Subterranean Frost

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The New York Sun

In March 1959, at a dinner celebrating the 85th birthday of Robert Frost, the critic Lionel Trilling managed to accomplish something that few toast-masters in history have ever done: In his brief remarks, he permanently changed the way people think about his subject. Frost, Trilling said, had long been considered a folksy, unobjectionable poet, “an articulate Bald Eagle.” In an age when writers such as Eliot and Stevens seemed like perverse highbrows, the common reader could feel vindicated in his bafflement by turning to schoolbook favorites such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken,” with their traditional meter and New England dialect.

Frost’s popular Yankee image, which he assiduously cultivated through readings, lectures, and even some of his poems, helped him to win the immense popularity that he enjoyed in his lifetime: four Pulitzer Prizes, a spot on the dais at the Kennedy Inaugural. Yet Trilling recognized that the aged poet would not be helped in his passage to posterity by this Norman Rockwell carapace, which could only seem more fake and dated with the years. That is why Trilling insisted on calling Frost, to his face, “a terrifying poet.” Really, he had less in common with Longfellow than with Sophocles, “who made plain … the terrible things of human life.”

Trilling’s remarks came in for what seems now like a surprising amount of criticism. When the New York Times reported on the speech, affronted readers wrote to suggest that Trilling should be taken “to the woodshed,” while Frost consoled himself with “a nice plate of buckwheat pancakes and Vermont maple syrup.” This anxious resort to the very clichés of Americana, which Trilling had decried, only proved how right he was. It was vital, for Frost’s longterm artistic reputation, to separate the maple syrup from the poetry.

If Trilling had been able to read “The Notebooks of Robert Frost” (Harvard, 688 pages, $39.95) — now published for the first time, 44 years after the poet’s death — he would have smiled to see how completely they vindicate his view of Frost. This strange volume transcribes, with excruciating accuracy, every page of the 48 notebooks that Frost left behind: every list, every stray jotting, every crossingout.

The editor, Robert Faggen, hopefully compares the resulting mess of fragments with the aphorisms of Pascal and Lichtenberg, but the comparison misleads. Frost’s workbooks were exactly that—quarries where he messily worked out thoughts and phrases, not galleries of sparkling pensées. Readers who are not Frost scholars will find many pages to skip, and much extraneous bibliographical detail. (If ever a book cried out for an abridged edition, it is this one.)

Yet if the “Notebooks” contain ore instead of ingots, for that very reason they seem to give us a glimpse of a more subterranean Frost. And the more private the poet, the more genuinely terrifying he becomes. To see the difference, consider Frost’s lecture “On Extravagance,” which he delivered at Dartmouth in November 1962, less than two months before he died. In this talk, Frost expatiates genially on “the extravagance of the universe. What an extravagant universe it is. And the most extravagant thing in it, as far as we know, is man — the most wasteful, spending thing in it — in all his luxuriance.”

This praise of luxuriance would be uncomfortably close to the adagency’s praise of luxury, were it not for that discreetly placed “wasteful.” Extravagance is a glad word, and an extravagant universe sounds a bit like a really expensive hotel room, a place you might not deserve but would certainly enjoy. Waste, on the other hand, is a sin, and seems to cry out for retribution. A wasteful universe is a Malthusian and Darwinian one, the scene of universal carnage that Frost delicately evokes in his poem “Design”:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? —
If design govern in a thing so small.

The difference between the Frost of the “Notebooks” and the Frost of the podium can be judged by his obsession in the “Notebooks” with the word and the idea of “waste.” In these pages not meant for public consumption, the poet has no need for euphemism. “The difference between expense and waste,” we find Frost writing early on, is that “Waste is where only God can see the sense.” This is from a rough draft of the poem that would become “Pod of the Milkweed,” with its famous line, “But waste was of the essence of the scheme.”

If waste is the essence of the universe, the universe can only be explained or justified from a superhuman perspective; but the superhuman, Frost always reminds us, is also the inhuman. The uncomprehending gaze of humans at the inhuman, and vice versa, is the dramatic center of some of Frost’s best poems. Think of “For Once, Then, Something,” where the poet sees a glimmer at the bottom of a well and asks, “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?” Or “The Most of It,” where the poet by a lake-side cries out, hoping to awaken “counterlove, original response,” and is greeted only by “a great buck” who swims into view and then stumbles indifferently away.

At times, however, the compression and wildness of Frost’s “Notebooks” makes even these parables seem overly explicit. Much of the “Notebooks” is occupied with formulating Frost’s ideas on politics and prosody — ideas that are integral to his whole achievement, but already familiar from his published work. But then, without warning, Frost will suddenly jot down a phrase that seems to open onto an abyss, showing how truly “terrifying” his wasteful, inhuman universe can be.

Frost is known as a master of metaphor, and many of his poems take the form of extended metaphors. Yet when he writes, “I doubt if any thing is more related to another thing than it is to any third thing except as we make it,” he shows how the power of metaphor can turn on the poet, plunging him into a world of sheer perspectivism where there is no essence, only likeness. If we can make anything resemble anything else, then we are doomed to perish from the very excess of significations.

This is the terror that has always loomed behind the willful optimism of the Emersonian tradition, and which Frost, very much like Nietzsche, was able to exhume from the corpse of Emerson’s gentility. Perhaps not even Nietzsche ever captured that terror in an image as striking and bottomless as Frost’s: “We get truth like a man trying to drink at a hydrant.” At such moments, Frost’s “Notebooks,” like his best poems, remind us that there has never been a more genuinely mystical American writer.

akirsch@nysun.com


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