On Frost: The Best from American Literature
272
On Frost: The Best from American Literature
272eBook
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Presented in order of their first appearance, the articles in each volume constitute a revealing record of developing insights and important shifts of critical emphasis. Each article has opened a fresh line of inquiry, established a fresh perspective on a familiar topic, or settled a question that engaged the interest of experts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822379942 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2012 |
| Series: | The Best from American literature |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 404 KB |
Read an Excerpt
On Frost
The Best from American Literature
By Edwin H. Cady, Louis J. Budd
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7994-2
CHAPTER 1
The Humanistic Idealism of Robert Frost
Hyatt Howe Waggoner
ALTHOUGH Robert Frost's poetic position seems as secure as that of any contemporary poet, the philosophical point of view consistently expressed in all of his poetry has never been adequately set against the thought currents of the past and of our day. Critics of the poet tend admiringly to see him as the voice of New England, the plain man speaking simply of homely things, or the voice of common sense; or, disapprovingly, they charge that he is not really contemporary, since he does not deal with science and machine civilization, or with the problems arising out of these two determining factors of our age, but with country folk, birds, flowers, and snowstorms. Others, the Neo-Humanists, come closer to understanding his thought when they praise him for having the perspicuity to see the rightness of their position and the virtue to associate himself with it. But Mr. Frost says that he is not a Neo-Humanist. His protest against nearly all that science and the machine have done to our thinking and our lives has other intellectual roots; it springs, in fact, from a philosophical tradition so old and so respected in American intellectual history that it is somewhat surprising that no critic has ever adequately analyzed its background. An attempt to see the philosophy in Mr. Frost's poetry in relation to the tradition which he carries on and the current tendencies in thought which he opposes may help to clarify the issues.
I
When Robert Frost entered Harvard in 1897, he found there the same intellectual mood that had both disturbed and stimulated E. A. Robinson a few years before: fin de siècle disillusion and pessimism were in the air. During his two-year stay he was impressed most by two sets of ideas that seem to him now, in retrospect, to have dominated Harvard intellectual life in the late nineties: naturalistic disillusion about life, man, and (consequently) democracy; and scientism, the attitude of those so excited by the triumphs of the scientists that they proclaimed that everything—poetry, philosophy, and even common sense—must give way to science.
From the beginning Frost was hostile to both these complex points of view. While he shared Professor Santayana's distaste for the Bumstead variety of optimistic scientism, unlike the naturalistic philosopher he found nothing to emulate in the rather numerous Peter Aldens of the day. But the lack of intellectually congenial spirits among his teachers did not lead to bewilderment or uncertainty of direction. Beset by the same terrible problem that darkened Robinson's mind during these and later years, he found his solution more quickly, and with less groping uncertainty, than did the young poet from Gardiner. Unable to give credence either to scientific optimism or to scientific pessimism and equally unable to accept the philosophies of protest against scientific materialism developed by Royce and Babbitt, he turned to Emerson, whose poetry he had long been acquainted with, and to William James for an antidote for the poison of scientism and disillusion. Not by accident but guided by ideas and dispositions already taking mature shape within him, reading in the way that Emerson had urged American scholars to read, he had come upon what is perhaps the central tradition in American thought.
Mr. Frost has never grown away from that tradition. When asked today what philosophers most influenced his thinking during his formative years, he replies with the names of Emerson and James; when asked to give his reaction to thinkers with whom he came into contact, either personally or through books, during his Harvard years, having dismissed Adams, Santayana, and Royce, he says of James, "There was a man," and of Emerson, "A great spirit!" Frost's poetry, then, cannot be completely understood except against this background of the tradition of pragmatic idealism.
