Robert Frost Essay Research Paper ROBERT Frost

Robert Frost Essay, Research Paper

ROBERT Frost has been

discovering America all his

life. He has also been

discovering the world; and

since he is a really wise

poet, the one thing has been

the same thing as the other.

He is more than a New

England poet: he is more

than an American poet; he

is a poet who can be

understood anywhere by

readers versed in matters

more ancient and universal

than the customs of one

country, whatever that

country is. Frost’s country

is the country of human

sense: of experience, of

imagination, and of

thought. His poems start at

home, as all good poems

do; as Homer’s did, as

Shakespeare’s, as

Goethe’s, and as

Baudelaire’s; but they end

up everywhere, as only the

best poems do. This is

partly because his wisdom

is native to him, and could not have been suppressed by any circumstance; it is

partly, too, because his education has been right. He is our least provincial poet

because he is the best grounded in those ideas–Greek, Hebrew, modern

Europeans and even Oriental–which make for well-built art at any time. He does

not parade his learning, and may in fact not know that he has it: but there in his

poems it is, and it is what makes them so solid, so humorous, and so satisfying.

His many poems have been different from one another and yet alike. They are the

work of a man who has never stopped exploring himself–or, if you like, America,

or better yet, the world. He has been able to believe, as any good artist must, that

the things he knows best because they are his own will turn out to be true for other

people. He trusts his own feelings, his own doubts, his own certainties, his own

excitements. And there is absolutely no end to these, given the skill he needs to

state them and the strength never to be wearied by his subject matter. “The object

in writing poetry” Frost has said, “is to make all poems sound as different as

possible from each other.” But for this, in addition to the tricks any poet knows,

“we need the help of context–meaning–subject matter. That is the greatest help

towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters.

. . . The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the

rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one

more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound,

because deeper and from wider experience.”

Frost is one of the most subtle of modern poets in that department where so much

criticism rests, the department called technique; but the reason for his subtlety is

seldom noticed. It is there because it has to be, in the service of something

infinitely more important: a report of the world by one who lives in it without any

cause to believe that he is different from other persons except for the leisure he has

given himself to walk about and think as well as possible concerning all the things

he sees; and to take accurate note of the way they strike him as he looks. What they

are in themselves is not to be known; or who he is, either, if all his thought is of

himself; but when the two come together in a poem, testimony may result. This is

what Frost means by subject matter, and what any poet had better mean if he

expects to be read.

Frost is more and more read, by old readers and by young, because in this crucial

and natural sense he has so much to say. He is a generous poet. His book confides

many discoveries, and shares with its readers a world as wild as it is wide–a

dangerous world, hard to live in, yet the familiar world that is the only one we

shall ever have, and that we can somehow love for the bad things in it as well as

the good, the unintelligible as well as the intelligible.

Frost is a laconic New Englander: that is to say, he talks more than anybody. He

talks all the time. The inhabitants of New England accuse one another of talking

too much, but all are guilty together, all are human; for man is a talking animal,

and never more so than when he is trying to prove that silence is best. Frost has

expressed the virtue of silence in hundreds of poems, each one of them more

ingenious than the last in the way it takes of suggesting that it should not have been

written at all. The greatest people keep still.

There may be little or much beyond the grave,

But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

Joking aside, Frost is a generous giver. He is not, thank heaven, one of those

exiguous modern poets–Joseph Wood Krutch has called them costive–who hope

to be loved because they have delivered so little: the fewer the poems the better the

poet. The fact is that the greatest poets have been, among other things, prolific:

they have

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