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Robert Frost, romantic - poet
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Sheldon W. Liebman
As all of these poems suggest, it is difficult to prove that Frost occupied one philosophical position or another. For all his seeming accessibility, he is, as Richard Poirier has shown, an exceptionally elusive and allusive poet. In his prose works, too, in which he might be expected to be less opaque, he is too often indirect and metaphorical to be easily pinned down. And even when he seems to be speaking spontaneously and unguardedly in his lectures and interviews, he can be very misleading. In a 1961 interview, for example, he said: "It's hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it. And what's in between doesn't make much sense" (Interviews 295). The point seems clear enough, but when the statement is understood to be (as it may be) a paraphrase of Lord Bolingbroke, by way of Emerson's "Montaigne," it takes on a very different meaning, especially in the context of Emerson's ultimately unskeptical essay.(8) For Emerson, Bolingbroke's sentiment is merely a stepping-stone to a broader and deeper affirmation. Statements or propositions, Emerson believed (and Frost seems to have agreed), have no meaning at all outside a poetic context. And even poems (whether in verse or prose) reveal their ultimate import only in the context of a poet's entire work. Thus, poems like "Design" and "The Bear" must be understood in relation to the rest of Frost's oeuvre. "Pod of the Milkweed," for example, appears to be less an expression of irremediable pessimism than a meditation on Plato's view of human suffering in The Phaedrus.(9) In answer to the question Frost asks in his poem - "why so much / Should come to nothing" - Plato wrote The Phaedo as well as The Phaedrus. And perhaps in response to the same concern, Frost wrote "Trial by Existence" as well as "Pod of the Milkweed."
In Frost's visionary poems, the woods are not the abode of disillusionment that they are in "The Demiurge's Laugh." Nor are the couples in them paralyzed by their fears or trapped in their houses, as in "Storm Fear" and "Love and a Question."(10) Like the men and women in "The Generations of Men" and "West-Running Brook," they enter a domain in which the fundamental conditions of life are mixed, even paradoxical. Yet they "trust" themselves "to go by contraries" and, in effect, transcend the conflicts and confusions that haunt Frost's couples in other poems. In a similar world of reconciled opposites, the conjunction of "love" and "truth" engenders a "fact" that is also a "dream" ("Mowing"); a ladder joining earth and heaven defines a magical sphere of half-sleep in which dream, vision, and reality are commingled ("After Apple-Picking"); and an abandoned road leads to a cellar hole and a children's playhouse where the truths of change, loss, and death merge with make-believe to create a vision "beyond confusion" ("Directive").
To some critics, of course, the poems of joy and communion cannot be taken seriously. They represent the regrettably sentimental Frost whose solaces are escapist and therefore unacceptable. At best, in Frost's own words, they are "momentary stays against confusion" - but only momentary and therefore negligible.(11) To other critics, Frost's affirmations are the willful assertions of an essentially skeptical poet who knows that order or form or meaning is imposed on nature as an expression of human need - not as a revelation of nature itself. In this view, the creation of form is either a heroic but ultimately futile act rooted in courage or a pragmatic act driven by the requirements of survival.(12) To a third group of critics, these poems represent the bright side of a coin that the poet tosses thoughtlessly and indifferently as the passing mood moves him. Together with poems like "Design" and "Desert Places," they add up to uncertainty and confusion. They signify Frost's inability or unwillingness to make up his mind, and they reflect the absence of any coherent vision in his poetry.(13)
