Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini REVIEW
Jay Parini’s exploration of the life of Robert Frost tells us so much about the
poems that Frost wrote and, perhaps more importantly, allows the poems to tell
us so much more about Robert Frost. One is struck by the gift that Frost had
for word play. Over and over, I was brought back to the observation that Robert
Frost was a man capable of maintaining the ability to play like a child might, long
after the time in life when most of us have gotten locked into being serious. Robert
Frost seems to have been able to be serious even as a young child playing ; and
he seems to have been able to be playful as an adult being serious. The paradox
is that he is never more serious than when he is being playful, and never more
playful than when he is talking something serious. "I am never so serious
as when I am playful," he once wrote.
"There are a lot of things I could say to you about the art of poetry if we were talking, and one of them is that it should be of major adventures only, outward and inward – important things that happened to you, or important things that occur to you. Mere poeticality won't suffice." – Robert Frost to Kimball Flaccus, 1928
And yet so many of his poems are about such seemingly simple things.
A number of his poems deal with the tension between the eternal child within us and the insistent adult (often imposed upon the child by a society unwilling to let children be children a day longer than is absolutely necessary). Thus he stops by woods lovely, dark and deep and wishes that he could remain looking into them; things beautiful; things wonderful; things mysterious – adventures of the inner world call to him but “he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps.” Similarly in Birches, we find him swinging between heaven and earth, like a boy bred with a metronome ascending into imagination and back to earth in an endless transcendental tidal system of play and usefulness. Throughout his young adulthood he was forced to try and find that balance between his vocation and his avocation. He loved to do farm work but only the sort of work that allowed him reflective and creative time. “Farming was,” Frost later said, "a practical way to earn a living, although I've not yet showed a talent for practicality.”
“A poet,” he would also later say, "needed time when nothing was happening, or seemed to be happening." "The whole point of farming is shirking duties," Frosts recalled. "You can't put your mind on farming. It won't stay there."
That was his problem. He had a mind that did not feel like growing up no matter how much smarter and more widely read and skilled it got at thinking. It wanted to keep wondering. In many ways, this belief that we would do better to bring more childhood into our adult lives even as children do and allow more important questions to be wrestled with in school was at the heart of the way that he taught. "I believe in teaching,” he said of his own experiences as a high school and college teacher,
“but I don't believe in going to school. Every day I feel bound to save my consistency by advising my pupils to leave school. Then if they insist on coming to school, it's not my fault: I can teach them with a clear conscience."
"We go to college," he said, "to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us." He himself dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard, believing them to be impediments on his education and ability to create. It may simply well be that he did not need a college to make him into a mind with something to contribute. His came that way.
For him, his objection to formal education often came down to a disagreement over either ends or means. He believed that education should result in students who could contribute, not simply correct. "I came to live in the house of a professor who was off in Europe having what a professor would call a good time,” Frost explained,
“He had left all his books for me to have a good time with taking good care that I shouldn't have too little time with them, he had marked them all with a pencil wherever he found the mistake of any kind – just as if they were written exercises of pupils. He never praised anything (I should have loathed his praise), But he had never contributed an idea or interesting commentary."
For many years, Frost tended chickens to make a living rather than pursue a living that would require him to go back to school (ironic given how many honorary doctorates he would later accumulate). He found that doing so allowed him to make the observations that his poetry would require. I like farming he told a Boston reporter, "but I'm not much of a Farmer." He elaborated:
"I always go to farming when I can. I always make a failure of it, and then I have to go to teaching. I'm a good teacher, but it hasn't allowed me time to write. I must either teach or write: I can't do both together. I have to live. .... I've had a lazy, scrape-along-life, and enjoyed it. I used to hate to write themes in school. I hate academic ways. I fight everything academic. The time we wasted trying to learn academically – the talent we starve with academic teaching!"
"I was a poor farmer in those days, Frost later said, "but rich too. There was plenty of food, and time, too. Lots of time. I was time rich." Frost was a huge fan of keeping yourself independent so that you could think and create and retain that inner child. “Steal away and stay away” he says in one of his poems,
Don't join too many gangs. Join few
if any.
Join the United States and join the family –
but not much in between unless a college.
Even as a teenager, he was jealous of the ownership of his own mind. Parini writes of his conflicts with his religious mother as a young man
“These ‘dangerous’ notions brought
Frost into conflict with his mother, as might be expected. They apparently
quarreled frequently about his seeming ‘atheism,’ although Frost consistently
defended himself against this charge. He was not an atheist, he maintained,
though he did subscribed to many of the views put forward by people who were.
