Robert Frost:
Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays
Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson
The Library of America, 1,036 pages, $35
After Whitman, Robert Frost is the only poet to have a volume of his own in the distinguished Library of America series. The first of these now 81 scholarly editions in handsome uniform format was published in 1982, a one-volume collection of Herman Melville’s early novels, “Typee,” “Omoo,” “Mardi.” The 1995 additions, besides Frost, include two-volume sets of Zora Neale Hurston, Raymond Chandler and World War II American journalism and a one-volume collection of Thomas Paine. More is sure to come, but copyright controls have kept writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Wlliam Carlos Williams out of this particular pantheon. The Library of America’s 20th Century list, then, is short compared to that of 19th Century classics.
But Frost’s inclusion is hardly a matter of convenience. Today, few would deny that he belongs among our greatest poets. It may, however, be less clear how this edition improves upon “The Poetry of Robert Frost,” edited by Edward Connery Lathem, a former student of Frost’s at Dartmouth College in the late 1940s. Published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1969, that volume, still in print, included Frost’s last book, “In the Clearing” (1962), along with nearly 60 pages of editorial statement, emendations and textual notes. Previously, “The Complete Poems of Robert Frost,” published by Henry Holt in 1949, had been the most complete edition.
As the title of this new volume indicates, much is included here that cannot be found in either of the others. Besides the “Complete Poems” of 1949, to which the editors have returned for good reasons, we have the nearly 40 pieces of “In the Clearing,” 94 previously uncollected poems, three short plays and a generous selection of lectures, talks, letters and inspired ramblings by a man whose classroom and platform presence was a masterly blend of taunting wit, idiosyncratic wisdom and barbed charm. Some of these pages are indispensable for understanding Frost’s sense of voice and ear, and his insistence, in talks and readings, that he would “say” or “tell” his audience a poem.
With 85 pages of excellent biographical and textual notes, this edition gives us, finally, a comprehensive sense of Frost’s lifework. One also might have hoped that some of the uncollected poems, many from before his first book, “A Boy’s Will” in 1913, would add to our sense of his artistic stature. But none really does so, although a number of them do sound notes we know from the mature work. As for the three short plays collected here for the first time, they are all one-act caprices of sorts and confirm the impression–based upon the short, predominantly blank-verse “A Masque of Reason” (1945) and “A Masque of Mercy” (1947)–that, for Frost, the play was not the thing. His dramatic gifts found much greater issue in narrative poems like “Home Burial” and “The Death of the Hired Man.”
Distinctly welcome are the reflections and statements on poetry. Often coy and frustratingly oblique, they were doubtless better as live performances. Still, the sallies of this cagey gadfly survive the constraints of print, making many of these pages both wise and amusing. The best of them insist brilliantly on assaying poetry by ear–sounding out and hearing–and by the cadence of the voice. For Frost, learning to recognize tonal variety and shifts was essential to all reading, but never more so than with poetry. And, he would add, the structure and balance of the well-crafted sentence–neither plain nor ornate, anchored always in the colloquial–is a poem’s best claim to art.
Illuminating as are those pages, the quiet strength of this edition lies in the editorial decision to return to the text of the out-of-print “Complete Poems” of 1949. Lathem’s 1969 edition announced changes from the 1949 copy-text “both for the correction of errors and for achieving greater textual clarity.” As critic William H. Pritchard observed in reviewing Lathem’s edition, that appeared to mean that “the editor has seen fit to correct or improve Frost’s punctuation of his own poems when . . . for one reason or another (it) is deemed inadequate or misleading or awkward or whatever.”
A couple of instances will make the point. In “To Earthward,” drawing a contrast between the sweetness of youthful ecstasy and “The sweet of bitter bark/ And burning clove” that marks mature experience, Frost writes: “Now no joy but lacks salt/ That is not dashed with pain/ And weariness and fault. . . .” Lathem, presumably to “clarify,” added a comma after “salt”; but that tinkering disrupts the otherwise forceful enjambment that is meant to make the first two lines a single unit of meaning.
