Robert Frost and the End of Poetry

Among the themes that seem most central and abiding in the work of Robert Frost is the poet’s self-evaluation in comparison to prior poets; another—related, as I’ll hope to show—is his preoccupation with making art out of what would have struck many of those predecessors as scanty and unpromising materials. History and diminishment: these are the entangled matters we’ll need to explore, as I believe Frost persistently did. And to bring things into sharper focus, we should probably begin with what we might call the history of diminishment.

To that end, here is one of Frost’s most memorable and probing poems, first published in 1923 in the collection New Hampshire:

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end For teams that came by the stony road To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm; And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Like all of Frost’s most significant work, this poem is taxingly ambiguous. I think, however, that one thing it clearly instances is what many years back Geoffrey Hartman named Hesperean, or westering lyric—lyric that sees itself caught, precisely, in the sunset of a vigorous tradition. The tradition, at least in our own cultural mythology, arose in Greece (or perhaps the Holy Land), moved to Rome, then traveled the breadth of Europe, finally making its way across the Atlantic. Frost’s 1915 arrival in Franconia, New Hampshire, after a three-year English sojourn, may have signaled as much as anything his awareness that he was in fact what Ezra Pound, half-approvingly and half-jeeringly, called a “vurry Amurrican poet.” But whether consciously or otherwise, he was also retracing that westerly course of poetry, or at least what he considered its final leg, its most attenuated phase.

This sunset poetry represented in Frost’s view an art that, however momentarily, might rekindle the energies once associated with literary giants from Homer to High Victorians like Tennyson and Browning (the latter of whose dramatic monologues must surely have influenced him). But, as would seem inevitable, such sunset poetry would also inescapably be involved with “brooding on what has been.”

Poets are of course famous for brooding, often on what has been. Many, myself included, worry that we are at this point really, absolutely, at the end, just now because of the racing development of technology: e-books, Kindle, texting, Twittering, etc. Poets, though, have pretty much always thought their art to be in its sunset phase. Like men and women who reach a certain biological age, we all must come to mourn a vanished and—inevitably, to our way of thinking—a better age.

If I stop and think about it, in fact, I can take some comfort in knowing that predictions of poetry’s demise are about as old as poetry itself. Some Tory writer—I can’t remember who, exactly—once opined in verse that “As Chaucer is, so shall Dryden be,” and early on someone must have thought the same thing about Homer and Virgil. But let’s turn to a curious English expression of this pattern, Thomas Gray...