At one point he referred to himself, with a touch of self-flattery, as a ‘freethinker,’
and his mother objected; "Oh, please don't use that word. It has such a
dreadful history."
“Frost determined to go his own way, or to seem to go his own way, as in The
Road not Taken, his most famous poem, which ends with the wry self-critical
note that he will be ‘telling people with a sigh that he took the road less
traveled by.’ In fact, Frost was a rugged traditionalist, a man highly
conscious of the forms, and one who found his freedom within the limits of
those forms. Part of his great originality lay with his discovery of freedom
within form, a way of extending a given tradition in a direction that seemed to
redefine it."
When applying for jobs that usually required more traditional education than he had, he simply tried to make the case that this had not prevented him from getting more education that college might have given him. Parini writes:
“When questioned about his
education, he replied: ‘if you mean what might be called the legitimate
education I received when you speak of 'training' and 'line of study,' I hope
that the quality of my poem would seem to account for far more of this than I
have really had. I am only graduated of a public high school. Besides this, a
while ago, I was at Dartmouth College for a few months until recalled by
necessity. But this inflexible ambition trains us best, and to love poetry is
to study it. Specifically speaking, the few rules I know in this art are my own
afterthoughts, or else directly formulated from the masterpieces I reread.’"
“The gravity and expressive force of a major poet are already audible here,
especially when he declares 'that inflexible ambition trains us best.’ That
kind of all-consuming artistic ambition was, indeed, Frost's own, and part of
his genius. He had his eyes firmly on the path of poetry, and nothing would
distract him."
As Pres. John Sloan Dickey of Dartmouth later recalled,
"I don't think Frost realized how out of the mainstream his approach was. He was highly eccentric, highly original, as a teacher. He encouraged a kind of rebellion against the standard approaches to life. He was almost aggressively self-determined, self-determining."
Frost believed that teachers needed to develop their own minds before they thought about developing the minds of their students. And he regularly refused to take jobs that did not give him the time he needed as a poet and as a person to “swing birches,” to take “roads less travelled,” to get lost in swamps, and peer into anything that occurred to him as unremarkable on the surface but full of important meaning if looked at long enough. His poetry focuses on the mundane details of nature and people because he believes that if we will but look with a poet’s eyes, we will see these things swarming with meaning. The short poem, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening for example, contained, said Frost, “all that I ever knew."
"You don't want to say directly what you can say indirectly" he once remarked echoing Emily Dickinson's injunction to 'tell the truth but tell it slant.'" In short, Robert Frost liked to play the part of the trickster archetype often found in mythologies all over the world. He liked to do magic tricks with words, talking to you, with a twinkle in his eye, about one thing, while knowing full well that he is getting you to think about another. "My poems," Frost wrote to a friend in 1927,
“are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks, carts, chairs, and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.' He referred to this as his innate mischievousness."
Take for example, the poem, The Ax Helve.
In the margins of a friend’s book next to this poem, Frost wrote in pencil: this is as near as I like to come to talking about art, any work of art – such as it is."
The poem is, on the surface, about a man who is an expert at making ax helves (a helve is the handle of a weapon or tool). Clearly, a poem can be a weapon or a tool and the poem is really about how a good poet makes a poem. Naturally, he won’t say that outright in the poem but he is too much of a prankster to tell a good joke without giving you enough clues to get it. What would be the fun of that? Frost will write a poem about apple picking and even tell you in the title that it is about apple picking but in the first line, he will point the apple picking ladder towards heaven so that you know that you should “look up” so to speak, and not get bound up in excessive literalism. The poem is really about the way that we live life in the light of the knowledge that we will die.
Frost reminds me of those artists that make meaningless patterns on post cards that turn into 3-D pictures if you stare at them long enough. He is playing hide-and-seek with his readers.
"Poetry begins in trivial metaphors," he says, "pretty metaphors, grace metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have.” “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another,” Parini writes,
“Frost believed that the greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter. In formulating this, he consciously or not, is redeploying an aesthetic common to the German Romantics, especially Goethe, who famously wrote: 'Whoever has truly grasped the meaning of history will realize in thousands of examples that the materialization of the spirit or the spiritualization of matter never rests, but always breaks out, among prophets, believers, poets, orators, artists, and lovers of art.”
"I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking," Frost says. I confess that I myself feel deeply and profoundly influenced by Robert Frost’s use of metaphor in the place of argument. Indeed, what I think he has discovered is that a good metaphor will argue for you. "Rob never argued,” one of his acquaintances once observed, “He knew what he knew and never had any interest in arguing about it." And yet no one who has read one of his better poems could ever deny that the poetry itself makes its argument long after the poet is gone.
