Bookplanet: Robert Frost, the last popular US poet (like Philip Larkin was the last popular Brit poet)

Frost on the Edge -- by DAVID ORR/NY Times

No one resembles a poet so much as another poet, which is a mixed blessing for American poetry. On the one hand, this kinship helps explain why writers with divergent sensibilities often read one another’s work with surprising compassion and skill; on the other, it also explains why certain factions in the poetry world loathe each other nearly as much as “Star Wars” fanatics despise people who have a working knowledge of Klingon. Sometimes this acrimony stems from a genuine aesthetic disagreement that is serious and important and (as one might say in Poetryland) worthy of a Panel Discussion, Followed by a Short Reception. Other times, though, it’s just a matter of writers carping at each other because they realize that if they didn’t, people would have a hard time telling them apart.

The longest-running feud is probably the low-intensity border war between so-called experimental poets and their “mainstream” brethren. Since the distinctions can be hard to parse (to most people, saying “mainstream poetry” is like saying “mainstream tapestry-weaving”), it’s helpful to turn to the experts. In her book “21st-Century Modernism,” Marjorie Perloff, a professor emerita at Stanford and longtime champion of the avant-garde, claims the “dominant” mode in poetry these days is “expressivist,” whereas experimental writing involves “constructivism ... the specific understanding that language, far from being a vehicle or conduit for thoughts or feelings outside and prior to it, is itself the site of meaning-making.” She fleshes out this concept with quotations from several contemporary avant-garde poets, who argue among other things that “there are no thoughts except through language” and “as soon as I start listening to the words they reveal their own vectors and affinities, pull the poem into their own field of force, often in unforeseen directions.”

Indeed, experimental poetry “finds its own name as it goes” and “may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being,” because ultimately “the whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association.” After all, where a given poem is concerned, “what do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it?” Such poems necessarily disdain lyric sincerity in favor of what one writer calls “the pleasure of ulteriority” and are usually — no surprise — aggressively bookish (“So many of them have literary criticism in them — in them”). Admittedly, this approach may not appeal to more conservative tastes, but as a general description of much of today’s most successful experimental writing, it’s not too bad.

The problem, however, is that only the first two of those statements were actually made by contemporary avant-garde poets. Everything else, of course, was said by Robert Frost (who is, to put it mildly, rarely described as a forefather of vanguard poetics). The point here is not that our self-consciously avant-garde writers are kidding themselves, or that your ninth-grade English class was sliding along the razor’s edge of American culture by reading “Birches.” No, the point is that whenever we begin forming up teams in American poetry, we run into the problem of picking sides for such complex and hard-to-place poets as Frost, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens (not to mention Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Lorine Niedecker). Rather than take these writers as they are — rather than acknowledge, for example, that Frost was as innovative as many poets more often considered “experimental” — we prefer to reduce such figures to a size better suited to the game we want to play. We cut the poet to fit the jersey.

This is an especially easy mistake to make with Frost, whose notebooks, edited by Robert Faggen, have now been published. Frost once said he wanted to be seen as “the exception I like to think I am in everything.” The problem with being an exception to every category is that after a while you begin to frustrate the categorizers. Consequently, Frost now occupies a position as unique as it is unstable. He’s a definitive Great American Poet, yet he’s never been embraced by the American academy as eagerly as, say, Ezra Pound. (In fact, Frost may be the only poet who is universally acknowledged to be a master but who nonetheless seems to require periodic reputation-buffing essays from the likes of Randall Jarrell and Seamus Heaney.) He’s a technician of prodigious agility, yet he generally limited himself to iambics, and favored rhymes like “reason” and “season” or “star” and “far.” And then there is the fraught matter of his popularity. Unlike almost every poet of comparable ability, Frost can claim a general reading audience, especially among readers who want poems that “make sense” — yet his aesthetic is evasive, arguably manipulative, and has at its core a freezing indifference that would make the neighborhood barbecue awfully uncomfortable. Still, as the critic Richard Poirier argues, “There is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose.” It’s easy to see how a poet this contradictory might suffer from the unsubtle ways in which we tend to talk about things like experimentalism and “the mainstream.” In such arguments, Frost will be simplified at best, ignored entirely at worst.

The new Notebooks of Robert Frost (Belknap/Harvard University, $39.95) won’t make things any easier. Not that they aren’t entertaining — open any page and you’ll find observations like “Seek first in poetry concrete images of sound” and “Reality is the cold feeling on the end of the trout’s nose from the stream that runs away,” as well as “Art is the last of your childhood and may be followed somewhat irresponsibly” and “An artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it.” Faggen has chosen to reproduce all of the more than 40 notebooks essentially “as is,” which is perhaps helpful for scholars but is taxing for regular readers, who will find Frost’s chronological shifts confusing (to say nothing of such unenlightening entries as “Come see kill a vase” and “Marriage Japanese Dwarf tree”). Still, any Frost reader will benefit from Faggen’s thoughtful introduction and be intrigued by the way in which concepts from these largely aphoristic journals animate the poems and vice versa. When Frost writes in Notebook 29 that “poetry is also the renewal of principles” and that “Principles have got to be lost in order to be found,” one thinks of the vision of truth from his poem “The Black Cottage”: “Most of the change we think we see in life / Is due to truths being in and out of favor.” Frost’s speaker then imagines being “monarch of a desert land / I could devote and dedicate forever / To the truths we keep coming back and back to,” a land that could be only “sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk / Blown over and over themselves in idleness.” Some poets don’t seem themselves outside their chosen medium; the Frost of these notebooks, however, is very much the Frost of the poems.

And that’s the problem (if it is a problem). Had Frost’s journals contained a study of Walter Benjamin, or a series of sympathetic and incisive observations about Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons,” he possibly could be made to fit into the American experimental lineage. Had they contained a quiveringly sensitive commentary on the flora of New England, maybe he could be seen as reliably conventional. But more than four decades after his death, this most American of American poets still fits uncomfortably into our country’s favorite aesthetic categories.

There are signs, though, that this is changing. Experimental poets like Susan Wheeler have begun to appreciate Frost’s emphasis on writing-as-performance, and to treat him as a valuable source rather than an opponent (Wheeler’s “Source Codes” contains a very funny imitation of Frost’s “Provide, Provide”). More important, Frost managed to procure the best set of supporters an American poet can have: non-American poets, especially non-American poets with jobs in American universities. A short list of these would include Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Glyn Maxwell, James Lasdun and roughly every Northern Irish poet born after 1935. In a turn of events Frost would have relished, the Pulitzer Prize (an award he collected a record four times) went in 2003 to the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, who has declared Frost to be “the greatest American poet of the 20th century.” If this is a peculiar and circuitous way for the influence of Frost’s poetry to be felt on his native soil, well, as Frost put it, “the line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight.” And for a poet who has always been a figure of curves and bends, of digressions and turnings, perhaps there is no better reward.