IX. “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL”

Some readers,⁠[12] no doubt, were surprised when the poet told them in his last book, New Hampshire:

There had been no protest, no satire, no revolt to be noticed in his poetry. On the contrary, here was quietude, good humor and a certain manly acceptance of circumstance. Yet this author who never whines, who never seems savagely to resent the present state of affairs, this author considers himself to have been writing against the world in general! The surprise was salutary, for the shock directed attention to the implications of Frost’s confession, the implications of his poetry in toto, and a study of these implications will lead to the quite sudden realization that the purest classical poet of America today is Robert Frost.

With Frost in the field as a classicist, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, conspicuous rivals for the title, begin to look like something else. Eliot’s poetry, for example, has romantic elements: his sentimental melancholy and wistfulness, the dandyism and obfuscation that cut him off from a more general appeal. Pound likewise seems to be hewing no closer to a norm of thought, feeling and conduct: he does not appear to be making a bridge from the special to the general experience, to be achieving the “grandeur of generality”: he is given up to the irritations and discomforts of a sensitive person. Yet a romanticist tinge does not make a romanticist and au fond Eliot and Pound are nearer to classicism than they are to romanticism. Still there is an important difference in kind between them and Robert Frost.

It is this: Pound and Eliot are in the main loyal to the principle of authority, whereas Frost depends entirely upon personal discovery. Pound and Eliot give allegiance to literary tradition as a governing body, seeking only to produce work that, while molded by tradition, still has sufficient novelty of conception and style to alter somewhat the existing body of letters. Frost is unconcerned with such a theory of dictatorship, adjustment and modification: he does not set up a literary authority to serve. Like the intelligent Greek, he is simply by nature rather positive, critical and experimental. If he manifests the classical virtues, if he achieves a nature, an imitation of it, a probability and a decorum which can suggest those cultivated by the classical world, it is because he has discovered them in, through and by his own direct experience. In comparison with him, Eliot and Pound appear formalistic, and the distinction between them and Frost is the distinction between neo-classicism and classicism.

It is important to see that the classicism of Robert Frost has been evolved in a simplified world, the world of the New England farmer. Such a farmer has a settled routine of living dependent upon the seasons. He leads a village life in which most of the human factors at work have the appearance of being tangible and measurable. The intricacies of commerce and industry, the distress wrought by machines, the flow of vast crowds, the diversity of appeals of a great city, do not reach him. Churches are what they were, intellectual currents do not disturb, and science, arch-upsetter of former values, finds no opening to intrude. Frost tells of a hugger-mugger farmer who burnt his house in order to buy a telescope with the insurance money. He gazed with an unspoiled wonder at the heavens. But for science at large the attitude is indifference.

In Frost’s New England then many of the complex tormenting questions that have arisen since the small city and agrarian communities of old Greece have been lopped away from the problem of living.

With this simplified world given, Frost has built his art, as was pointed out in the preceding chapter, upon the foundation of observation, and it is by positive and critical observation of things conceived as discrete that Frost has discovered his Nature.

The end reached by observation as a method, whether it is a poet or a scientist who employs it, is dualism,—that is, a set of axioms and laws founded on distinctions. The distinctions are based on appearances and both they and appearances are treated as reasonably final data. Of course, something inscrutable remains beyond, “something must be left to God,” as Frost says, but the fundamental truth or error of dualism is not plumbed. At any rate, whether or not the real world is dualistic, certainly the apparent world is.

So in Frost’s poetry we are consistently struck by his acceptance of the dualistic world and his actual contentment with his lot of joy and love “dashed with pain and weariness and fault.” Nature we feel as a sort of friendly antagonist, dangerously strong sometimes, but on the whole a fair opponent. In combat with her one cannot laze or cheat: but honest struggle brings fair returns. Especially is the line between Nature and Man always present in Frost’s mind, though never insisted upon. For example, he spends no time dilating on the aloofness or indifference of nature to man. Such a poem as The Need for Being Versed in Country Things illustrates very well the sense of demarcation between man and nature which Frost preserves, his acceptance of nature as lovely and fair, and his awareness of her unconcern for man’s disasters. In this poem we hear of the burning of a farmhouse and the decay of its barn. The birds nest in the latter.

Frost’s poetry contains no taint of the “pathetic fallacy” of the romanticist which in these days is almost sufficient ground for suspecting Frost’s classical tendencies.

The man that Frost treats is situated in a tamed wilderness and is disciplined by it. In New Hampshire the mountains are not high enough, there is nothing extravagant or unduly wild about nature, nor are the people of Frost’s poems grandiose or expansive. Their bodies have been contracted and hardened by sweating toil, their emotions are rock-like, and their minds achieve a good dogged horse sense.

