Epistolary Frost

Epistolary Frost

Robert Frost c.1905

Book Details

Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen, editors

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST

Volume 1: 1886–1920
848pp. Belknap Press. £33.95 (US $45).
978 0 674 05760 9

Robert Frost's letters are lessons in poetry, personality, disclosure and holding back

DAVID BROMWICH

Robert Frost thought of himself as a poet at the age of twenty, but he had passed forty before he received the recognition that would allow him to write for a living. The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume I: 1886–1920 takes him to the age of forty-six and the publication of his third book, Mountain Interval. He was then already much in demand for readings, informal talks on poetry in general, and eventually a position as a teacher of writing at Amherst College. Frost could not be called prosperous, and he still lacked the comfort of a safe profession, but by 1918 he had climbed out of the limbo of expectation described in the first lines of "The Investment":

Over back where they speak of life as staying
(You couldn't call it living, for it ain't) . . .

By the end of the First World War, Frost had ascended halfway to the eminence he would mark in the title of a later poem, "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation". The tone, however, of most of these letters is anything but kingly. Frost as a young man is working to convince others that he is a poet; and he does it partly in order to convince himself.

Frost dropped out of Dartmouth after one semester in 1892 and would never finish college, but he seems to have felt little regret. An early admirer and sympathetic correspondent was Susan Hayes Ward, an art critic who, as poetry editor of the New York Independent, published the first poem that Frost set much store by. His letters to Ward are open and impulsive, and full of thoughts. At the age of twenty, in 1894, he tells her who his favourite poets are. Thomas Hardy comes first, for teaching "the good use of a few words". There follows an idiosyncratic list: "Keats' 'Hyperion,' Shelley's 'Prometheus,' Tenneson's [sic] 'Morte D'Arthur,' and Browning's 'Saul' – all of them about giants. Besides these I am fond of the whole collection of Palgrave's". By 1896, he is ready to impart a more abstract discovery. Speech and the motive for speech are, he thinks, related but originally separate. The motive may be detected by interpreting the words of the speech. It is then the job of the poet to indicate (without himself following) the path on which a reader's interpretation might travel. Of course, this is also a discovery about the ways of irony: how words may frame a thought that cannot be captured by words; how words may suggest a "tone of meaning" prior to words themselves, and larger. Frost's early thoughts about poetry are indistinguishable from thoughts about himself; and they show an overwhelming interest in the possibility of fame. He is not thinking about other things, even things that should be important. "As nothing that happens matters much and as most of my thoughts are about myself I am always at a loss for likely subject matter. I am the father of a son if that is anything."

More than a decade later, he wrote to Ward from his farm in Derry: "I can't look at my little slope of fields here with leaves in the half dead grass, or at the bare trees the birds have left us with, and fully believe there were ever such things as the snug downhill churning room with the view over five ranges of mountains, our talks under the hanging lamp . . . . There is a pang that makes poetry. I rather like to gloat over it". This is already the voice of poems such as "October", from his first book, A Boy's Will:

O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief,
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.

What Frost learns to "gloat over" is the suppressed sigh, the conscious discipline against regret, the summons to a recovery of self-trust. He left New Hampshire for England in September 1912, under the accurate apprehension that his chances in poetry would be better there. Soon after taking up residence at The Bungalow, Beaconsfield, he writes to Ward: "To London town what is it but a run? Indeed when I leave writing this and go into the front yard for a last look at earth and sky before I go to sleep, I shall be able to see the not very distant lights of London flaring like a dreary dawn". Yet he pulls up short: "If there is any virtue in location – but don't think I think there is. I know where the poetry must come from if it comes".

These early letters to Susan Ward touch the note of sincerity by which one comes to measure Frost's attitude towards all his other correspondents. In a steady stream of letters to two younger men, John Bartlett and Sidney Cox, he strikes up terms of similar frankness, with results that are always interesting. Bartlett had been a student of Frost's in his early days teaching at the Pinkerton Academy; Cox, whom Frost came to know during his last year in America, would go on to teach English at Dartmouth. He always writes to them – being Bartlett's elder by eighteen years and Cox's by fifteen – as an understood authority. He dispenses with the tones of dogmatic instruction or officious advice. But still, advice there is and warmly meant, about life as well as art, about marriage and children and how to make writing compatible with living. Frost takes charge because he knows they already appreciate his command of the things they want to know. The closest friendship in his life, by his own account, was with Edward Thomas, but that was in a different category: an intimacy felt and sealed in person, in conversations during visits that must have had time for many long walks. And yet, Frost's letters to Thomas are rather casual and implicit; he counts on his friend to know what must be on his mind as he talks of nothing much. It is Bartlett and Cox who receive his subtlest and most thoughtful letters about poetry.

The doctrine of "sentence sounds" and "the sound of sense", which turns on the all-importance of the speaking voice, is first broached in a letter to Bartlett written in high spirits. It is headed (instead of The Bungalow) "The Bungs, Beaks, Bucks, Fourth-of-July, 1913", and sets up a written-out seminar with four sentences that can only be read rightly one way:

You mean to tell me you can't read?
I said no such thing.
Well read then.
You're not my teacher.

