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Overview
Originally published in 1979.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691601250 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1430 |
| Pages: | 292 |
| Product dimensions: | 9.00(w) x 6.10(h) x 0.70(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Robert Frost and New England
The Poet as Regionalist
By John C. Kemp
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1979 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06393-5
CHAPTER 1
The Problem of Frost's New England Poetry
We might think — perhaps we should hope — that by now there would be no need for further study of Robert Frost's position as a New England poet. For over half a century, amid wide-ranging discussion of this renowned author, one of the few commonly accepted premises has been that he was indeed "a New England poet, perhaps the New England poet" (to use the words of Mark Van Doren). He has garnered Yankee laurels from such prominent commentators as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Dean Howells, Bernard DeVoto, W. H. Auden, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Graves. Furthermore, although some have disparaged his rural vantage point, not even his severest critics — among them R. P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, Malcolm Cowley, Robert Langbaum, and George W. Nitchie — have questioned his credentials as a major regional spokesman.
While references to the "farmer poet," the "Yankee bard," and the "poet of New England" are now commonplace, the exact significance of such terms remains obscure. Surprisingly, Frost's relationship to the region that dominates his poetry has never been a central subject for scholarly investigation, despite its importance to the standard interpretation of his work. Most commentary proceeds from predictable affirmations of his Yankee identity to unpredictable generalizations about the region, glossed with quotations from the poems and often interlarded with personal opinions for or against what is taken to be New England character. The captivatingly rustic identity Frost presented in his spellbinding performances as poet and public figure apparently enabled him to establish his own definition of his regional importance. He expounded it so persuasively that it has been accepted, echoed, and enlarged upon — but never seriously questioned. Admirers and detractors alike have seized on it as fodder for their critical cannons. Unfortunately, the regional identity has seemed such a convenient assumption that its problematic nature has consistently been overlooked.
The truth is that for the critics, as for the poet himself, New England creates more confusion and uncertainty than anyone wants to admit. Despite a wealth of local lore, popular stereotypes, and scholarship in the area, we only have to sample a small portion of the material on Frost to realize that the region's fundamental character and its literary tradition are much in dispute. Donald Greiner's recent scholarly survey, Robert Frost: The Poet and his Critics, cites the influence of arbitrary notions about New England as a crucial stumbling block for the critics. There is disagreement even on basic facts of geography and climate. Some would exclude urban areas like Boston, Providence, and New Haven from the region and associate Frost only with the farm country to the north and west of the main population centers. Yet others have stressed his affinities with urbane intellectuals and academics like Emerson, Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, Longfellow, and William James. Considering just rural New England, however, we still can find no clear opinion about whether the cold winters, rough farm country, and forested hillsides constituted a challenging and stimulating environment for Frost, or a destructive and debilitating one.
If the region resists definition, the character of its people is still harder to identify. Apparently, the New Englander is qualified as much by spirit or personality as by residence. Paradoxically, however, this spirit does not include a definite sense of allegiance. The Yankee is often characterized as an idiosyncratic and equivocal type, who, if asked, might maintain that no one has ever belonged in New England, not the original colonists, not even the Indians who came before them. From this point of view, Yankees are eccentrics more than anything else, aliens wherever they may be.
Despite such uncertainties, received opinion has it that Yankees are an identifiable group. But identifiable as what? It is common to think them plain, simple, down-to-earth folk, yet reputable sources have also labeled them shrewd, devious, and unpredictable. And there is additional disagreement about their social tendencies: some regard them as outwardly warm and affable, while others brand them dour and unsociable.
We have heard much of Yankee ingenuity, but we are not likely to know whether it is motivated by dedication to work or by mere laziness. It might come from perseverance and careful planning, or it could bespeak serendipity and sudden flashes of genius. Furthermore, even if we accept contradictions and paradoxes as part of the legendary New Englander's quaint perversity, we must choose between those commentators who point to an underlying optimism and those who argue that a fundamentally pessimistic outlook is more typical. The former emphasize rustic wit and droll types who savor the comic side of life; the latter find Yankees cold and humorless, living stoically at best, desperately at worst.