Out of a settled social framework, an honest necessary struggle for existence, and a fair amount of well-being, something like a representative man can emerge. There are balances and checks to trim down his uniqueness while at the same time there is permitted a moderate scope for his emotional and reflective life. In such a state the acquisitive impulse gets no favoring head start and instead of haste we find reticence and deliberation characteristic.

Thus Frost discovers what Professor Irving Babbitt would call a sound model for imitation. Professor Babbitt has labored to show that imitation as the ancients understood it was a fresh and imaginative process. It is just so with Robert Frost. His choice of words, his rhymes, always escape the commonplace: we are awakened by the exact perceptions of a new discoverer. But the more important point is that this stirring-up is followed by a conviction of the naturalness or the obviousness of Frost’s statements. Why, we murmur, has this not been said before? Again we are repeating Poe’s useful test question for the workings of the imagination.

One cannot be certain just what content the term, the imagination, contains today. Modern psychology has cleared away some of the rank underbrush which has cluttered our view of the imagination, though it has planted other bushes to confuse us at the same time: but at least we habitually distinguish imagination from fancy. Perhaps by pure imagination we mean something not far from a total sweeping flash-like view taken by a human being at unusual moments. At any rate Frost’s imagination is based on the view of a man who is using more of his equipment than most of the moderns do. The meaning is simply that Frost does not seem to write almost exclusively from one of three centers,—from the intellect or the emotions or the instinctive center,—but from a sort of rude partnership of all three. The conditions of his erstwhile livelihood (farming) brought into at least partially coördinated play his body and his emotions, and in addition he is capable of thought. In this growth he is again a parallel, though distant, to the ancient writers, and gives a start to the speculation as to how far the conditions of modern mechanized life throw into disuse portions of the necessary equipment of a fully aware human being. Certainly, Frost’s lines give one more of an impression that a whole man is writing them than do the sharply intellectualized or bubbling emotional lines of most of his contemporaries.

The moot interpretation in the doctrine of imitation has always been the meaning to be attached to universals. One may rightly be skeptical as to the coincidence of the views of the idealists with the original meaning of Aristotle. But whether Aristotle is interpreted idealistically or not, Frost’s use of universals arising from a welter of particulars is covered in the minimum definition that could be offered. His poems, Mending Wall and The Grindstone, are prime examples: in these poems the particulars are vividly and concretely seen and they can stand the most rigid literal interpretation. Yet no less present and vivid in them is a wider significance or rather there are wider significances. Thus, among other things conveyed in The Grindstone, we are deeply aware that a sense of the inertia of nature has been induced. We are aware of the aching strain of making nature malleable and the tear and wear made on the straining human being by time. For readers of Frost it is not necessary to add that this creation of universal significance is accomplished directly without an atom of didacticism.

Although the doctrines of nature and imitation as exemplified in the works of Robert Frost have been so briefly dwelt upon, does it seem requisite to develop the contiguous statement that Frost is an observer of the law of probability and the law of measure or proportion or decorum? It is simply stating an easily recognizable fact which any reader may verify by going through Frost’s writings that it is the probable sequence and not the improbable but possible sequence that he develops. He is a poet of the customary in man and nature, not the exploiter of the remarkably arresting and wonderful. Nor does his feeling for decorous proportion require argument beyond saying that he does not commit the mistake of the neo-classicists who have been properly accused by Professor Babbitt of confusing the language of the nobility with the nobility of language. Frost’s people are humble, but they speak a language and utter feelings appropriate to them: they are restrained by conventions which are inherently worthy of respect, and the result is decorum in the true sense.

The study of these considerations should explain why Frost declares that he has written several books against the world in general. For since Rousseau romanticism has been in the ascendency. A new conception of nature as impulse and temperament has supplanted the old nature as a strict model, a “return to nature” has come to mean “letting one’s self go.” For imitation has been substituted the self-expression of the spontaneous original genius, for the law of probabilities has been exchanged the law of wonderful possibilities, and for decorum we have the doctrine of expansiveness. Science has abetted the growth of naturalistic emotionalism, and neither humanism nor religion has been able to stop the tide of writing designed for the expression of uniqueness rather than of generality.

Against this efflorescence of the interior world, the neo-classicists have striven in vain, for their position does not rest solidly enough upon experience and personal discovery. They have been debilitated by the blight of Scaliger’s rhetorical question, why imitate nature when Virgil is a second nature?

Frost however quietly takes his place beside the antique Greeks and against the modern world. He proves that a species of classicism resting on personal discovery is still possible.

