VIII. “A SENSIBILITIST”

The poetry of Robert Frost is of one piece with his life and even with his physical appearance. Like the latter, it makes the impression of solid substance from which mounts a lyric flame whose light confers meaning on the mass. And it resembles his life in that the extraordinary in the shape of event or experience is usually quite absent: the materials are restricted and common. “Common in experience: uncommon in writing” is the true formula for practically all of Frost’s poetry.

Whence arises his distinction in expression? The answer must first be made in terms of sensibility. The art of Robert Frost is built upon the foundation of observation: it is the poetry of observation, an emotional response, lyrical, dramatic, humorous, tragic, to what he has seen and heard.

This is the type of sheer observation that abounds in Frost’s works, and one reads line after line that requires no help for vividness from specially constructed images or even from simile and metaphor which are in their turn composed of other definitely observed things.

The temperament of Frost, as befits an observer, is passive and plastic, and his impressionability depends in the first place for its intensity upon the keenness of his ear and his eye. In fact, his style can almost be entirely explained by saying that he is a remarkably close listener and a very sharp see-er.

Take his versification. What is it but a disciplined and ingrained habit of listening to the tones of speech in New England from the time he was fascinated by Charley Hall’s talk back in Windham to the present? The poems, although they adhere to the molds of blank verse and rhymed lyrics, are “talk poems.” The feat has been that of conforming living speech to metrical forms by taking advantage of the flexibility inherent in all metrical forms, so that Llewellyn Jones, a conservative student of versification, is right when he says:

“Technically, it is the outstanding feature of all Mr. Frost’s verse that he makes it speak in human tones. He has never written a line of free verse that does not scan—if the reader knows how to scan English verse as it should be scanned and not as Latin or Greek verse should be scanned. The reason some people have thought Mr. Frost’s verse very licentiate and why others have said that he writes free verse is because he subordinates his metrical pattern to the cadences of human speech. His metrical ictus is always there but it is not always emphasized, and he is never afraid to let a logical or word accent come in a weak place metrically. His verse is at the opposite pole from that of Swinburne, who gallops to an anapaestic tune in a manner which is quite alien to human speech. On the other hand: ‘I shan’t be gone long.—You come too’ is pure and unadulterated human speech which just happens to fit into the metrical scheme of the poem. Only, such a thing ‘just happens’ so often in Mr. Frost’s work that we know that it does not just happen at all but is the work of an exceptionally sensitive and gifted poet. And indeed Mr. Frost is so sure of the natural speech-tones in his work that he says that no one who reads his verse naturally can read it wrong. But on the other hand those who read it with a preconceived notion in their minds of how a verse should scan often find it a little difficult.”

Frost himself settled the matter when he said to Miss Sergeant:

“They call me a dialect poet.... Not so you’d notice it. It was never my aim to keep to any special speech unliterary, vernacular or slang. I lay down no law to myself there. What I have been after from the first, consciously and unconsciously, is tones of voice. I’ve wanted to write down certain brute throat noises so that no one could miss them in my sentences. I have been guilty of speaking of sentences as a mere notation for indicating them. I have counted on doubling the meaning of my sentences with them. They have been my observation and my subject matter.

“I know what I want to do most. I don’t do it often enough. In The Runaway I added the moral at the end just for the pleasure of the aggrieved tone of voice. There are high spots in respect of vocal image in Blueberries:

It is plain to see why Frost calls himself an “anti-vocabularian,” for the speech materials he attends to are limited in number of words. But there is a gain here: the right limitation of vocabulary will produce honesty of vocabulary, will insure, that is, some personal content in experience for the words one employs, and this matching of vocabulary and personal experience gives force.

If Frost’s ear gives a natural life to his verse, his eye gives it a clarity, a definiteness, a firmness of outline that produces a strong feeling of actuality. Edward Garnett in his essay on Frost lifted out from his better known poems a number of images and held them toward the reader for inspection of their purity and hardness. We may take a recently published poem, Once by the Pacific,⁠[11] with the same purpose in mind, the more so as this poem lies on Frost’s usual plane of excellence and is not quite among his best.

Here we see rows of waves growing taller as we gaze out from the shore, and beyond above the fitfully glowing horizon the strands of clouds disordered by the wind. (“Great waves looked over others coming in.... The clouds were low and hairy Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.”) Already the scene is massive, and we are being prepared for the introduction of a cosmic word in the last line. The rest of the poem is devoted to heightening this anticipatory mood. We stand on the sand which is backed by a cliff which is backed by a continent: thus the scale of the struggle is enlarged to huge dimensions. The falling darkness of one night is similarly magnified: “not only a night, an age.” And then the poem is ready to leave its symbolic frame altogether in the last two lines. “There would be more than ocean water broken Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.”

