Robert Frost

Frost achieved poetic maturity before the beginning of poetic modernism, which was ushered in by the early 20th century movement known as imagism. He therefore had more in common with the 19th century poets and with the Georgians-poets who carried the Victorian tradition into the 20th century-than with Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and others who dominated the first half of the 20th century. It is possible to say then, without implying any value judgement, that Frost is a transitional poet between the two centuries.

Frost was an "outsider" during most of his poetic career-a time when those "inside" believed that "a poem should not mean but be." Frost's poems are intended to mean. He thought that a poem should "begin in delight and end in wisdom."

Frost's characteristically defensive posture was not due solely to the fact that his poetic manner was about to be rendered "old-fashioned" by younger poets when his first volume appeared. Demanding density of texture, complex verbal ironies, symbolism, and the avoidance of outright statement, they seemed to be relegating Frost's poetry to the high schools, ladies' poetry societies, and popular anthologies. As Frost saw it, he had to survive as a poet in an intrinsically hostile climate and he did very successfully.

However, even going against the pattern and poets of the age, Frost proved to be a leading poet of any age.

Though Robert Frost has become such a national institution that he was called on the read a poem at the 1961 Presidential Inauguration, it is still difficult to understand just how deep his roots go down into time. When he published "My Butterfly" in the Independent in November 1894, Henry James had not yet entered his major phase and Stephen Crane had not published The Celtic Twilight, but Poems had not yet appeared, and Conrad, having closed his career in the merchant service, was beginning one as a professional writer. The careers of Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound had of course not begun; Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway had not even been born.

These facts reveal more than Frost's age. They emphasize that he was writing poetry before modern literature had really begun to happen. In fact, Frost grew up in a time when there was no commanding poetic voice in America. Whitman was still alive, still writing, but the force of his career was spent and he had become the Good Gray Poet. Emily Dickenson, the one vital spirit in American poetry was significantly enough unheard and unknown, having chosen to write her poetry to posterity instead of addressing it to a contemporary audience. In the wake of the Schoolroom Poets, who were dying one by one, there simply was no poetic audience to listen and no voice to speak during the twenty-six years Frost spent in the nineteenth century.

Yet the remoteness of Frost's beginnings is not more striking that the decisive 20th century chronology of his career. Although he had published fugitive pieces in magazines, his first volume of poems did not appear until 1913, when he was thirty-nine years old. That is an extraordinarily late age to begin a career, even in America, where Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Melvin, and Mark Twain did not discover themselves as writers until they were past twenty-five. Yet Frost not only began late; he seems to have gathered his forces deliberately and bided his time until he was sure of not launching himself too soon.

He has not completed poems to make books, but had made his books from completed poems.

Refusing to arrange his observations into any kind of systematic theory, Frost ahs mentioned several specifics and factors that seem to him important. Rejecting the hard and fast boundaries of definition as too dangerous, he ahs indicated certain elastic principles which seem not only rooted in the experience of poets in any age but also sensible and salutary.

Form, then, may been said to be the most important characteristic which Frost finds essential to poetry in any age. But the spread of meaning in that very elastic word must be suggested before such a simple statement is to be understood. For example, we may start with the great variety of stanzaic forms and then break any of them down to the rich formal relationships of rhyme to rhyme, of line to line, of sentence to sentence, of words which talk back and forth to each other in the poem. When we recall that another characteristic of form is balance and equilibrium, or controlled unbalance, we open up entirely now vistas. Futhermore, form in poetry is modulated also by the relation, the balance, of emotion and emotion, of thought and thought, of emotion and thought, of the specific and the general, of the trivial and the significant, of the transient and the permanent. All of these facets appear to Frost as related aspects of that terse, but by no means simple, word "form".

And Frost further to assert quite bluntly that another requirement of poetry is that this formal fusion of distinct elements shall achieve the personal idiom of the poet's expression without sacrificing that happy correspondence which must exist between his own experience and the experience