Pictorially, Frost’s apartness from contemporary currents is striking.... He came on our literary scene, this intensified and intelligent and subtilized “ordinary man,” in very queer company. There was Carl Sandburg with his love of the blur, his dreamy slothfulness, his drifting impressionism, there was Vachel Lindsay, sentimental, picturesque and declamatory, there was Amy Lowell, shallow and decorative, there was Edgar Lee Masters, protestant and disillusioned, and these were the poetic vanguard of Frost’s generation. In the novel Theodore Dreiser was working up a public appetite for naturalism, and Sherwood Anderson, recoiling in disgust from American business life, was starting toward his present trust in objectless wandering and instinctive laughter. Romantics all, and so were the new critics, J. E. Spingarn with his gusty estheticism, H. L. Mencken, braying out his prejudices, and Van Wyck Brooks with his humanitarian approach. Frost came on with this troop, and they hailed him as a brother. He was contemporary with them in age and public appearance, and a mistake was made: it was taken for granted that he belonged in attitude and spirit and general aim to the so-called “new poetry.”

Today the Middle Generation is beginning to recede whereas Robert Frost emerges more and more and as a poet differing at the root in substance, craft and direction from the romantic movement of the last decade. Where is his kinship in America? Not with that other New England poet of parts, Edwin Arlington Robinson, for Robinson exemplifies a withering and retrospective New England and Frost exemplifies the New England that is still sturdily alive. No, it is rather in the Eldest Generation in American letters that one finds a similar temper and approach to Frost’s. One imagines that the elder critics, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, casting skeptical eyes over our literary life today, might single out Frost and say: “Here is a poet who has not succumbed to the ‘law for thing’: here is a poet who has not bleached himself with neo-classical dogma: here is a poet who sings afresh in the great classical tradition.”

Ultimately More and Babbitt diverge, as More seeks to sustain the religious tradition of classicism and Babbitt to revitalize the humanistic tradition. It is the latter tradition that includes Robert Frost.

For speaking in terms of psychology rather than of literature, what distinguishes Frost is simply good sense. Good sense avoids extremes both in what it denies and in what it accepts. It does not, for instance, deny the bulky evidence of the senses and the man of good sense, therefore, will not accept the lies of idealism. The external world he will try to see and feel and otherwise sense as clearly and tangibly as he can: “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” At the same time the man of good sense will not in his acceptance of the practical instinctive fact as such fly to an extremely narrow materialism and atheism. Something inscrutable and ordering very likely remains: there are overtones in the observer of the fact that he cannot ignore. Thus, he neither denies God nor the world: he accepts the latter as demonstrated and the former as probable or at least possible.

What he does trust is his own experience (having good sense he knows that there is nothing else to trust) and his own experience happens in Frost’s case to be mediatory in character. Being intelligent, being deeply emotional, being obliged to make terms with practical life, the man of good sense casts up a rough balance of the three aspects of his life and travels, so far as he is permitted so to do, in the center of the highway.

A fair-minded description of a poet ought to be in itself a placement and therefore a criticism of that poet. If Frost’s qualities pertain to good sense, we must not expect him to write on the religious level. In The Trial By Existence, one of the poems in A Boy’s Will, he took up a religious theme, the gathering in heaven of the souls ready for birth, “the trial by existence named, the obscuration upon earth,” and the conclusion reached is sensible. As Llewellyn Jones has stated it, it is “a recognition that suffering is always in terms of what we are, not an alien something hitting us by chance from without but somehow or other implicit in our very constitution.” But The Trial By Existence is exceptional in theme and treatment in all of Frost’s range.

Nor must we expect from Frost that rarest and most difficult of virtues that goes by the prosaic name of commonsense. Commonsense is a community of judgments, intellectual, emotional and practical, upon life. It is an exact balance demanding the utmost strenuousness to achieve and the perfection and harmony of our faculties. Good sense is a gift: commonsense must be deliberately arrived at, as witness the efforts of Socrates.

There are certain all-important questions which only the greatest literature raises and attempts to answer, and these questions it is not appropriate to ask of every poet. Frost makes no pretense of great inclusiveness and great profundities. The canniness of good sense forbids such rash over-reachings of one’s self. But what we have always a right to demand is that the poet should be skilled in his craft, alive in his sensibility, and at least sensible in his conclusions. Robert Frost is all of these, and to those questions that it is proper to ask of him, those questions, that is, that are covered in his own experience, he returns always an answer in true currency equal to the demand.

His comprehensive answer is the natural (not romantic and not religious) vision of life, and it is natural in the sense that it is fitting to man as he is. “The poetry of a true real natural vision of life,” said Goethe, “demands descriptive power of the highest degree, rendering a poet’s pictures so life-like that they become actualities to every reader,” and that is what Robert Frost, man of good sense and fine sensibility, has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the long and noble course of American literature.