These sentences are audible as dramatic speech, but with a more delicate variety of emphasis than the average pair of exchanges in a produced play would normally have, or want to have. A detail not noticeable on first reading is that English and American inflections would give quite different turns to the first line: for an English speaker of English, read touches the highest note and takes the major stress; whereas for an American, the first You has that position, and tell and the second you assist with secondary accents. That there may be such occasional differences, between competent speakers of different origins, proves Frost's point all the more convincingly. A true poet must school the reader in the tone of meaning he wants the reader to hear.

A further development of the idea appears in a letter to Bartlett of February 22, 1914. Here, Frost separates out single lines for their expressive grace and individuality, and he pulls the following sentences, among others, into his mixture of specimens:

Never you say a thing like that to a man!
And such they are and such they will be found
Hence with denial vain and coy excuse
The thing for me to do is to get right out of here while I am able.

Two of these lines, Frost wants his listener to recognize, were written by poets whom you can find in Palgrave's Golden Treasury; the other two were plucked out of the stream of life's conversation by Frost. Yet all are poetry in the sense that chiefly counts with him. Or rather, they exemplify the never-to-be-spared elements from which poetry must arise.

"The simple declarative sentence", Frost came to think, "used in making a plain statement is one sound. But Lord love ye it mustn't be worked to death. It is against the law of nature that whole poems should be written in it. If they are written they won't be read . . . [But] it is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound – pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist." The same idea is given a more complex formulation in a letter to John Cournos in July 1914. Frost now makes it clear that the variety of speaking sounds which the mind of the reader craves for the sake of the ear – or is it the other way around? – cannot be worked up without regard to an underlying regularity that continues. For the ground bass of recurrent sound is poetic metre. The artist who knows the tone of meaning, the "oversound" of speech, knows the grain of the expected metre and shows that awareness even when he delights to work against it. "There are", Frost writes to Cournos, on the one hand "the very regular accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation. I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle."

Thomas, in his review of North of Boston, would select tactfully from "The Wood-Pile" to illustrate the workings of such "strained relation"; but Frost's practice seemed to other early readers, including some of the best of them, so remote from the common music of poetry that it might as well be prose. A review of North of Boston by Ford Madox Ford (in which Frost took considerable satisfaction) brought forward a bewildered admiration for the subject matter and the sound of Frost's poetry. "There are these natural objects and scenes – and always there is present the feeling of madness, of mysterious judgements, of weather-hardened odd people – people very uncouth and unlovely, but very real." Ford asked his readers not to be frightened by the "prosaic" quality of the verse, "so queer, so harsh, so unmusical", as he quoted with evident relish sixteen lines from "The Housekeeper", beginning with "I just don't see him living many years, / Left here with nothing but the furniture". Frost had a solid warrant for saying of the poems in North of Boston, in a letter to Thomas Mosher of July 1913: "I dropped to an everyday level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above. I trust I don't terrify you. I think I have made poetry".

In his two and a half years in England, which would end in February 1915 – the heyday of the Georgian poets and the first "years of the modern" – Frost formed a close and lasting friendship with Lascelles Abercrombie, and friendly alliances with Harold Monro and F. S. Flint. His letters of this period are selfconscious but never preening and not especially guarded; they track his gradual acceptance into the London milieu. Yeats, early on, has "asked me to make one of his circle at his Monday nights when he is in London" and "told my dazzling friend Ezra Pound that my book was the best thing that has come out of America for some time". Frost's opinion of Yeats would start high and gradually cool: "His candle-lit room is more like a shrine than a room; his manner is like that of a man in some dream he cant [sic] shake off. It is not a pose with him. He has to take himself that way". A year further in, there is a sharper judgment in a letter to Cox of September 1913: "I won't say that he is quite great judged either by the way he takes himself as an artist or by the work he has done . . . . Let him be as affected as he pleases if he will only write well. But you can't be affected and write entirely well".

Pound elicits a more pronounced initial show of interest followed by a steeper decline.

Ezra Pound, my fellow countryman, is one of the most describable of [the London circle of poets]. He is six inches taller for his hair and hides his lower jaw in a delicate gold filigree of almost masculine beard. His coat is of heavy black velvet. He lives in Grub Street, rich one day and poor the next. His friends are the duchesses. And he swears like a pirate and he writes what is known as vers libre and he translates from French, Provençal, Latin, and Italian. He and I have tried to be friends because he was one of the first to review me well, but we don't hit it off very well together. I get on better with fellows like [Wilfrid] Gibson who are less concerned to dress the part of a poet.

Even though favourably reviewed by Pound, Frost came to resent his attentions for two reasons. Pound, as was his wont, made an implicit claim to have discovered Frost and thereby to have saved him from the indignity of neglect by a philistine America. At the same time he presented Frost as a reminder of the fresh things still coming from the West – if not quite a modern in good standing, in any case a force the makers of the new should sympathize with. Frost heard a note of condescension probably deeper than Pound intended, but the treatment could certainly be read that way, and it seemed to place Frost in an untenable posture, superior to the country he had left but without a proper adoptive home. He also perceived the mischief of having his non-recognition by America turned into a case-in-point to prove the imbecility of American editors, critics and poets. He had always planned to go back, and suspected Pound had sown a native suspicion against him out of sheer irritability and excess of animus.