To study Frost's regional poetry, we should pay particular attention to the New Englander's distinctive verbal and linguistic traits. But again there is little agreement on the basic character of the local dialect. Extremists on one side assert that it is demotic and enervated, the speech of an impoverished and moribund culture. On the other hand, its proponents claim that it is a lively and colorful language, flourishing with pithy idioms, striking locutions, and vivid figures of speech. In a general way, the popular image of Yankee prudence and taciturnity is hard to reconcile with the garrulous, impulsive country folk whose discursive circumlocutions and whimsical ramblings dominate such characteristic Frost poems as "The Mountain," "A Servant to Servants," and "The Witch of Coos."
So much controversy and confusion about Yankee character is a serious hindrance, especially when Frost's critics — antagonists and apologists alike — seem unwilling to recognize its existence. The problem is further compounded by the absence of reliable definitions of New England poetry. Everyone agrees that Frost wrote it, but in all the vast critical literature devoted to him it is impossible to find systematic analysis of the generic features that distinguish an actual New England poem. (For a chronological listing of commentary on Frost's regionalism, see the appendix.) One is hard put to say whether a given poem is or is not a genuine specimen. Of course, Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson are considered leading exponents of the tradition, and Emerson, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson are oft-mentioned nineteenth-century forbears. But there are many famous works by famous Yankee poets: Bryant's "Thanatopsis"; Emerson's "Concord Hymn" and "Brahma"; Whittier's "Barefoot Boy"; Longfellow's Hiawatha and "The Village Blacksmith"; Dickinson's numerous lyrics; Lowell's Vision of Sir Launfal and The Biglow Papers; Holmes's "Old Ironsides" and "The Chambered Nautilus"; and Robinson's Tilbury Town verse. Questions about the relationship of such poems to one another, to a local culture, and to a New England literary tradition are not easily answered. Scholars have been understandably reluctant to confront these issues or to suggest methods by which they might be approached. Commentary on Frost's regionalism, for example, often founders on the lack of a New England setting in well-known pieces like "The Trial by Existence," "Once by the Pacific," "Acquainted with the Night," "Departmental," and "All Revelation." These may be New England poems, but certainly not of the same sort as "The Death of the Hired Man," "New Hampshire," "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," "The Birthplace," and other works that deal more overtly — and, we may think, more typically for Frost — with the countryside north of Boston.
Perhaps the most harmful aspect of Frost's regional reputation is that it seems to have discouraged critics from attempting to discriminate among his poems. Many scholarly books and articles discuss the regional point of view, the local themes and images, and the message and philosophy of Frost's oeuvre while avoiding the basic critical responsibility of evaluating individual poems and particular literary techniques. Consider some frequently discussed examples of New England verse, which will also be central to the present study: "My Butterfly," "The Tuft of Flowers," "Mowing," "The Vantage Point," "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Birches," "Brown's Descent," "New Hampshire," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "A Drumlin Woodchuck," and "Directive." We can of course distinguish sonnet from ballad and lyric from dramatic monologue, but the important problem — again a problem that has never received adequate attention — is to define significant similarities and differences among poems like these in terms of their specific features as regional works of art. Not only does the literature on Frost neglect analysis of types or categories of New England poem, but it fails to appraise the relative effectiveness of the regional techniques and poetic strategies that Frost adopted. Are we to believe that throughout a career spanning eight decades his relationship to New England and his poetic treatment of it never varied? Were there no changes in form or style, no developments in technique, no high points or meaningful failures?
Although most critics and scholars have been content with the standard interpretation of Frost's regionalism, one notable authority, the poet Archibald MacLeish, offers a pointedly unorthodox view in a recent study titled "Robert Frost and New England." Well qualified by his eminence as a modern author and his long acquaintanceship with Frost, MacLeish stresses the inadequacy of conventional attitudes toward the Yankee poet. If it seems ironic that his essay accompanies a portfolio of photographs in a National Geographic Bicentennial tribute to New England, this is only part of MacLeish's unorthodoxy. His obvious intention was to bypass the academic audience and address general readers directly. MacLeish reveals his point of view in disparaging references to "the discomfiture of distinguished scholars who, having used Frost's predecessors among New England poets as keys to his work, have ended up trying to explain why the keys don't fit."
