Robert Frost: Flic Work of Knowing

Oxford, $11.95

“There is a Frost who has been missed, almost lost, because of the lack of intensity and expectation brought to his poetry by those who know him best,” writes Richard Poirier, whose book is the most resourceful and penetrating reading of Frost’s work yet given us.

Poirier’s brilliantly attentive study shows how Frost’s voice infused his poetry, and it identifies the focal points around which, slowly hut very surely, he achieved form. One such focus: “He was always in some sense running away in the expectation that the road would somehow lead him back to a more acceptable ‘home,'” even though “. . . the kinds of dangers Frost confronts in his imaginary journeys seem at times to have a prepared itinerary.” Here Poirier uncovers the deeply banked sexual energy that fired so many of Frost’s poems of exploration and discovery. Even the famous “momentary stay against confusion” can be read, and profitably, with sexual connotations.

Another of Poirier’s revelations, equally important, lies in the relationship of work to form. “Frost’s poetry of work is quite directly about the correlative work of writing a poem and of reading it. . . . Manual labor in Frost is often an image of the effort to penetrate matter.” In fact, “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”

Admirers of Frost who have long been irritated by the simplistic way in which most readers skim the cream off his work, while throwing away the nourishing milk of it, have cause to be grateful for Poirier’s scrupulous attention to Frost’s singularity. “His unique difficulty is in the demand that we be common and literary all at once.”No reader is likely to agree with all of Poirier’s readings. But while the ghost of Frost may, in his own words, be taking pleasure “ages and ages hence in telling it with a sigh,” Poirier’s fresh, energetic, and complex approach may well rescue Frost and “make all the difference.” —Peter Davison