Robert Frost, romantic - poet

The point is that visionary experience in Frost's poetry occurs only after intellectual exhaustion, spiritual despair, or metaphorical breakdown - that is, after the kind of experience that Frost portrays in his darker poems. And because these interludes of darkness always precede illumination, it seems reasonable to conclude that they are a precondition for it. In this respect, revelation is not just an escape from confusion and disappointment but a consequence of them. And it is not merely given, but suffered for. Under such circumstances, darkness is "precious," as one of Frost's characters says in "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus":

We need the interruption of the night To ease attention off when overtight, To break our logic in too long a flight, And ask us if our premises are right. (511)

In short, the dark is not merely a contrasting backdrop against which the stars can be better seen, but the medium through or the means by which they appear - the via negativa without which vision is impossible: "The groundwork of all faith is human woe" (472).

In Frost's poetry, darkness leads to illumination, and chaos becomes cosmos. But this can happen only when the prospective "hierophant" goes into the woods ("Birches") or returns to a cellar hole ("Directive") - that is, when the prospect of becoming "whole again beyond confusion" is made possible by a turn away from the quotidian and into darkness, chaos, or oblivion. Having entered the woods, the candidate for revelation is ready for the kind of self-transcendence that Frost found in Emerson's "Brahma": "the perfect detachment from ambition and desire that alone can rescue us from the round of existence" (Prose 97). At this new level of consciousness, the initiate is baffled, hopeless, and lost. Ultimately, however, he attains not only solace and sustenance, but also knowledge of a different - and deeper - reality.

In this context, it should be clear that poems like "Design," "Stars," and the tragic narratives of North of Boston are neither at the center of Frost's poetic vision nor in real opposition to his more affirmative poems. Rather, they merely express the nature of the profane world, and they are subsumed in the process of illumination, which ultimately reveals the cosmos, the sacred. They are the Everlasting Nay to Frost's Everlasting Yea, the experience of alienation before the blessing of the water snakes, the expression of disillusionment that precedes the ascent of the sacred mountain. Not that these poems are trivial or incidental. Rather, although the picture they present is neither final nor absolute, it is indispensable for a thorough comprehension of human existence, and it must be accepted before understanding is actually completed by illumination.

In my view, then, Frost was not a sentimental escapist, a brooding nihilist, or a pragmatic Greek who courageously faced chaos in order to impose meaning on it. As a romantic, he did not believe that truth is simply willed into being; nor did he believe that beauty is merely created. According to his own testimony, truth and beauty are discoverable in reality. They come into being when thinker and artist transcend their ordinary selves and allow experience to complete itself. Like Emerson, Frost believed that one "sees" when the intellect is "where and what it sees" (3:26). And he agreed with Wordsworth that "the individual Mind" is "fitted" to "the external World," and vice versa, but only in the act of creation, when both Mind and World act "with blended might," as Wordsworth says in "Home at Grasmere" and "Tintern Abbey" and throughout The Prelude.(19)