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Literary Review
Master of ceremonies
ROBERT FROST may not have been the quintessential boy-next-door American, suffering throughout his life from depression, loneliness and a turbulent family life; however, he is considered by many as the "original entrepreneur of poetry" and has outshone many of his World War I contemporaries.
Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. Though he was a brilliant student, he dropped out of Harvard and Dartmouth to marry his high school sweetheart and took to farming, teaching and writing poetry, activities that he pursued for the rest of his life.
His first major literary success, North of Boston, was published in 1914 when Frost was 40. Many of his poems show an intense distrust for machinery, which is not surprising for poets of that age. However, it is for his stubborn pastoralism that Frost was most attacked for, and for what he is most remembered.
The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, is a comprehensive collection of Frost's work, starting from his first collection of poems, A Boy's Will to his final collection, In the Clearing, and it includes his two plays "A Masque of Reason" and "A Masque of Mercy".
The way to read a poet, Frost said, "is to settle down like a revolving dog and make ourselves at home among the poems, completely at ease as to how they should be taken." In this sense, The Poetry of Robert Frost is a fine book to have at your bedside table. Particularly because the terrifying nature of Frost's poetry rarely makes itself apparent on first reading. It is only after repeated readings that the grimness and darkness of his seemingly simple, naturalist poems are perceived.
Frost was not merely a nature poet; he believed that you had to put people in the foreground for the poem to mean something. In Frost's most famous poem, "Stopping by the Woods", he depicts a solitary, stark winter landscape. But it is the rider of the horse who gives voice to that landscape with those immortal lines, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep."
Frost uses nature as a metaphor for the spirit, and as an act of creation. In poems like "After Apple-picking", "Mending Wall" and "The Ax-helve", he shows the breaking down of forms and then restores them to an almost startling newness through nature. His objective was never to merge with the nature he wrote about, but rather to find "portent in little", as he said in the poem "Design".
Frost believed in the "sentence of sound" in poetry, by which he meant that a sentence must not merely convey a meaning of words, it must also convey a meaning by sound. According to him, poetry should be made with ordinary words, words heard in conversation in everyday life, and it should be the imagination which gives these words their iridescence. Certainly, he was a formal poet, claiming that to write without form was like playing tennis with the net down.
One hesitates to call Frost a sentimental poet, but he is deeply philosophical and nostalgic, dwelling on childhood and the almost circular nature of life, with the turning of seasons and the many paths that we cross and recross in our lives. This is echoed in so many poems, but perhaps nowhere as beautifully as in "Birches" where he says:
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from the earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
In his lifetime, Robert Frost achieved that most elusive thing for poets: fame. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry and travelled across America, creating an audience for poetry by teaching at various colleges and giving readings. He outlived his three children and wife and many of his contemporaries.
"Occasionally a man comes along," Frost once said in an interview, "who says, you can't tell me there is any poetry in the process of scratching a pig's back! But I don't know. The farmer on the Sunday holiday is apt to stray out just to scratch the back of his pig or to salt the cattle. It is a little ceremony — a kind of poetic ceremony — tender-like."
In his collected works, Frost emerges as this kind of man; abrasive, complex, large and a little tender-like.
The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Vintage, 2001, p.607, £8.99.
Tishani Doshi is the recipient of the Eric Gregory Award for poetry, 2001.
TISHANI DOSHI
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