Literary Criticism:If every picture tells a story, the woodcut of Robert Frost, with his iconic shock of white hair, against a rural New England scene on my undergraduate paperback Selected Poems suggests only part of a far more complex tale.
Like many Americans, the poet laureate of Vermont was born in another state - in California, in 1874, where he lived until age 11. And, unlike most Americans, Frost also lived abroad - in England, from 1912 to 1915, with his wife and children, where he fell in (and out) with Ezra Pound, and met a host of other poets, from TS Eliot to Robert Graves. Nor, for that matter, did every New England poultry farmer study under philosopher George Santayana as a special student at Harvard.
Eliot, Pound and Santayana are among the myriad names that surface in the welter of observations, meditations, epigrams, and poetic drafts in The Notebooks of Robert Frost, 48 in total, dating from the 1890s to the early 1960s. What also surfaces is the immense erudition of Frost, who was better versed in the classics than Pound, and hugely read in the Bible and English poetry as well. A random entry on the paradoxical nature of knowledge in notebook 29, for example, references, among others, Roman poet Albius Tibullus, Greek philosopher Zeno and Albert Einstein, with a playful riff on Robert Burns's Coming Through the Rye thrown in for good measure. Nevertheless, for purposes of poetry, Frost, like Wordsworth, championed the straightforward vocabulary of everyday speech. "No book words," he avows in another entry, and his own poetry rarely sends us to the dictionary, bar the odd geologal talus or archaeological eolith.
The Notebooks also abound in cryptic entries and curiosities, a reference to "50,000 acres in ginseng" or sometimes just a name - John Boyle O'Reilly - where you wish for more. Another passage notes how Padraic Colum's wife, Molly, on their visit to the US in 1914, informed Frost that "men have too meagre a sex experience in Am[ erica] for art", a comment Frost later playfully expands on in a dramatic dialogue, a device he employed to such powerful effect in what Robert Graves called his "country dramas", poems such as Death of the Hired Man or the haunting Home Burial.
AS UNCONFESSIONAL AS his poetry, the Notebooks offer nothing of autobiography, no mention of the serial personal tragedies that he once alluded to as "the vast chaos of all I have lived through", including the early loss of an alcoholic father, the deaths of his own first-born son at age three and last-born daughter at two days, or the psychiatric illnesses that institutionalised his only sibling Jeanie, and dogged his own daughters and son Carol, who committed suicide at 40. An occasional reference to his seeming unease in company is pretty much all we get of the social, as opposed to artistic, personality. "Society," he notes, "reminds me of so many sleepless beetles crawling over each other in a bottle." Yet even these instances, like so much of the Notebooks, speak in turn to the poems, in this case Build Soil, which ends: "And coming home from company means coming home to our senses".
Other entries reflect Frost's teaching career, in secondary schools and later at various universities where, as Notebooks editor Robert Faggen wryly observes, Frost practically invented the post of poet-in-residence. (Or, per Frost: "Poet-in- resistance"!) His interest in pedagogy, particularly at high school level, is both passionate and wonderfully commendable; according to Frost, students should be instructed: "Don't 'tell' the poem in other and worse English of your own to show you understand it," and teachers should be challenged by students "to ask me something that you don't know".
Frost returns throughout the Notebooks to his seminal belief in the primacy of sound; more specifically, the tone of the spoken voice within the poetic line, which he says both informs the meaning of individual words, and also saves us from the unrelieved sing-song of meter, what he calls "death by jingle". "We value poetry too much as it makes pictures," he insists, arguing that poetry is sound before it is sight. "Write with the ear to the speaking voice," he adjures elsewhere, exhorting the poet to summon the multiple tones of voice - hate, delight, weariness or longing - that are as particular to the human throat as "the runs and quavers" of the cat-bird or the chickadee. And if it's a truism that poetry should be read out loud, Frost's insistence on the rhythms of the spoken voice likely explains the immense rewards that come from reading his own work aloud.
Unlike Henry James, Frost was not seduced by England, nor did he consider an overly refined Europe "as good grist as America" for the artist. A keen observer of politics, he strikes a prescient note in much of what he observed decades ago about his native land. "The government must not consent to be outgoverned by big business," he remarks in notebook four, while his common-sense observation that "our hold on the planet [ is] just one jump ahead of exhaustion of natural resources" seems, in our dawning awareness of peak oil, light years ahead of its time. Frost borrows from Donegal poet William Allingham in characterising the American populace as "Wee folk, good folk, trooping all together", and his belief that America's "interfering" with other nations "derives from a Christian wish to make the whole world happy" seems chillingly prophetic in light of born-again President Bush's determination to inflict his vision of "democracy" upon Iraq.
DISTRUSTFUL OF ALL monotheism and extremism, Frost in an early entry describes both life and the arts as "a bursting unity of opposition barely held", one which clamps together "the ultimate irreconcilables, spirit and matter, good and evil . . . peace and strife". That "barely held", however, suggests his is a hard-won negative capability - what Keats called the capacity of a master poet to stand his own ground amid mystery and uncertainties. "Belief is fortune- telling," Frost wrote, and another entry famously declares how "a poem is a momentary stay against confusion".
Although much of the material will interest scholars primarily, other passages bring us back time and again to his poems. Like his advocacy for "the fresh noticing of details" on the part of "the so-called nature poet" which "prove he has been there". Such actuality is a key part of what anchors Frost's own verse - whether the more frenetic flight of a moth compared to that of a butterfly (To a Moth Seen in Winter), or the fact that a white birch first grows up green (A Young Birch). Or the way we as readers can trust that the great buck in the magisterial The Most of It (a poem which Seamus Heaney suggests in ways surpasses Yeats's A Second Coming) actually swam across a lake "and landed pouring like a waterfall,/And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,/And forced the underbrush - and that was all".
"Que sais je?" writes Frost in an early notebook, echoing Montaigne in his scepticism and the limits to all learning. Truth be told, it's hard to think of another American poet who knows as much about what little we can safely apprehend as Robert Frost.
Boston-born Anthony Glavin is a short story writer and novelist
The Notebooks of Robert Frost Edited by Robert Faggen Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 810pp. £25.95