, his engagement with science kept him from falling into sentimental attitudes toward religion or the human heart, making it possible for him to write poems such as “The Most of It,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “Desert Places.” In the latter, he talks of those places “so much nearer home” where he can scare himself with his “own desert places.” Indeed, those deserts were there, in his life and mind, and every poem was an attempt to rescue some clarity, to find oases of language in deserts of thought and feeling.
His own physiological makeup was such that he never felt quite free of a tendency toward depression, although I hesitate to say that he suffered from bipolar disorder: one cannot, retrospectively, make such a diagnosis. The manic talker, the robust public performer, and the witty conversationalist were surely the flip side of his persistent, ingrained melancholy. And as Ed Ingebretsen has shown, Frost turned his incipient melancholy into abiding interests in the Gothic and the darker sources of religious vision.6
Needless to say, the serious mental illness that plagued Frost’s sister, Jeanie, as well as Carol and Irma, represented the outer edge of his own instability. He might well have gone that way were it not for the spirit of independence, resilience, and combativeness that were part of his artist’s will to power. “But this inflexible ambition trains us best,” he as a boy of twenty wrote to William Hayes Ward in 1894. Even then, he knew himself well, and he never lost that ambition. “I expect to do something to the present state of literature in America,” he said to John Bartlett in 1913, and he did.
Frost has been condemned by earlier biographers as selfish and egotistical, a poor father and an inattentive husband. Yet the evidence suggests that he was faithful to Elinor throughout their long marriage; each book was written, as he said, “for love of her.” Hardly a poem was not composed with her in mind as the ideal reader. After her death, he found Kay Morrison, who stood in as muse, closest reader, and best friend—roles that Elinor had fulfilled “willingly, with grace and patience, for over four decades,” as her granddaughter Lesley Lee Francis notes. It is also clear from Elinor’s letters that she regarded her husband with deep affection and respect.
The situation of the family was such that Frost was very much at home each day, in daily contact with his children. This was certainly true at Derry, when the children were young. He took them for long walks in the woods and (together with Elinor) taught them to read and write. His playfulness and inventiveness—as reflected in Lesley’s childhood notebooks—were vital to their imaginative development. One can hardly imagine a father more accessible to his children. As one sees, he encouraged them throughout their lives with loving consistency, engaging them emotionally and advising them with care and thoughtfulness. It may well be, in fact, that he remained in a parental role too firmly, and well past the point where he should have let go—at least financially.
One of his very last letters, written shortly before his death, was to his daughter Lesley. The tone was typically supportive, encouraging, grateful, and frank: “You’re something of a Lesley de Lion yourself,” he wrote, responding to a quip of hers. “I am not hard to touch but I’d rather be taken for brave than anything else. A little hard and stern in judgement, perhaps, but always touched by the heroic. You have passed muster. So has Prescott. You have both found a way to make shift. You can’t know how much I have counted on you in family matters. It is not time yet to defer a little to others in my future affairs but I have deferred not a little in my thoughts to the strength in you and Prescott and Lee and very, very affectionately to K Morrison and Anne Morrison Gentry, who are with me taking this dictation in the hospital, and to Al Edwards in all his powerful friendship.… I am too emotional for my state. Life has been a long trial yet I mean to see more of it. We all liked your poems. It must add to your confidence that you have found a way with the young.”7
The view of Frost as monster and misanthrope that has been lodged in the minds of readers by previous biographers is hugely distorted. While hardly a saint, Frost was a passionate, headstrong man who believed deeply in his own vision. Like any human being, he was not without jealousy; indeed, he could be irritable and difficult, even mean-spirited, when it came to his poetic rivals. But to a remarkable degree, he succeeded in uniting his vocation and his avocation, and in making a place for himself in the world of letters, “a place apart.”
Above all, Frost was a lover of paradox. So it should offer no surprise that while he was a “lone striker,” the opposite is also true of him, that he sought public recognition and institutional support with indefatigable energy. A recent critic, Mark Richardson, cautions against reading Emersonian self-reliance into every aspect of Frost. “Potent American individualism notwithstanding,” he writes, “Frost sought and achieved a kind of ‘social approval’ unprecedented for an American poet.” Richardson locates a tension in Frost between “formity” and conformity”—a dichotomy elsewhere characterized as “originality” versus “governance.”8 His point is well taken. Frost was not just an individualist, hell-bent on noncomformity. He believed in a proper blend of rule and energy, of social conformity (law, order, form) and individual freedom (wildness, a willingness to break forms, standing apart).
The contradictions of his life and work remain stunning. He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in. Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries. While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end. He was a democrat who hated Franklin Roosevelt, a poet of labor who could not support the New Deal. He believed passionately in war as a rational and justifiable response to certain international crises, yet he could not stir in himself much interest in the Second World War. He was an ardent Eisenhower supporter who campaigned for John Kennedy with enthusiasm in 1960—and who publicly identified himself with Kennedy by reading at his inauguration. He was a fierce anticommunist who embraced Nikita Khrushchev personally, calling him “a great man.” As Katherine Kearns has said, Frost’s “near-phobic distaste for systems … exceeds even the most potent American individualism.”9 In a sense, Frost made himself a representative American by amplifying his individuality, by finding a voice for Everyman in the persona of the Lone Striker. By making himself eccentric, he found the center.
Frost’s portrait of the stoic, independent-minded men and women who worked the harsh, unyielding soil north of Boston in the early part of this century reminds us that, like William Faulkner, his contemporary and peer, he understood that universality is often the product of intense local habitation. He knew that a literary artist must inhabit a specific place and learn the speech of that place and time. “Locality gives art,” he wrote in an early notebook, and he sought locality in his life and art.
With vast curiosity about the natural world, he was well suited to the task of bringing this region to life with unusual specificity. Few poets, before or after, have so consistently or specifically evoked a particular place. His poetic universe is dense with flora and fauna that he had observed firsthand. “He walked in the woods every day that he could,” recalled Reginald L. Cook, who often walked with him in the later years. “It had been a lifelong habit, this walking. Like Wordsworth, he walked and looked, he listened. He knew the birdcalls, the names of the flowers, their patterns of blooming. The life cycles of trees were always of close interest to him. Mushroom, mold, or fungus—everything caught his eye. He understood the rhythms of farm life, having farmed and lived around farming for most of his adult life. Right to the end, he kept a garden. The physical world was metaphorical, of course, a source of metaphors and images for his poetry, but it was real, too. He could keep the figurative and literal in balance. That was his genius.”10
It is thrilling to watch his mind as it culls an image from daily life, transmogrifies what it finds, gives it the grandeur and elevation of permanence in art. The dark recesses of his life, the chaos, disappointment, and confusion he experienced, only tempered the steel of his character. The final image of Robert Frost is one of resolution and independence, of a man whose purpose in life was to find meaning in language, “risking spirit / In substantiation,” as he wrote in “Kitty Hawk.” This was, indeed, the great enterprise of his existence, nobly carried forward over many decades.