Much of the second half of this volume shows Frost occupied with arranging the reception of his poems in the US. Close friends are encouraged to circulate appreciative reviews and copies of his books. Amy Lowell writes a review that will advance his fame as much as any estimate published in the decade after his return; but Frost is uncertain what to make of this woman of letters, a poet of marked but limited originality and domineering habits. He never forgave (or quite recovered from) Lowell's observation that he lacked a sense of humour; and indeed, what she must have meant (and what he must have realized with a twinge) is elusive enough to make one pause and think. Frost did have a lively sense of "play", and it was play that he demanded of poetry, as the inborn trait that makes the larger virtues tenable. Play of mind, he meant, and play of temper – the quick alternation of moods. But his jokes are too packed with aggression to be counted as humour in the accepted sense. One thinks of the choice of recipes for ending the world in "Fire and Ice", of "God's last Put out the light" as the shorthand for apocalypse in "Once by the Pacific", and of the drawn-out anecdote of "The Code" about dumping a wagon-load of hay on a stiff manager who used his authority badly.

Occasional but palpable insincerities creep into the letters, starting in America in 1915. Joseph Warren Beach, a professor at the University of Minnesota, whom Frost liked well enough and cultivated short of friendship, was apparently wounded by Frost's criticism of some of his own poems. Frost writes back promptly: "if I didn't seem to like your poetry enough, I want to add that I liked it better than my own". Yet some way under, one can detect a real self-disgust that contributes to responses of this kind. His first two years back in America were hard: Frost was having difficulty paying for a new house and farm in Franconia, and he reproached himself for the failure in supporting his family by anything he put his hand to. Out of the same mood comes the stricture in a letter to Louis Untermeyer of July 8, 1915: "All I insist on is that nothing is quite honest that is not commercial". Then he adds defensively: "You must take that as said in character". But how often did Frost choose to inhabit this character? An unmistakable line of "Provide, Provide" tells his listener to "Make the whole stock exchange your own!"; and that strange and memorable poem runs all in the same vein of imperative exhortation. Build a fortress for self-defence. Better to die admired by paid-for friends than die without them. Frost suffered deep humiliations which he felt to the core; this was a hidden source of his affinity with Keats. Yet he had a power without peer for prolonging the resentment and recoiling from his own weakness and susceptibility.

Another letter to Untermeyer, of considerable biographical interest, ventures a personal disclosure that is both fascinating and aberrant. On the brink of publishing Mountain Interval, Frost confesses that all the poems in this third book and in North of Boston were written years before, and all of them close together. He adds that further books are to come from that early accumulation; which must mean that his critics (including Untermeyer) will stand exposed as fools if their reviews pretend to discover evidence of "development", or decline, or even a wonderful maturing of imaginative faculties. I am all one, Frost is saying, and I was everything I am a long time ago. So he has plotted it all in advance. "The poet in me died nearly ten years ago", he declares in this letter of May 1916:

Fortunately he had run through several phases, four to be exact, all well-defined, before he went. The calf I was in the nineties I merely take to market. I am become my own salesman . . . . Did you ever hear of quite such a case of Scotch–Yankee calculation? You should have seen the look on the face of the Englishman I first confessed this to. I won't name him lest it should bring you two together . . . . As you look back don't you see how a lot of things I have said begin to take meaning from this? Well.

It is an extraordinary act of self-aggrandizement and self-negation, and, knowing Frost, one concludes that it was probably in some measure true but deliberately exaggerated. This intuition is confirmed by his next letter to Untermeyer, which begins with a retraction: "Seriously I am fooling" – a playful and ambiguous sentence that still holds back a good deal.

Some of the best letters in the second half of The Letters of Robert Frost are written to his daughter Lesley. She gets cut from the tennis team at Wellesley College, for reasons she does not understand, and Frost gives her the closest of instructions how to launch an inquest into the injustice, and then how to put the humiliation behind her whatever the facts may be. Another letter generously shares Lesley's indignation at being chided by her Latin teacher for some slight grammatical infraction, and assures her that the study of Latin is in "Egypt" compared to the study of English; but he goes on to lay out a plan for improving her mastery of the grammar, in her own time and by a suitable method. Frost always hoped that his confidence would be contagious – "They would not find me changed from him they knew – / Only more sure of all I thought was true" – and it must be said that these early letters carry the burden of his poetry so finely as to be no embarrassment to the poetry. The book has been edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen with continuous tact and sensitivity to the likely demands of a literate reader; there are enough notes and just enough (they never strike one as intrusions pretending to be elucidations). A good index and a biographical glossary complete the authority of a book that has been printed with the care and elegance it deserves. Frost's letters seem the inevitable expressions of a personality, so that, even when a mask is on, there is interest to be found in exactly what it reveals.