That Emerson did not develop a completely self-consistent system is too obvious to bear more than mention, but it is important for an understanding of what Frost has taken from Emerson. The poet found no necessity for adopting a "system" complete and ready-made or rejecting it entire; what he found in Emerson that appealed to him philosophically was attitudes and hints, passages and essays and poems which lighted the way along which he was groping. Emerson's emphasis upon the paramount importance of the individual and the necessity of self-reliance; his statement, perhaps the best that the past has yet produced, of the end for which democracy exists as the means; his attitude toward experience and scholarship and the relation of the two; his insistence upon the reality of moral and spiritual values—all this and more Frost found in Emerson, and all this is expressed in Frost's life and poetry. The Emerson of the poems, of "Self-Reliance" and "The Poet" and "Fate," of the flashes of insight that are valid without reference to German romantic transcendentalism, remains Frost's master.
In James, whose connection with Emerson has been shown by Mr. F. I. Carpenter, Frost found the pragmatic tendency of Emerson's thought developed; and he found, too, what seemed to him convincing reasoning in opposition to the swelling current of naturalistic materialism. Though there is no evidence that he was impressed by "the will to believe," he had great sympathy for James's valiant defense of a humanistic interpretation of man and experience in the face of a science that denied that either was what it seemed.
So, after two years, having already found what he wanted and fearing, perhaps, that to stay longer would interfere with what had become his chief interest, the writing of poetry, he left Harvard. To have remained, he thought, would have necessitated meeting naturalistic disillusion and confident scientism on their own grounds and arguing against them at close quarters; because he had already found the solid New England rock on which to build his intuitive philosophy, Harvard had lost its attraction for him. Here was the forking of the road in Frost's life. Along one branch, well-traveled, went most of the intellectuals of the day—Mark Twain and Henry Adams, E. A. Robinson and William Vaughn Moody, William Graham Sumner and John Fiske, each in his own way combating or accepting the domination of the doctrines of science over all things intellectual, each, whatever his ultimate position, taking as his starting point the method, the conclusions, or the implications of science. That road was to lead eventually to "the modern temper" and equally to Dr. Link's Return to Religion; to philosophic behaviorism with its startling pronouncement that "we need nothing to explain behavior but the ordinary laws of physics and chemistry," and equally to the neo-humanistic manifestoes of a decade or so ago; to historians to whom moral considerations are irrelevant to an understanding of history, and equally to Neo-Thomism. For Robert Frost that was the road not taken. He took the other and returned to New Hampshire to write poetry of life as he knew it, to keep close to common human experience and see the symbol in the fact. While Robinson was composing the philosophic subtleties of Captain Craig to express the idealism which he opposed to scientific materialism, Frost was writing the poems which later appeared in A Boy's Will. If this was "retreat," "escapism," why, let it be. How could one escape from life? Were not those who thought they had disposed of a poet by labeling him "escapist" merely begging the question to be settled—namely, whether the thing the poet wanted to leave alone was good or bad? Robert Frost knew what he wanted, and it was not the waste land.
II
But when he left Harvard for Derry and Plymouth, England, and finally Vermont, he did not turn his back on what used to be called human frailty and sin, on evil and suffering, the shortness of life and the finality of death—the facts that make complete optimism seem a little ridiculous. He has been acquainted with the dark. He has resolutely entered the darkest woods nature has to frighten man with, that he might determine his faith. Again and again in his poetry he has written of the impersonal quality of nature, of the element of fate in life; he has always known that the stars look down "with neither love nor hate." He has always known that nature, as William James said, is as wild as a hawk's wing. There is no tendency in Frost to romanticize. A great many of his poems, from the earliest to the latest, deal with storms that emphasize man's smallness and his need to be on guard, with gray and cheerless fall days, with old deserted houses and their reminders of death and fate. There are lines and suggestions in his poetry that, but for the differing styles, one could believe had been written by Housman. So much, in fact, is this true that a number of critics have remarked the "grayness" of his mood and have classified him as one of the poets deeply affected by the cosmic chill emanating from the doctrines of science. His leaving the traveled road that would have led to a Harvard degree for the Derry farm that his grandfather bought for him was not a retreat from "life" but the move of a self-reliant individualist who, following the advice of his beloved Emerson, made the choice that seemed best to him though it meant flouting convention. He did not need the doctrines of post-Victorian science to keep him aware of the sadness of human life:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Nor did deserting Cambridge for Derry mean that he could henceforth endeavor to remain ignorant of the thought-currents of his own time. He says now that he knows Freud only "out of the tail of my eye"; but though he is no avid reader of scientific books, he knows enough of the general trends of scientific thought to know where and why he differs with them. From the time of the publication of New Hampshire onward he has referred obliquely to science in many of his poems, and since about 1928, in keeping with the increasingly philosophic and didactic tone of his poetry, he has written several poems which explicitly state—as many of the earlier lyric poems suggest—his reactions to scientific thought. That there are not more such poems is not surprising to one who knows Frost's poetic credo and understands the man. But there are enough to enable us to chart his beliefs about the authority and value of science and about man's place in the universe.