In one of his earliest poems, lines written in his attempt to woo his high school sweetheart and future wife, Elenor, he uses a memory of the first time he met her to convey something of his wishes and intents.
As I went down the hill along the
wall
there was a gate I had to leave that for the view
and had just turned from when I first saw you
as you came up the hill. We met.
But all we did that day was mingle great and small
footprints in summer dust as if we drew
the figure of our being less than two
but more than one as yet.
One can picture the footprints in the dirt road, sometimes overlapping and sometimes distinct; one larger, one smaller. To Frost, the tracks they left that day made it seem as though some living thing “less than two but more than one as yet” was leaving them.
Is that not a powerful description of relationships that we have had with people we have been engaged to or married to or maybe just met? I will say it again, “The image itself is an argument.”
An aside: Robert Frost’s relationship with Elenor was not entirely easy for either of them. They had many children and their children were difficult. They had many hardships and their hardships were challenging. “The whole point about marriage,” Frost remarked, "is learning how not to take offenses when none were intended. It took me a while to figure this out." Frost noted to a friend that Elenor “had some loss she can't accept from God." It may be that Frost’s poetry helped him to process his losses and God was someone that he allowed himself to live life without understanding perfectly. As Parini put it when discussing Robert Frost’s exposure to Satayana at Harvard.
"William James had been Satayana's teacher and the pupil had understood his teacher’s basic position on faith, that one can believe anything one wishes, as long as it remains useful and is "live enough to tempt.'"
There is so much in this biography that one has to eventually narrow their report or it will be as long as the book. There are three aspects of Robert Frost as a poet that I should like to highlight from the many things that Parini has had to say about the subject.
First, a word about Robert Frost and the Sound of poetry. Frost liked the idea of poetry being something deeper than words. Words were merely the surface of a poems meaning and he liked to write poems that expressed meaning subliminally. He mentions the experience of listening to two people converse or argue on the other side of a closed door. Even without hearing the actual words, you can tell if the exchange is an argument or a conversation or lovemaking. The same should be true of a good poem, read. Here are some excerpts from Parini’s biography that illustrate the point.
"As a young poet, he began by
imitating voices of the past. The young poet is prone to echo all the pleasing
sounds he has heard in his scattered reading. He is apt to look on the musical
value of the lines, the metrical perfection, is all that matters. He is not
listening to the voice within his mind, speaking the lines and giving them the
value of sound."
"I didn't know until then what I was after," he recalled. "I was
after poetry that talked. If my poems were talking poems – if to read one of
them you heard a voice – that would be to my liking!"
"You listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not
bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of
them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you
can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer."
Some of the highlights, the most vivid imaginative passages in poetry are of the eye, but more perhaps are the ear. . . . The vocabulary may be what you please though I like it not too literary; but the tones of voice must be caught fresh and fresh from life. Poetry is a fresh look and a fresh listen. . . . The actor’s gift is to execute the vocal image at the mouth. The writer’s is to implicate the vocal image in a sentence and fasten it printed to the page.”
Frost thought that poets needed to be primarily listeners. If they were good listeners, they would capture the sound of people speaking in their poetry. Here is how Frost expressed this conviction in a lecture to the Browne and Nichols School in May 1915.
“Mr. Browne has alluded to the
seeing eye. I want to call your attention to the function of the imagining ear.
Your attention is too often called to the poet with extraordinarily vivid
sight, and with the faculty of choosing exceptionally telling words for the
sight. But equally valuable, even for schoolboy themes, is the use of the ear
for material for compositions. When you listen to a speaker, you hear words, to
be sure,— but you also hear tones. The problem is to note them, to imagine them
again, and to get them down in writing. But few of you probably ever thought of
the possibility or of the necessity of doing this. You are generally told to
distinguish simple, compound, and complex sentences,—long and short, —periodic
and loose, to varying sentence structure, etc. ‚Not all sentences are short,
like those of Emerson, the writer of the best American prose. You must vary
your sentences, like Stevenson, etc.‛ All this is missing the vital element. I
always had a dream of getting away from it, when I was teaching school,—and, in
my own writing and teaching, of bringing in the living sounds of speech.
So, my advice to you boys in all your composition work is: ‚Gather your
sentences by ear, and reimagine them in your writing.‛ {. . .]
"What we do get in life and miss so often in literature is the sentence
sounds that underlie the words. Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and
to [ . . prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does
not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people
who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard
but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry,
the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the
conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or,
to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound
which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being
conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to understand the
thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed.”
"What I am most interested in emphasizing in the application of this
belief to art is the sentence of sound, because to me a sentence is not
interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words. It must do something more;
it must convey a meaning by sound.‛
"No matter what I think it means," he said of one poem, "I'm infatuated with the way the rhymes come off here."
