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As originally published in The Atlantic Monthly
June 1951
Robert Frost's America
Poet and critic, MARK VAN DOREN has been connected with
the English Department of Columbia University ever since he received his Ph.D.
there in 1920. An inspiring teacher, he saves his summers for his writing. He
is the author of ten volumes of verse; he has edited the Oxford Book of
American Prose and an impressive Anthology of World Poetry; and in 1939 the
publication of his Collected Poems brought him the Pulitzer
Prize.
by Mark Van Doren
ROBERT Frost has been discovering America all his life. He has also been
discovering the world; and since he is a really wise poet, the one thing has
been the same thing as the other. He is more than a New England poet: he is
more than an American poet; he is a poet who can be understood anywhere by
readers versed in matters more ancient and universal than the customs of one
country, whatever that country is. Frost's country is the country of human
sense: of experience, of imagination, and of thought. His poems start at home,
as all good poems do; as Homer's did, as Shakespeare's, as Goethe's, and as
Baudelaire's; but they end up everywhere, as only the best poems do. This is
partly because his wisdom is native to him, and could not have been suppressed
by any circumstance; it is partly, too, because his education has been right.
He is our least provincial poet because he is the best grounded in those
ideas--Greek, Hebrew, modern Europeans and even Oriental--which make for
well-built art at any time. He does not parade his learning, and may in fact
not know that he has it: but there in his poems it is, and it is what makes
them so solid, so humorous, and so satisfying.
His many poems have been different from one another and yet alike. They are the
work of a man who has never stopped exploring himself--or, if you like,
America, or better yet, the world. He has been able to believe, as any good
artist must, that the things he knows best because they are his own will turn
out to be true for other people. He trusts his own feelings, his own doubts,
his own certainties, his own excitements. And there is absolutely no end to
these, given the skill he needs to state them and the strength never to be
wearied by his subject matter. "The object in writing poetry" Frost has said,
"is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other." But for
this, in addition to the tricks any poet knows, "we need the help of
context--meaning--subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety.
All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters. . . . The
possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the
rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely
one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if
sound, because deeper and from wider experience."
Frost is one of the most subtle of modern poets in that department where so
much criticism rests, the department called technique; but the reason for his
subtlety is seldom noticed. It is there because it has to be, in the service of
something infinitely more important: a report of the world by one who lives in
it without any cause to believe that he is different from other persons except
for the leisure he has given himself to walk about and think as well as
possible concerning all the things he sees; and to take accurate note of the
way they strike him as he looks. What they are in themselves is not to be
known; or who he is, either, if all his thought is of himself; but when the two
come together in a poem, testimony may result. This is what Frost means by
subject matter, and what any poet had better mean if he expects to be read.
Frost is more and more read, by old readers and by young, because in this
crucial and natural sense he has so much to say. He is a generous poet. His
book confides many discoveries, and shares with its readers a world as wild as
it is wide--a dangerous world, hard to live in, yet the familiar world that is
the only one we shall ever have, and that we can somehow love for the bad
things in it as well as the good, the unintelligible as well as the
intelligible.
Frost is a laconic New Englander: that is to say, he talks more than anybody.
He talks all the time. The inhabitants of New England accuse one another of
talking too much, but all are guilty together, all are human; for man is a
talking animal, and never more so than when he is trying to prove that silence
is best. Frost has expressed the virtue of silence in hundreds of poems, each
one of them more ingenious than the last in the way it takes of suggesting that
it should not have been written at all. The greatest people keep still.
There may be little or much beyond the grave,
But the strong are saying nothing until they see.
Joking aside, Frost is a generous giver. He is not, thank heaven, one of those
exiguous modern poets--Joseph Wood Krutch has called them costive--who hope to
be loved because they have delivered so little: the fewer the poems the better
the poet. The fact is that the greatest poets have been, among other things,
prolific: they have had much to say, and nothing has prevented them from
keeping at it till they died.
Contrary to a certain legend, good poets get better with age, as Thomas Hardy
for another instance did. The Collected Poems of Hardy are a universe through
which the reader may travel forever, entertained as he goes by the same paradox
as that which appears in the Complete Poems of Frost: the universe in question
is presented as a grim, bleak place, but the longer one stares at it the warmer
it seems, and the more capable of justifying itself beneath the stars. By an
almost illicit process it manages in the end to sing sweetly of itself--not
sentimentally, or as if it leaned upon illusion, but with a deep sweetness that
truth cannot disturb. For truth is in the sweetness: a bittersweetness, shall
we say, but all the better preserved for being so.
And this is the case, whether with Hardy or with Frost, because the poet has
never grown tired of his function; has always known more, and known it better,
as time passed; and has found it the most natural thing in the world to say so
in new terms.
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation.
The poet in Frost has never been different from the man, or the man from the
poet; he has lived in his poetry at the same time that he has lived outside of
it, and neither life has interfered with the other. Indeed it has helped; which
is why we know that his poems mean exactly what he means, and might say in some
other language if he chose. But he has chosen this language as the most
personal he could find, toward the end that what it conveys should be personal
for us too. We need not agree with everything he says in order to think him
wise. It is rather that he sounds and feels wise, because he is sure of what he
knows. And the extent of what he knows would never be guessed by one who met
him only in anthologies. He is powerful there, but in the Complete Poems we
find a universe of many recesses, and few readers have found their way into all
of these. Some of them are very narrow, it would seem, and out of the ordinary
way; in the language of criticism they might even be dismissed as little
"conceits"; but the narrowest of them is likely to lead further in than we
suspected, toward the central room where Frost's understanding is at home.
