This is the second in our occasional series celebrating State Poets Laureate. It is adapted from a reading I gave at Bennington College in 2018 when the college was gifted the Stone House in which Robert Frost lived with his family and wrote from 1920-1940. It was here that he won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for poems––including “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”––that made the New England landscape his own.
The reputations of major poets tend to move in long cycles over time. Who would have thought that Robert Lowell, the lion rampant of the ‘60s, and Elizabeth Bishop, the mouse, would exchange places in the pantheon of American poets today?Surprisingly, Eliot––our 20th century’s answer to Samuel Johnson––has suffered a decline in recent years. Even Shakespeare wasn’t always Shakespeare. Frost, too, has had his ups and downs––but he endures like a stubborn boulder in a rushing stream.
I think part of the reason for Frost’s continuing immediacy is that he is one of the very few poets whose work is important both to critics and to the general reading public. Whitman and Dickinson would also go on that list, but no others come to mind. A poem by one of these three is likely to be the point of entry for any American first-time reader of poetry. So Frost’s relevance continues because everybody reads him. But also because poet/critics of the stature of Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon have continued to publicly revere him.
For most of his long life, Frost was neglected by literary critics as a country poet of homespun wisdom––almost a greeting card poet. All that changed on his 85th birthday, when Lionel Trilling called him “a terrifying poet.” People were shocked––and Trilling left the birthday party early. But it made Frost instantly fashionable with critics. That was in 1959.
Although Frost was among the very first Modernist poets a century ago, he was a complete anomaly. He was old-fashioned from the start. Oldest by age, he was born a decade after the Civil War. Pound, Eliot, Stevenson, Marianne Moore––all were born later. Richard Poirier wrote that if Frost had been born a decade later, he would not have written the same poetry. Those other Modernists were all urban poets, but Frost was born into an America still agrarian. He was a farmer, if not a very committed one. (A neighbor recalled hearing Frost’s cows lowing from pain at not being milked, while the great man sat inside and wrote.) His poems––among the many, “Mending Wall,” “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” ––drew on the rural world all his life. He was also old-fashioned in his poetic style: He was the complete formalist who quipped that “Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.”
In his personal life Frost was a tortured man. Both the family he was born into and the family he made with Elinor were oppressed by mental illness and early death. After the suicide of his son Robert, Frost said, “My poems are my children.” When I read this, I think, “That’s great for the poems, but what about the children?”
He was also a driven man. Over his long career he garnered four Pulitzers, more than any other poet. And among his many other honors he was Vermont’s State Poet Laureate (1961-63). Frost was a born teacher. (His Introduction to the Collected Poems, “The Figure a Poem Makes”, is the wisest essay on the lyric poem that I’ve ever read. I quote from it endlessly, and a poet friend keeps a copy on his desk.) But he was too competitive to be a mentor. I think he could not abide any other poet––even a student––to approach the throne he gave so much to gain.
But as Auden wrote on the death of Yeats: “Your gift survived it all.” Frost wrote a body of lyric poems in language so spare, delving and nakedly honest that they belong with the classics of any age. No poet could have worked his poems harder to bring them to their ravishing conclusions. “I have been one acquainted with the night”; “one could do worse than be a swinger of birches”; “what to make of a diminished thing”; “I have promises to keep // and miles to go before I sleep.” The closing lines stay with you for life.
It is the poems, not the complicated man, that is the stubborn boulder in the rushing stream.