Frost, Robinson, and the Judgment of Posterity

Poets, alive or dead, need recognition above all else. Few of them make money, but that rare reward pales when compared to the enduring admiration of critics and readers. By this standard Robert Frost has taken his place in the pantheon, while Edwin Arlington Robinson threatens to slip out of sight. It was not always thus. For most of their careers Robinson and Frost, Frost and Robinson were repeatedly linked in critical assessments as more or less equal in importance. In 1938 Robert P. Tristram Coffin, himself a poet, wrote a book about their connection—New Poetry of New England: Frost and Robinson. Both men were acutely aware of these comparisons—how could they not be?—and they reacted in markedly different ways.

Most commentators pointed out that Robinson (1869–1935) and Frost (1874–1963), less than five years his junior, had a great deal in common, with nearly every similarity inviting a contradiction. They were both New Englanders, Robinson from Maine, and Frost, after boyhood, from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont; and they both wrote about the people and experiences they encountered there. Much was made of Robinson's amiable "Isaac and Archibald" as prefiguring the rustic country folk Frost bodied forth in a series of powerful portraits. The analogy breaks down with a closer look. Robinson's Isaac and Archibald are indeed two elderly farmers, but usually he wrote about people in the community of Tilbury Town, invented along the lines of his native Gardiner, Maine. Frost, on the other hand, concentrated on rural settings and characters in a latter-day pastoral at once sensitive to the natural world and acutely aware of the costs of existence in the modern world. Both depicted a region in decline. In sonnets and other brief lyrics Robinson wrote of failures and failed relationships, trying to puzzle out where they went wrong. In dramatic monologues and narratives Frost presented the desolate lives of people trying to hold their own.

V. Foster Hopper contrasted their approaches in a letter to the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, written shortly after Robinson's death in 1935. A previously published essay in the magazine maintained that Robinson took as his motto the warning at a Boston and Maine railroad crossing to stop, look, listen. That was incorrect, Hopper pointed out. The grade-crossing sign actually read look out for the engine.

It was Robert Frost, deriving from California who brought with him the more ordinary admonishment to stop, look, and listen. It is Frost who stops to embrace a boundless moment, who sees the strayed colt, Frost whose ears are exclusively attuned to the unmistakable accents of the New England farmer. Robinson would have little or none of these. He was looking out for the engine. External or adventitious peculiarities interested him not at all. His was the search for motivation, for the hidden springs of human action. The train and the passengers were for him only surface phenomena. His study was the engine which hauled its human load over a roadbed considerably more hazardous and toward a terminal even more uncertain than any on the dear old B. and M.

Frost and Robinson were mutually praised for abandoning the polite, facile, propriety-ridden language that dominated American poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. In reacting against that prettified verse, however, they went their separate ways. Robinson adopted a plainspoken and accessible diction that was revolutionary at the time, but only rarely did he employ the colloquial idiom that Frost was reaching for (and often grasping) in what he called "the sound of sense." Carl Van Doren recalled meetings that brought this distinction into focus. He met Frost at a noisy gathering, and the two of them repaired to the kitchen where Frost, a world-class talker, read one of his poems. That was a revelation for Van Doren: "I had always, somehow, read the words as universal English, like any other poem's. But now I found they were Yankee words and without their true intonation had never said to me half what they meant. [Frost] writes only...