It is this simplicity and coherence of imagery that creates the concreteness of Frost’s vision. At the same time, grandiose though the theme is, the language is utterly like talk: the waves “thought of doing something to the shore that water never did to land before ... you could not tell, and yet it looked as if the sand was lucky” ... God will say, “Put out the light.”

If Frost is thus faithful in the use of his own eyes and his own ears, it follows, since they cannot be universal in scope, that he will write about his own locality. He will be obliged to be American, New England, indigenous, to be an “environmentalist,” to do things with the “native touch” Edward Garnett spoke of, because the very process of his writing poetry commits him to it.

But this is not all the story. The third conspicuous element in his style is his sense of situation, his sense of drama. This, too, has been often illustrated by the critics of Frost, and Edward Garnett has quoted in connection with it one of Goethe’s offhand remarks: “A lively feeling of situations and an aptitude to describe them makes the poet.” Frost has qualified in this way many times—in The Death of the Hired Man, in Fear, in The Witch of Coos, among many others. And he has given us one “straight” example of drama in the one act play, A Way Out, printed in the Seven Arts.

The scene is “a bachelor’s kitchen bedroom in a farmhouse with a table spread for supper. Someone rattles the door-latch from outside. Asa Gorrill, in loose slippers, shuffles directly to the door and unbolts it. A stranger opens the door for himself and walks in” and takes a survey. “Huh,” he says. “So this is what it’s like. Seems to me you lock up early. What you afraid of?” And Asa replies in a piping drawl: “’Fraid of nothing, because I ain’t got nothing—nothing’t anybody wants.”

The situation has taken form at once: Asa Gorrill, the queer hermit, on the defensive, and the intruder, hurried, rudely questioning and commanding, mysterious. The dialog quickly develops both the characters and the situation. The stranger investigates the room and the old man’s means as though perhaps his motive might be robbery—in case his suspicion of miserly hoardings finds evidence to go upon. He hints of violent action, of a necessity for hurry. He is aggressive, reckless, a factory hand in some sort of trouble. Asa trembles, wishes he were off, doesn’t dare to resist, unwillingly answers the questions that build up a picture of his daily life—when he goes to market and what for, how he carries in his logs, what he believes in, what his history has been.

Then the stranger reveals he has committed a murder and is in flight. He was seen once during the day by a wagonload of women. He insists on donning some of the hermit’s extra clothes and mimicking his behavior. The proposal is apparently that he hide here in the house and take turns with the hermit in “stretching his legs” abroad.

Dressed to resemble the old man, the murderer then drags Asa round and round in a game to get themselves dizzy. “And then when we’re down,” he says, “I want you should wait till you can see straight before you speak and try to tell which is which and which is t’other.”

This is the high dramatic moment of the play as they fall moaning from their whirling and each accuses the other of the crime. The weak old man faints from terror in the excitement, the stranger clubs him with his fist and drags him out. The room is empty for a time.

A posse calls and the sham hermit fools it. Its members pass on. It is “a way out.”

It will be noted that this play has both literary and theatrical form. The two are not the same: for instance, Eugene O’Neill, generally rated the best American playwright, often fails to produce a coincidence of what is visually effective with what is psychologically and dramatically determined. That Frost has done; the form stands up on the printed page as well as on the boards: the psychological springs of action are revealed: the writing is terse and necessary.

Needless to say, these elements of his style—the gift for tones of voice, the aptitude for concrete images, and the sense of the dramatic—would not suffice if they did not give rise to full-bodied, vital and corresponding emotions. Robert Frost is the type—the pure poet. The outline of his life has shown that he has all of the poet’s traditional impracticality, though in his case there is no indulgence in utopian flights. Now, on the basis of his poems, we can add that he is emotionally centered, and the world is to him predominantly a source of emotion. It is his sensibility, and not ideas and his actions, that mostly strikes at his emotions, and the result is song inspired by natural objects which include, of course, people. Yet though his poetry is clearly not cerebral, neither is it thumpingly emotional. His personal make-up gives it its flavor—the humor and slyness, the sense of rural retreat, the friendliness. But to his intelligence goes the credit for its economy and restraint, its solidity and subtlety, for its bounding lines. Frost knows sufficiently what he is about in writing poetry to compose his own ars poetica.

“Imagery and after-imagery are about all there is to poetry. Synecdoche and synecdoche—My motto is that something must be left to God.

“In making a poem you have no right to think of anything but the subject matter. After making it, no right to boast of anything but the form.

“A poem must at least be as good as the prose it might have been. A poem is a box with a set or assortment of sentences that just fit together to fill it. You are rhyming sentences and phrases, not just words. They must go into it as unchanged in size and shape as the words.

“A straight crookedness is most to be desired in a stick or a line. Or a crooked straightness. An absolutely abandoned zig-zag that goes straight to the mark.

“Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether and I ask myself what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they can do something, unless they amount to deeds as in ultimatums or battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker, from which there is no appeal. My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.

“All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.

“There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.