APPENDIX A Selected British Opinion on Robert Frost

The following quotations are taken from a little leaflet distributed by David Nutt. Historically, the leaflet is interesting for showing the quick captivation of English critics by North of Boston. But more than that, the English writers appear to have succeeded better in stating the emotional character of Frost’s verse than the Americans who have undertaken the same task.—G. B. M.

... A unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of compression and more lightness, unity and breadth. The language ranges from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack of violence make the unaffected verses look like prose, except that the sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, The Black Cottage, and The Wood Pile, do we realize that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious tenderness.—The English Review.

... To start with, Mr. Frost is an American poet who noticeably stands out against tradition.... We find very little of the traditional manner of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work; scarcely anything, indeed, save a peculiar adaption, in his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse.... It elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation does. It is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words—to put them, that is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected virtue comes out of them; it is, in fact, poetry composed, as far as possible, in a language of things.... We have heard a great deal lately of the desirability of getting back again into touch with the living vigors of speech. This usually means matters of vocabulary and idiom; and Mr. Frost certainly makes a racy use of New England vernacular. But he goes further; he seems trying to capture and hold within metrical patterns the very tones of speech—the rise and fall, the stressed pauses and little hurries, of spoken language. The kind of metrical modulation to which we are most accustomed—the modulations intended for decorations or purely esthetic expressiveness—will scarcely be found in his verses. But, instead, we have some novel inflections of metre which can only be designed to reproduce in verse form the actual shape of the sound of whole sentences. As a matter of technique, the attempt is extraordinarily interesting.... Naturally, this technical preoccupation bears strongly on the general form of Mr. Frost’s poetry. He uses almost entirely dialogue or soliloquy; he must have somebody talking. We might call these poems psychological idylls. Within their downright knowledge, their vivid observation, and (more important) their rich enjoyment of all kinds of practical life, within their careful rendering into metre of customary speech, the impulse is always psychological—to set up, in some significant attitude, a character or a conflict of characters. The ability to do this can turn a situation which is not very interesting at first into something attractive, as when a rather protracted discourse of two distant relations on genealogy gradually merges into a shy, charming conversation of lovers; or, in a more striking instance, when the rambling speech of an overtasked farmer’s wife works up into a dreadful suggestion of inherited lunacy. If, as we have said, we cannot quarrel with this deliberate method of exposition, it can scarcely be questioned that Mr. Frost is at his best when he can dispense with these structural preliminaries as in the admirable soliloquy of a farmer mending his wall, or in the exquisite comedy of the professor sharing his bedroom with a talkative newspaper-agent, or in the stark, formidable tragedy called Home Burial. Though it is difficult to state absolutely the essential quality of Mr. Frost’s poetry, it is not difficult to suggest a comparison. When poetry changes by development rather than by rebellion, it is likely to return on itself. Poetry in Mr. Frost exhibits almost the identical desires and impulses we see in the “bucolic” poems of Theocritus.—The Nation.

... There is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the least suggesting that Mr. Frost should write vers libre; I am only saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman—But Mr. Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground, and much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman gave the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It is another form of the New England conscience.... He does give you a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of wildnesses—of an America that really matters far more than the land of endless trickery, make-believe, and lying and empty loquacity. That is the face that—Heaven knows why!—America seems to like to present to these parts of the world; but those are the least desirable features. Anyhow, Mr. Frost has called in on us to redress the balance of that particular New World.... He is not a remains of English culture grown provincial and negligible. He is not, in fact, a sentimentalist. Not to be a sentimentalist is to be already half-way towards being a poet—and Mr. Frost goes the other half-way as well, though to describe what that other half is beats me. Here is the little poem—rhymed for a change—in which, as it were, he proffers his invitation to read North of Boston.

Why is that beautiful and friendly and touching and all sorts of things? I don’t know. I suppose, just because Mr. Frost is a poet.—Ford Madox Hueffer in The Outlook.

This is an original book which will raise the thrilling question, What is poetry?... Few that read it through will have been as much astonished by any American since Whitman.... He has trusted his conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply.... In his first book, A Boy’s Will, there is this piece, entitled Mowing:—

Those last six lines do more to define Mr. Frost than anything I can say. He never will have “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf”: he can make fact “the sweetest dream.” Naturally, then, when his writing crystallizes, it is often in a terse, plain phrase, such as the proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” or—

or

But even this kind of characteristic detail is very much less important than the main result, which is a richly homely thing beyond the grasp of any power except poetry. It is a beautiful achievement, and I think a unique one, as perfectly Mr. Frost’s own as his vocabulary, the ordinary English speech of a man accustomed to poetry and philosophy, more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even in a letter, almost entirely lacking the emphatic hackneyed forms of journalists and other rhetoricians, and possessing a kind of healthy, natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats’.—Edward Thomas in The New Weekly.

In its quiet and unsensational way, Mr. Robert Frost’s North of Boston is the most challenging book of verse that has been published for some time.... Mr. Frost has turned the living speech of men and women into poetry.... To me it seems that Home Burial and The Fear are the most absolute achievements in the book; but that may only be because they come nearest to the kind of thing I wish to see done in poetry; and the other pieces in the book all contain notable qualities, and qualities which have been too long absent from English verse. Mr. Frost has a keen, humorous sense of character.... Tales that might be mere anecdotes in the hands of another poet take on a universal significance, because of their native veracity and truth to local character.—Wilfrid Wilson Gibson in The Bookman.