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Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Stambuk

In Robert Francis's reminiscence of Robert Frost, A Time to Talk, the entry dated April 4, 1932, contains a poem published the day before in the Springfield Republican and Union. Francis wrote the poem to commemorate Frost's arrival at Amherst. Here are its final stanzas:

Best of all--you've heard?--he comes to stay.

This is his home now. He is here for good.

To leave us now would be running away.

(I too would stay forever if I could.)

While he stays, life that breathless fugitive,

Will stay. While he lives, some things here won't die.

And we, breathing his air, may learn to live

Close to the earth, like him, and near the sky.

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An example of Francis's exuberant juvenilia (neither published in book form nor included in the Collected Poems), the lyric was, in his words, "the first pop gun fired in my private campaign to establish a significant relation with this most significant man in town" (48-49). The following January, he befriended Frost in his home on Sunset Avenue in Amherst; thereafter blossomed a relationship in which the younger poet found in Frost a mentor. In fact, he recalled, when he made Frost's acquaintance, he "was still unpublished in book form, a young poet looking for guidance. So Frost took the role of mentor, and much that he said had to do with my own poems and my problems as a poet" (45). [1]

After his second book, Valhalla and Other Poems, was published in 1938, the volume "made no stir anywhere" (21), Francis wrote in his autobiography, The Trouble with Francis. But if the book failed to excite critical notice, it brought "some quiet rewards" (21), one of which was a letter from Robert Frost:

I am swept off my feet by the goodness of your poems this time. Ten or a dozen of them are my idea of perfection. A new poet swims into my ken. I can refrain from strong praise no longer. You are achieving what you live for.... You have not only the feeling of a true lyric poet, but the variety of a man with a mind. (19)

Francis's mention of Frost's letter is important because Frost's praise was a formal recognition of his poetry. The letter also provided evidence of Frost's influence on Francis: note that his praise of Francis's poems is reserved for those that are "[his] idea of perfection" (19). Not surprisingly, then, there is a sort of Frost static everywhere in this volume. Compare a passage from Francis's "Valhalla"-

The valley sees the pasture on the hill.

Below the pasture and above are woods

Up to the wooded peak up to the sky.

The valley sees the darkness of evergreens

Waiting above the pasture to come down

As other evergreens have come or wait

To come to darken pastures on other hills.

--to an excerpt from Frost's poem, "The Mountain":

The mountain stood there to be pointed at.

Pasture ran up the side a little way,

And then there was a wall of trees with trunks;

After that only tops of trees, and cliffs

Imperfectly concealed among the leaves. [2]

As David Graham observes, the echoes of Frost in Francis's early poems helped shape a critical view that Francis was "a minor lyricist perpetually standing in Frost's broad shadow" (83). Reviews of Francis's early volumes focused on the thematic resemblance of his writing to Frost's. Consider, for instance, Louis Untermeyer's critique of Francis's third book, The Sound I Listened For (1944), whose poems accentuate what he asserts is Francis's "gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial." "In this," Untermeyer animadverts, "he reminds the reader of his more illustrious forerunners, especially of one whose background is contiguous. It is nothing against Robert Francis that he often resembles Robert Frost." And though Untermeyer admires Francis's lyrics for the way in which "they blend observation with imagination," he adds, finally, "[b]ut we know who wrote them first" (345).

Untermeyer's praise of Francis's perceptiveness provides a critical basis for a comparison of Frost's and Francis's poetry. Like Frost, Francis sees nature emblematically; he reads meaning in the things and creatures of the world. He also approaches Frost in translating his perception of nature's moral significance into a code of conduct. This way of seeing traces back to Emerson, Thoreau, and the influence on them of classical Stoicism, which emphasizes, as Robert D. Richardson Jr. argues, turning to nature for instruction as to "how one's life should be lived" (Henry Thoreau 189). [3] However, Francis and Frost depart from Emerson and Thoreau in their willingness to probe nature's dark design, and move even further from them in their readiness to explore a corresponding experiential darkness, which expresses itself as psychological loneliness. While both poets exhibit wariness at entering the darkness they describe, they differ in the stances they take up in relation to it. In Frost's case, this state of m ind is defined by Richard Poirier as "a sense of 'nothingness' or a condition of vacancy" (204), which he argues Frost contrives in order that he may resist it. When Frost adopts a posture of resistance, he becomes his own ideal version of himself. He then extends his self-idealization from the poems to the fictions he creates about how easily he composed them. In Francis's case, the stance he takes up in the face of loneliness is one of detachment, a detachment that is paradoxically an engagement in that he displays (to borrow Poirier's phrase) a "contemplative receptivity" (211) rather than a resistance to his "vacant" condition. Ironically, Francis adopted this stance on the advice of Frost, whose words are invoked in the poem "For the Ghost of Robert Frost." Here, Francis pictures detached engagement as the hovering of a hummingbird over a flower, defining, in the process, an important way in which he has outgrown Frost:

Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Stambuk

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