If to doubt that scientists know all there is to know; if to doubt that their discoveries, though marvelously—and perhaps, too, fearfully—effective in changing man's immediate environment and supplying him with information, have turned into unwisdom most of what was once called wisdom; if to doubt, even, that this practically useful information has revealed anything really new about the essential nature of man and the world, anything never before known or surmised by poet or philosopher—if to doubt this is to be "singularly out of touch" with one's own time, then Robert Frost is out of touch with our time. But if by "out of touch" we mean "behind" the times, as, for example, we might say that Hamlin Garland in his last years was out of touch with contemporary problems, then it is significant that Frost's ideas, where they run counter to what may perhaps be termed the "orthodox" scientific views, are strikingly similar to those of an extremely important and influential scientific and philosophic minority. And it seems to many competent observers that the scientists and philosophers who, like Frost, are highly critical of the naïve scientism and materialism exemplified by Haeckel and of the whole structure of Victorian and post-Victorian science are laying the foundations for a new "modern temper." If one thinks immediately of Alexis Carrel's Man the Unknown, one need not rest his case on that sensational book; the works of Whitehead, Eddington, Jeans, John Scott Haldane, C. E. M. Joad, Northrop, and Hook, to name no more, offer impressive support for the poet's intuitions. If Frost is out of touch with our time because of his attitude toward science, then a strong case could be made out to prove that these scientists and philosophers must also, when they oppose current tendencies and interpretations, be out of touch with our time. And not scientists and philosophers only: all those literary critics, artists, and theologians who have castigated the age for the blindness of its science-worship must likewise be included in Frost's category. For the basis of the poet's philosophy is the basis of theirs also: the conviction that the increase of scientific knowledge has not rendered useless the truths known to poets and philosophers through the ages. Or, putting it in a way less displeasing to scientists, science (to paraphrase both Robert Frost and Bertrand Russell) is a power-knowledge; it is in itself neither understanding nor wisdom, and what it leaves out of account may be as important for philosophy as what it considers.
This conviction Frost expresses in many ways, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously. "We've looked and looked," he writes in "The Star Splitter," after telling of Brad, who spent his nights looking through a telescope, "but after all where are we? / Do we know any better where we are ...?" Nor has psychology told us much about human nature that has not been known—much, that is, from the standpoint of the philosopher. To be sure, psychology is often effective power-knowledge; it aids manipulators in controlling people, for good or for bad. But after writing, in the poem "At Woodward's Gardens," of an experiment with monkeys, the poet concludes, "The already known had once more been confirmed / By psychological experiment ...," In "The White Tailed Hornet" he confutes those who intimate that he has no knowledge of science by dealing with perfect sureness of touch with a popular scientific theory of instinct; but he does more than show that he knows the theory: the suggestion in the subtitle—"or Revision of Theories"—is carried out in a criticism of the method of drawing sweeping philosophical conclusions from the data of science. What is pointed out is that followers of the "nothing but" philosophy commit what may be called the genetic or analytical fallacy:
Won't this whole instinct matter bear revision?