Believing that scholars have been on the wrong track, MacLeish holds them responsible for perpetuating misconceptions about Frost's regionalism: "the trouble is that if you start with the assumption that Frost was a Yankee poet you will expect him to write like a Yankee (which he often, but not always, does), and you will expect his poems to be New England poems, poems not only of the New England scene but of the New England mind, which they may not be at all" (p. 440). At a stroke MacLeish undercuts a good part of the regional commentary on Frost. Yet his essay is regrettably short, and for all its originality and insight, it treats only five poems. While performing the valuable service of challenging a popular but untrustworthy hypothesis, it opens up many areas that demand further study if we are truly to understand the relationship of the poet and his region. For instance, the point that Frost "often, but not always" writes like a Yankee leaves us asking: which are the Yankee poems, which are not, and why have scholars so frequently failed to see the distinction? Equally important, when and why did Frost adopt or abandon the Yankee voice, and what were the poetic effects of his choice?
MacLeish's argument that "it is a mistake to look for the New England mind in Frost's work" (p. 442) strikes at the root of a central problem in the critical literature and raises several issues. We must investigate how such a misconception developed and how it has been perpetuated. Scholars may have erred in seeking keys to Frost's poetry in the work of earlier New Englanders, and the keys may indeed not fit, but the poet's contribution to this misunderstanding is highly significant. Those most directly influenced by his conversation and personality — Ezra Pound, Gorham Munson, Sidney Cox, and Bernard DeVoto, for instance — have written some of the strongest endorsements of his spokesmanship for New England attitudes.
In probing the origins of Frost's interest in New England, MacLeish also challenges the widespread belief that the poet was an indigenous, dyed-in-the-wool Yankee. He argues that "the relation of Frost to New England was not the relation of the native son" because prior to 1900, when Frost took up farming in Derry, New Hampshire, he was "hardly a Yankee at all in the country sense." Thus, there must have been a decisive turning point that brought him to a sudden new awareness of the region: "when he got safely through the first winter and settled down to writing, his poems became Yankee poems — became famous in time as the Yankee poems of his generation. And it is there, precisely in that curious, almost paradoxical fact, that one finds the real key to his relation with New England" (p. 442). This is a valuable perception, for critics have never grasped the importance of the process through which Frost discovered the artistic potentialities of New England. At the core of the paragraph, however, MacLeish's tantalizing suggestion that Frost's poems "became" New England verse points up another subject for investigation. In reviewing this poet's early work, what kind of evolution do we find? When and under what circumstances did he reach a turning point? What were the causative factors and critical elements in the development of his relationship to New England? What differences can we observe between the pre- and post-Derry pieces, and which poems best exemplify his artistic progress?
For such study, a scholarly, annotated edition providing an accurate chronology of Frost's poems would be highly valuable. Discussion of his development has always been hampered by a paucity of information about dates of composition for many of the early poems. Frost himself was notoriously evasive, even deceitful, concerning such matters, and he delighted in teasing readers, critics, and literary acquaintances with hints about a secret fund of old manuscripts from which he could draw material whenever he wanted to publish a new collection. Indeed, many volumes contain works written decades prior to publication. Thus, confounded by the poet's secrecy and by the difficulty of dating such drafts and manuscripts as are available, commentators have been wary of speculating about his maturation as a writer.
However, through the diligence of two dedicated Frost scholars, Lawrance Thompson and Edward Connery Lathem, considerable information is now available on dates, places, and circumstances of composition for many of the poems. Three years after the poet's death, the first volume of Thompson's "official" biography, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915, was published. It aroused controversy among readers who were surprised at so much detail and such an unflattering portrait by Frost's personally appointed biographer. Overlooked in the ensuing uproar was a wealth of documentary evidence and previously unpublished verse. Some five years later the second volume, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, won a Pulitzer Prize and elicited further arguments for and against the poet's personal character and artistic integrity. Finally, after Thompson's death in 1973, his assistant, R. H. Winnick, completed the last volume, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963. Meanwhile, Lathem edited The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969), which includes helpful bibliographical and textual notes for each of the poems. There are still gaps in the record, and some important questions remain unanswered, perhaps unanswerable; but the text and copious notes of these works — along with several recent volumes of supplementary material — provide an adequate basis for thorough study of the poet's artistic growth.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Robert Frost and New England by John C. Kemp. Copyright © 1979 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. ix
- Acknowledgments, pg. xi
- Abbreviations, pg. xv
- One: The Problem of Frost’s New England Poetry, pg. 1
- Two: The Poet in the Making (1874-1912), pg. 40
- Three: The Poet from New England (1912-1915), pg. 86
- Four: The Poet of New England, pg. 134
- Five: The Poet in New England, pg. 185
- Appendix: A Chronological Listing of Commentary on Frost's Regionalism, pg. 237
- Index, pg. 263