Reinstating the Old Pieties in Frost Criticism

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume IO,Number 2, Fall, 1979 Reinstating the Old Pieties inFrostCriticism RichardPoirier. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. ~ewYork: Oxford University Press, 1977. 322 + xvii pp. Wayne Tefs "Beloved" is a term that must always be mistrusted when applied to artists, and particularly to poets Poets are likely to be beloved for only a few of the right reasons, and for almost all the wrong ones: for saying things we want to hear, for furnishing us with an image of ourselves that we enjoy believing in, even for living for a long time in the public eye and pronouncing sagelyon current affairs. Robert Frost has been long admired for all these things, and is consequently one of the most misread writers in the whole of American literature. AsJames Dickey intimates in the above passage, Frost is not only one of the mostwidely read but also one of the most frequently misread poets of our time.Commentaries on his work have flourished in the past twenty years but manyhave interred, rather than genuinely interpreted, Frost's poetic explorationof what he called "the great predicament: a figure of the will braving alien entanglements." The explanation for this peculiar state of affairs is simple but notobvious. It lies in the unusual demand that Frost makes upon his readers tosee both surface and depth at once. Frost asks us to conspire in a sympathetic understanding of both literary traditions and personal concerns, a complex effort which many of his critics would prefer not to make. They wouldrather regard Frost as the polisher of brilliant surfaces, the implacable oldfarmer, or the spiritual drifter-images that minimize the seriousness of Frost'spoetic achievement by falling into the trap he set in facetiously claimingthat while serious poets, like Eliot, were playing Eucharist, he was playingEuchre . But Frost, as Lionel Trilling amply demonstrated in his speech commemoratingthe poet's eighty-fifth birthday, was not only complex, but far more 218 WayneTefs disturbing than had been previously acknowledged. Trilling's claim that Frost unfolded "a terrifying universe" dovetailed with Lawrance Thompson's assertion in his Introduction to Frost's authorized biography that "the central problem of his life-artistic and non-artistic-was to find orderly waysof dealing with dangerous conflicts he found operative within himself or between himself and others." Together the suggestive work of Trilling and Thompson prompted several investigations into what Randall Jarrell had much earlier called "the other Frost." Elaine Barry, for example, wrote a short monograph which began with the assumption "that many of [Frost's] speculations place him in the great tradition of New England writers who penetrated the dark undersurface of American life." And Frank Lentricchia, noting that "Frost's motive for poetry is not cognitive but psychological," initiated the exploration of Frost's psychological themes. Frost criticism, it appeared, was ready to take the step already made in criticism of Hawthorne, Poe, Whitman and Dickinson : the recognition and investigation of the psychic impulses and motives that lie behind and interpenetrate social and literary themes. Into this scene arrives Richard Poirier's Robert Frost: The Work cl Knowing. Poirier's elegant and urbane study opens with a spirited discussion of "The Silken Tent" in which he identifies as the central impetus behind Frost's poems the tension between poetic postures of risk and poise. These postures reveal, in Poirier's eyes, that for Frost the poem is both instrument and embodiment of the mind's encounter with the entanglements of experience , for it must express, and at the same time contain, its material. Hence,he claims, "Frost seems to me of vital interest and consequence because his ultimate subject is the interpretive process itself." According to Poirier there are several key motifs in Frost's poetry which illuminate the imaginative landscape that he inhabited. Among these are the twinned concepts of "home" and "extravagance," dramatizing the attractions of domesticity and the impulse to stray beyond its bounds. For Frost, he argues, home represents the value and security of human decorums: it shapes human lives. But then there is also extravagance, the desire for the kind of vagrancy which implies expenditure and the possibility of enriching "home." When...