The sign that he is at home is that his language is plain; it is the human
vernacular, as simple on the surface as monosyllables can make it. Strangely
enough this is what makes some readers say he is hard--he is always referring
to things he does not name, at any rate in the long words they suppose proper.
He seems to be saying less than he does; it is only when we read close and
listen well, and think between the sentences, that we become aware of what his
poems are about. What they are about is the important thing--more important, we
are tempted to think, than the words themselves, though it was the words that
brought the subject on. The subject is the world: a huge and ruthless place
which men will never quite understand, any more than they will understand
themselves; and yet it is the same old place that men have always been trying
to understand, and to this extent it is as familiar as an old boot or an old
back door, lovable for what it is in spite of the fact that it does not speak
up and identify itself in the idiom of abstraction. Frost is a philosopher, but
his ideas are behind his poems, not in them--buried well, for us to guess at if
we please.
2
We can guess that his own philosopher is Heraclitus, who said: "If you do not
expect it, you will not find out the unexpected. . . .Let us not make random
guesses about the greatest things....The attunement of the world is of opposite
tensions, as is that of the harp or bow. . . .What agrees
disagrees. . . . Strife is
justice. . . . The road up and the road down is one and the same. . . . The beginning
and the end are common . . . . A dry soul is wisest and best. . . . For men to get all
they wish is not the better thing. . . . It is the concern of all men to know
themselves and to be sober-minded. . . . A fool is wont to be in a flutter at every
word." Yet the guess could be wrong, for Frost does not say these things,
however strongly his poems suggest them. The suggestion may be nothing but a
coincidence: the two men see the same world, and its end is like its beginning;
down is up and up is down, the new is old and the old is new, and strife is
justice.
At least we know nothing of justice if we know nothing of strife. It is tension
that maintains our equilibrium; if opposites could not feel each other in the
dark there would be no possibility of light. Good fences make good
neighbors--each knows where he is and what confines him. Without a wall between
them, each would confuse himself with the other and cease to exist; or if there
were fighting, it would be too close--a mere scramble, in which neither party
could be made out. Distance is a good thing, and so is admitted difference,
even when it sounds like hostility. For there can be a harmony of separate
sounds that seem to be at war with another, but one sound is like no sound at
all, or else it is like death. Let each thing know its limits even as it
strains to pass them. No limit will ever be passed, since indeed it is a limit.
Which does not mean that we shall never stare across the void between ourselves
and others. People, for instance, who look at the sea--
They cannot look out far,
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?
It is human to want to know more than we can. But it is most human to know what
"cannot" means.
Frost never says these things either; his poems only suggest them, and suggest
further things that contradict them. His muse, like the truth, is cantankerous;
it keeps on turning up fresh evidence against itself. And yet we cannot miss
the always electric presence of opposition--two things or persons staring at
each other across some kind of wall. Frost has no interest in doors that do not
lock, in friends who do not know they are enemies too, or in enemies who do not
know how to pretend they are friends, and even believe it as far as things can
go. His drumlin woodchuck sits forth from his habitation like one who invites
the world to come and visit him; but he never forgets the two-door burrow at
his back. So Frost himself can reflect upon the triple bronze that guards him
from infinity: his skin, his house, and his country. If he is greatly
interested in the stars, and no poet is more so, the reason is that they are
another world which he can see from this one, and accept or challenge as the
mood of the moment dictates. They burn in their places as he burns in his, and
it is just as well that neither fire can consume the other; yet each of them is
a fire, and secretly longs to mingle with its far neighbor.
The great thing about man for Frost is that he has the power of standing still
where he is. He is on the earth, and it is only one of many places, and perhaps
every other place is better. But this is his place, where in spite of his
longing to leave it he can stay till his time comes. Like any other
distinguished person, Frost lives in two worlds at once: this one, and another
one which only makes it more attractive. The superiority of the other one is
what proves the goodness of the one we have, which doggedly we keep on loving,
as doggedly it tolerates and educates us if we let it do so. Wisdom is enduring
it exactly as it is; courage is being familiar with it and afraid of it in the
right proportions; temperance is the skill to let it be; and justice is the
knowledge that between it and you there will always be a lover's quarrel, never
to die into cold silence and never to be made up. The main thing is the mutual
respect.
Not that Frost wants us to think he knows everything.
If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes
Will keep my talk from getting overwise,
I'm not the one for putting off the proof.
Let it be overwhelming, off a roof
And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust,
And blind me to a standstill if it must.
His vision is the comic vision that doubts even itself. But it remembers all it
can of what it always knew, and rests, in so far as the mind can ever rest, on
the sum of its memories. The comic genius ignores nothing that seems true,
however inconvenient it may be for something else that seems as true.
The groundwork of all faith is human woe. . . .
There's nothing but injustice to be had,
No choice is left a poet you might add,
But how to take the curse, tragic or comic.
The choice of Frost is clear. His humor, an indispensable thing in any great
poet, is in his case the sign that he has decided to see everything that he can
see. No man of course sees all the world, but the poorest man is the one who
blinds himself. The man with his eyes open has the best chance to understand
things, including those things his ancestors have said. The minister says of
the old lady who used to live in The Black Cottage:--
One wasn't long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for,
It wasn't just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldn't have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrases--so removed
From the world's view today of all those things.
That's a hard mystery of Jefferson's.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn't true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it. . . .
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
There it is. One couldn't say half so much if one were tragic.
Copyright © 1951 by Mark Van Doren. Permission to reproduce granted
by Charles and John Van Doren, executors. All rights
reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; June, 1951; "Robert Frost's America"; Volume 187, No. 6;
pages 32-34.
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