Frost's Great Misgiving

The publication of Frost's notebooks, in which for decades he collected his ideas, is a significant moment. Scholarship slowed to a trickle after the popular encomiums of his day and the biography wars of the past several decades, and little new material has surfaced to reinvigorate the world of Frost studies. Perhaps Robert Faggen's edition of Frost's Notebooks, and the many-volume series planned by Harvard University Press and headed by Faggen, could provide the jolt that this quaint region of scholarship needs.

As reviewers have already recognised, the contents of Frost's notebooks are just what might rescue him from the fire and ice of postmodern criticism. An abundance of passages show his deep concern with social, political, religious, and scientific dilemmas, and these are among the subjects of his less critically renowned late poems. Frost uses his notebooks to cogitate his disdain for current politics, viewing them as 'an honest effort to misunderstand one another'. One of his main sources of angst was Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal: 'he will defeat his own aim if he makes his people too harmonious. A nation is not meant to be harmonious as a family. It is one step further toward the severe in the gradations of discipline. Perhaps two steps . . . . A nation should be just as full of conflict as it can contain, physically mentally, financially'. Other entries develop his poetic theories. In several places he expands upon the sound of sense, as when he writes, 'The Sentences must spring from each other and talk to each other even when there is only one character speaking' and 'Poets have lamented the lack in poetry for any such notation as music has for suggesting sound . . . . The sentence is the notation'. Frost also balances his famous notion of free verse as playing tennis with the net down: 'Form without content and form before content are equally hard on us', and 'Form is only the last refinement of subject matter'. One-liners proliferate, and this one is inscribed about a dozen times: 'All men created free and equally funny'. In what may have been a riff on the phrase 'I'd rather be lucky than good', Frost jests 'I had rather be wise than artistic'.

Frost's notebooks include a hodge-podge of quips, aphorisms, quotations, ruminations, drafts of poems, teaching notes, ideas for public lectures, one-man Platonic dialogues, and mini-dramas with two or three characters. There is little diary material: no private revelations, no family dirt, and no confessions. The closest we get to controversy are passages in which Frost imagines he's addressing some unidentified persons with whom he disagrees, and some that scrutinise nationality and race. There are fewer entries that address fellow writers or their writing than one might expect. Some notebooks have long, interconnected passages in which Frost is debating his particular stance on topics such as democracy and communism. Readers will quickly get the impression of a mind working out possible truths while also attending to the practical realities of his life: a grand 'laboratory', as Faggen suggests in his introduction, combined with everyday doodles.

Frost chose to keep multiple notebooks going simultaneously, and like his work on his poems, he kept adding to several notebooks for decades. This built-in disorganisation presents problems for readers and editor alike; the latter no doubt had to make many educated guesses as to the dating and order of the notebooks. Since it is not possible to present the entries in true chronological order, Faggen has chosen to order the notebooks according to the dating of the first entry. Although there is no overarching system, or even a noticeable thread of chronology, the editor's decisions in structuring their contents, including the preservation of the original page formats (recto and verso), are commendable. His well-argued introduction aims to construct a prominent place for these notebooks in the larger context of Frost's life and works. Given their sometimes whimsical and random contents, Faggen rightly...