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Dark Darker Darkest h Robert Frost’s poetry is full of actions taken on obscure impulse. A man reins in his horse on “the darkest evening of the year” to watch the woods ‹ll up with snow. Why does he interrupt his journey? “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Another man hesitates where “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” and takes “the one less traveled by.” These poems are so familiar that it is almost painful to quote them. Others less well known are no less driven by impulse. “Into My Own,” the sonnet that opens Frost’s ‹rst book of poems, evokes a distant prospect of “dark trees”: “I should not be withheld but that some day / Into their vastness I should steal away.” Every true poem, Frost wrote in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” the lovely little manifesto that served as the preface to his Collected Poems of 1939, is the child of impulse: “It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the ‹rst line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clari‹cation of life—not necessarily a great clari‹cation, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” In the summer of 1912, following his own impulse to “steal away,” Frost abandoned a life of raising chickens and teaching school in small towns on the outskirts of Boston, and took his family to England, with little money and no real prospects for making more. The Frosts had four children; two others died in infancy. Elinor, Frost’s high school sweetheart turned long-suffering wife, acquiesced in this impulsive scheme as she did in so many others; besides, she confessed to a wish to “live under thatch.” Frost at thirty-eight soon had enough poems to ‹ll two 67 books and part of a third, though no publisher, and a terri‹c theory of how those poems had gotten written. The poems were of two main kinds. In the ‹rst group were short lyrics of an extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship. In the second were longer poems, stories really, that could be as harrowing (“Home Burial” or “A Servant to Servants”) as a Hemingway short story, or ruminative and wry like an extended joke allowed to go off the tracks. The theory, which looms large in The Notebooks of Robert Frost—seven hundred pages of wisdom and prophecy, raving and rant, expertly edited and annotated by Robert Faggen—involved what Frost called “sentence-sounds,” primal patterns of intonation and impulse that, in Frost’s view, precede and underlie the words of a conversation or a good poem. Birds have their song; humans have their sentence sounds. “So many and no more belong to the human throat, just as so many runs and quavers belong to the throat of the cat-bird, so many to the chickadee.” The job of the poet was to collect them and identify them, like an ornithologist in the outback, and then to set memorable words to the sounds. England was good to Frost. He quickly found a publisher for the poems and a friend, the writer Edward Thomas, who was as excited about the theory as he was. The shorter poems were gathered in A Boy’s Will, the title borrowed without acknowledgment —since everyone knew its provenance anyway—from a poem called “My Lost Youth” by Longfellow, who had in turn borrowed the phrase from Herder’s translation of a Lapland lament: “Knabenwille ist Windeswille,” or “A boy’s will is the wind’s will.” Something like Longfellow’s spectacular success with the common reader was what Frost in England already had in mind for himself. As he wrote to his friend and former pupil John Bartlett in 1913, “There is a kind of success called ‘of esteem’ and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands . . . . I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.” The last phrase is peculiar, and characteristic of Frost; “by taking thought” sounds like it means “deliber68 ately,” but it also probably means “without sacri‹cing thought,” hence without “dumbing down,” as well. That...

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