Robert Frost: His Own Tradition

ROBERT FROST more than spans in his lifetime the distance between nineteenthand twentiethcentury poetry, and yet he is more a poet of his age than many younger poets writing today. Though he was born in 1874, his verse was not published in book form until 1915, and since then he has kept even with his times, if not frequently ahead of them. Frost, in a queer way, is a tradition unto himself. While his ideas owe much to the stoical doctrines of antiquity and to the writings of Emerson and others who expressed their aspirations for the American republic, his style and tone owe little to any other poet. Frost has created his own style in English verse — a style as distinct as T. S. Eliot’s in the twentieth century or Milton’s in the seventeenth.

While other poets, moreover, have found specific guidance and refreshment in re-establishing contact with the poetry of the past, Frost has not changed or looked back, but, in his own words, written more than fifty years ago, has grown “Only more sure of all I thought was true.” He is surely the most independent of our poets and stands apart from obvious poetic tradition. Yet who would venture to say that he is untraditional? His work is rooted neither in poetic convention nor in colloquial speech, but in the movement of outlanguage, in the rhythms of our talk, in the innate sound and structure of English, as well as in the verse forms that have taken shape in our language over the centuries.

It cannot help but be odd to think of Frost as a contemporary — not only in years but in preoccupations— of Grover Cleveland as well as of John F. Kennedy; and it seems strange that a poetic career which has continued after the death of Dylan Thomas should be the lifework of a man who was attending Dartmouth in the year that Tennyson and Whitman died. Yet these are accidents of the calendar. It is no accident that Frost continues to embody in his verse as subtle a spirit as that of anyone else writing. The times have a way of catching up with themselves. Frost’s recent poems are often topical, but you would not be making a bad bet if you gambled on the timelessness of at least a few.

Things will have to settle down for a while, of course, before the question of Robert Frost’s place in the history of our poetry can become certain, partly because his long career has made him the contemporary of so many and such disparate poets, and partly because he is so much his own man. He differs, too, from his contemporaries of this generation not only because he stands above them but also because he stands, in a way, ahead of them, looking forward rather than back. His new collection, In the Clearing (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $4.00), is his first in fifteen years. It contains thirty-eight new poems, two of them quite long. No other poems being written today resemble them in tone or rhythm, and few have the power to stretch the reader’s mind in just the way that these do.

The longest, most central poem is called “Kitty Hawk,” and, more ambitious than his youthful contemporaries, Frost has here attempted what most poets would shy from — to understand and make lyrical the aspiration at the heart of science. In some five hundred lines he reflects, in shifting contexts, on the impulse that occasioned man’s first vault from the earth in the Wrights’ biplane on the sands of Kitty Hawk,

and summons, in prophetic terms, the history and force of man’s inspired wrestle with nature over the centuries past and in the years ahead:

It is a most extraordinary poem, and, in my opinion, one of the major poems in Frost’s work. The poem is a little forbidding in a way peculiar to Frost’s habit of “fooling” about things — it sounds trivial on the surface.

He is a poet who has always tried (sometimes so successfully as to be misunderstood) to disguise the largeness of his own poetic statements. Though “Kitty Hawk” is perhaps the highest flying “skylark” he has ever written, he conceals his intention within an apparently rigid, rhymed structure of three-beat trochaic lines — a line so difficult to vary that, since the time of Skelton, it has seldom been used in English except for short, light lyrics. Frost seems to have left that the broadest theme demanded the most constricted form, and therefore required himself to modulate his rhythm across the tight confines of this meter and yet keep plenty of sweep for such trumpet blasts as:

The secret of bringing off so ambitious, not to say so seemingly impossible, a trick as this lies in Frost’s profound fascination with the behavior of rhythm and meter as much as in the determination to master the conflict between form and substance and make them one. In another long poem Frost digresses:

Regular verse springs from the strain of rhythm Upon a metre, strict or loose iambic. From that strain comes the expression strains of music

And throughout this collection the serious play with metrics is part of the poet’s game. Some rhythms are spare and bald, others flow in the unmistakable accents of the poet who years ago invented his own brand of blank verse and left his stamp on it forever:

MIST: I don’t believe the sleepers in this house

Know where they are.

SMOKE: They’ve been here long enough

To push the woods back from around the house And part them in the middle with a path ....

Other poems take on the quizzical, deceptive, facetious manner that is more common in Frost’s work of the last twenty years. Here are the opening lines from one of his best jokes:

Some of the comic poems (which are, of course, never purely comic in Frost’s work) take on a silliness, a reaching for the unconsidered laugh that you may find disappointing, but most of them contain a great deal more than meets the eye, like this rueful remark about the iron that goes into tools and into weapons:

Robert Frost has taken the privilege of age in this volume; he has turned his back, for the most part, on the soft lyrical manner of many of his earlier poems and has set aside the details of nature in favor of nature in the large, in favor of political and philosophical speculation. One of the finest poems is an engaging blank-verse fable called “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” Throughout them all, however, no matter how speculative they are, the reader hears rather than sees the truly independent personality of this poet, putting a good face on the rocky reality of the world, calling from himself the strength to summon a smile at our confusion, to cope with the terrible moments of inner darkness, to temper our ineluctable stubbornness, to celebrate the rewards that nature offers us for being ourselves. At the age of eightyeight such a confrontation of reality shows at least no less courage than it would in a younger man; and if Frost’s work as a whole reveals that it is easier for him to confront some orders of reality than others, yet his most recent collection shows him still courageous in the face of the same losing odds as ever. “Forgive, O Lord,” he asks, apparently blithely,