Won't almost any theory bear revision?
To err is human, not to, animal.
Or so we pay the compliment to instinct,
Only too liberal of our compliment
That really takes away instead of gives.
Our worship, humor, conscientiousness
Went long since to the dogs under the table
And served us right for having instituted
Downward comparisons. As long on earth
As our comparisons were stoutly upward
With gods and angels, we were men at least,
But little lower than the gods and angels.
But once comparisons were yielded downward,
Once we began to see our images
Reflected in the mud and even dust,
'Twas disillusion upon disillusion.
We were lost piecemeal to the animals,
Like people thrown out to delay the wolves.
Nothing but fallibility was left us,
And this day's work made even that seem doubtful.
Briefly, then, the poet is saying that the limitations of human knowledge—and of scientific knowledge in particular—are severe. With Robert Frost the day of Bacon's, Fiske's, Haeckel's unbounded confidence in science is past; he knows that no matter how they may strain to be impartial and objective, to eliminate the inconstant and the uncountable, to control their experiments, by the scientific method alone men can see neither "out far" nor "in deep." The caged bear who sits and rocks back and forth between the philosophy of one Greek and that of another or nervously paces from one end of his cage to the other, from telescope to microscope, is a "baggy figure, equally pathetic / When sedentary and when peripatetic."
III
If he opposes nearly all those aspects of "the modern temper" which spring from modern scientific culture and which the Thomists and the Humanists likewise oppose, he, like the Thomists and the Humanists, has a positive outlook to offer in place of what he dislikes. But—and here is the difference between Robert Frost and the chief contemporary idealistic and humanistic groups—he finds support for his idealism neither in the scholastic theologians nor in the Greek classics but in Emerson and James and his own experience. Fundamental in his philosophy is his conception of man's nature. In a period obsessed with the notions that moral ideas are meaningless, reasoning is rationalizing, and all previously held concepts of man's nature have been, somehow, exploded in the laboratory, Frost holds that ideals are real, that ideas are powerful instruments in man's march toward his dream, that man is not merely a body but a spirit as well, that, in other words, intelligence and volition give man a power which is different from the force of a chemical explosion and which no laboratory experiment can prove to be illusory or necessarily doomed to frustration. Man, bound by fate, yet has freedom; and that freedom increases as intelligence and courage increase.
The surest thing there is is we are riders,
And though none too successful at it, guiders,
Through everything presented, land and tide
And now the very air, of what we ride.
What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
We can just see the infant up astride,
His small fist buried in the bushy hide.
There is our wildest mount—a headless horse.
But though it runs unbridled off its course,
And all our blandishments would seem defied,
We have ideas yet that we haven't tried.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from On Frost by Edwin H. Cady, Louis J. Budd. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Robert Frost and the Sound of Sense (1937) / Robert S. NewdickThe Humanistic Idealism of Robert Frost (1941) / Hyatt Howe Waggoner
Robert Frost's Asides on his Poetry (1948) / Reginald L. Cook
Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems (1956) / Reginald L. Cook
The Unity of Frost's Masques (1960) / W.R. irwin
Religion in Robert Frost's Poetry: The Play for Self-Possession (1964) / Anna K. Juhnke
Frost's Poetry of Fear (1971) / Eben Bass
Robert Frost's Dramatic Principle of "Oversound" (1973) / Tom Vander Ven
Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: "What to Make of a Diminished Thing" (1975) / Todd M. Lieber
Robert Frost: "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows" (1981) / Priscilla M. Paton
Frost's Synedochism (1986) / George F. Bagby, Jr.
Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg, and Bohr (1987) / Guy Rotella
"The Place Is the Asylum": Women and Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry (1987) / Katherine Kearns
Frost and Modernism (1988) / Robert Kern
"The Lurking Frost": Poetic and Rhetoric in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" (1988) / Walter Jost
The Resentments of Robert Frost (1990) / Frank Lentricchia