Lathem apparently loathed hyphens and freely expunged them from Frost’s text. In “Birches,” where Truth used to break in “With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,” Lathem has “With all her matter of fact about the ice storm”–thus defeating, as Pritchard notes, “the fine emphasis that (Frost’s) hyphens provide.” Even “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” wasn’t safe in Lathem’s hands. The second of these famous lines, “Whose woods these are I think I know./ His house is in the village though;” becomes, absurdly, “His house is in the village, though;” and a comma is placed after “dark” in “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”
In Pritchard’s words, “It is as if a prim schoolmaster were at work, showing his concern for Robert’s getting the correct punctuation in the business or friendly letter so that his English will be Good and Understood by All. . . .”
It is a boon, then, to have again in one beautifully printed volume the texts as Frost intended them to appear. To read right through, from “Into My Own” (the opening poem of “A Boy’s Will”) to “In Winter in the Woods Alone” (the last of “In the Clearing”) is to see whole a great poet’s artistic trajectory. And it is also to see that those two poems trace a thematic circle from a youth’s to an old man’s vision of solitary independence, the hallmark of Frost’s poetic persona.
This long view makes clear, too, that Frost’s finest work belongs to the books published before “Steeple Bush” in 1947, when he was already 73. Few poets do much after that age, though remarkable exceptions exist: Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, a handful of others. The later Frost, though, lost the fire and turned too much the barbed public sage–his passion spent and his complexity hardened into mere wit.
Most of us first met Frost in secondary school, and rare is the college student who cannot at least echo the lines “But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep.” But for old friends of the poems, this restoration of the out-of-print 1949 texts is most welcome. And how fine to re-read Frost’s apparently artless “The Pasture” (originally a prologue to “North of Boston,” and after 1930 the introductory poem to all editions of his collected poems) together with “The Imagining Ear,” a lecture from 1915 in which he comments on the five distinct tones of its first four-line stanza. In the same talk, Frost recounts his discovery in his 18th year of “the Sound in the mouths of men I found to be the basis of all effective expression–not merely words or phrases, but sentences,–living things flying round,–the vital parts of speech.”
This great early lesson resounds in all his finest mature work, and surfaces repeatedly in the prose selections provided here: “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. . . . You listen for the sentence sounds. . . . I want the unmade words to work with not the familiar made ones that everybody exclaims Poetry! at. . . . The vital thing, then to consider in all composition . . . is the ACTION of the voice,–sound-posturing, gesture.” And, in 1918, “There are two kinds of language: . . .our everyday speech . . . and a more literary, sophisticated, artificial, elegant language that belongs to books.” And, more problematically, “I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art.”
Much of Frost’s stated aim to “fetch” the colloquial into poetry preceded the full appearance of T.S. Eliot, particularly “The Waste Land” (1922), so his quarrel is less with the exigencies of high modernism than the rarefied excesses of Late Victorian and Georgian verse. For his part, Ezra Pound, who helped the young Frost get published in England, was justly lauded. Frost felt there was much to learn from the Imagist poets, and, in a letter of 1934 to his daughter Lesley he seconded Pound’s conviction “that rhyme and meter make you use too many words and even subsidiary ideas for the sake of coming out even.” Yet, “the purpose of free verse,” Frost knew Pound believed, “was . . . to be less free, not more free, with the verbiage.” Frost’s own preference, however, remained clear: “I should be as satisfied to play tennis with the net down as to write verse with no verse form set to stay me.” This belief in firm but unostentatious form is beautifully suggested in his graceful, single-sentence sonnet “The Silken Tent,” which, Richard Poirier remarks, “has the qualities ascribed to the tent’s own grounded elasticity”:
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
This beautifully sustained metaphor reminds us that Frost is anything but colloquial in the slack manner of so much contemporary “free” verse, so much prosaic minimalism, confessionalism and ethno-speak. To confuse the flatness of our studiedly anti-lyrical poets with Frost’s subtle modulations of voice is as foolish as to suppose that the difficulty of reading Eliot, Pound and Stevens gave them an exclusive claim to being “modern.” In his profound revision of earlier poetic excess and sentimentality, Frost was himself a modern master who chose his own distinct path “as just as fair/ And having perhaps the better claim,/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear. . .”.