Secondly, because the language that the poet captures in his poetry has structure, Frost thought that the language used in the poems had to as well. He was not a fan of modern poetry or poetry that mistook the violation of all forms as creativity. "Poets had vainly attempted to seem original by omitting punctuation, capital letters, metrics, images, and so forth,” Parini notes,
“They have eliminated phrase, epigram, coherence, logic, and consistency. But to what end? Where was the real originality in all of this?"
Frost insisted that one could remain within the boundaries
of any convention so long as one was given freedom to think creatively within
it. In some ways, having to deal with form forced creativity. "I am both ‘a
wall builder’ and ‘wall destroyer,’ he argued (in other words, he was
both himself and his neighbor in the poem Mending
Wall). As Seamus Heaney has noted, 'his appetite for his own independence
was fierce and expressed itself in a reiterated belief in his right to limits:
his defenses, fences, and his freedom were all interdependent.'"
A third feature of the way that Frost approached poetry has to do with the way
that he incubated, fertilized, and harvested his poems. He constantly kept
files of poems he had begun but not finished. He ages them. He lets them
percolate into his own psyche, often for years, before bringing them back “up”
to the surface for reworking. A poem might take years to make and many of those
years it will simply sit in some recess of his mind developing. Parini asays
that "Frost did not, like most poets, grow and shift; rather, like a tree,
he added rings." Frost actually took his own advice, his biographer says,
“spending many years, even decades, 'plowing it under' and building soil – in Derry, for example, the years when so much was sown and very little reaped or sent to markets. He let ideas come, but felt no compulsion to rush to print with them; he let them play in his head, play on his tongue in endless conversations; he put them into letters, into prose, which formed a kind of halfway stage between speech and poetry. What reached print was an idea of an idea of an idea. When it finally emerged, it was fully formed and richly developed."
He was not really trying to create poems so much as to create a poet. If he became the poems he started to write, they would, in time, finish themselves and thus, when he taught, he taught more about being a poet than about writing poetry. “Frost was not teaching a subject. He taught himself.” This is why he liked his New England life. He needed to be somewhere that allowed him to become something. As he told Ernest Silver, he wanted to find "a farm in New England where I could live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier."
Like Emerson, Robert Frost was one of those rare individuals who could collect waters from many mountain streams and distribute them into a delta of many forms. He was a synthesizer of thought and feeling. He was one of those people who have a talent for photosynthesizing light available to us all and converting it to something we can all use. He admired other people that could do that for him. He believed that this is what he had come into the world to do: To write great poems – poems “that it would be hard to get rid of.”
“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts,” he wrote of . The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound, that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It has not to wait the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at site that we never could forget it. There was a barb and a toxin that we owned to at once.”
To return to the theme that I began with, I think this is the source of that dilemma I started this essay with. Robert Frost wants to develop his inner child in a serious way. But he wants to do it in a playful way. He does not want to take short cuts. He is willing to “come to be” before be “comes to write.” He is willing to let his poems play with him before he lets them out to play with the world. But there had to come a time when he had to decide if he was going to be a farmer and high school teacher who happened to have written poems or a poet who had happened to have farmed and taught high school. Parini describes the moment of truth in the following way.
“His feelings of mortality were by
now intense; after all, his father had lived only to the age of 34. Given the
fluctuations of his health, Frost imagined there was little time left. He must
withdraw from the daily demands of teaching, become selfish, and find the time
to devote himself wholly to the task at hand: the completion of a book of
poems.”
“He always said that the turning point came in 1912, at Plymouth. He had to
make a decision: to be a poet or teacher, primarily. There was no way to
reconcile both careers at this time. The poems had to get his full attention,
which is why he left teaching. He had written just enough poetry of the highest
quality to make that apparent to him. He understood what had to be done."
Thanks to some inheritance money, he was able to go to England for two years and focus on writing. The result was his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will. Followed soon after with North of Boston, the book would make Robert Frost the household name that he is today. Somewhere, the decision to give himself permission to play seriously with the words he found in his head – to let them play with each other “has made all the difference.”
Question for Comment: “I never take my own side in an argument,” Frost once said. Somehow, he manages to both take himself seriously and laugh at himself a lot. This in spite of what can only be described as an unusually difficult family life (his children were often either mentally ill or physically ill and Frost himself seems to have struggled with a great deal of depression). In many of his poems, you may see him make a point and its counterpoint, as if to say “I am just here to make you think. Not to make you right.”
Can you think of one of his poems that is particularly effective at getting you to think? To “fall forward into the dark” as it were?
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