When I was in high school in the seventies, I think the most contemporary American poet we read in English class was Robert Frost. And he’d been dead for 20 years! It wasn’t until I went to college that I discovered there were actual living poets out there, seriously writing poetry, and not just dabbling in it as a hobby like the spinster aunts I knew or heard about.
As I got more into poetry, reading, studying and writing it myself, especially the rich heritage not only of living poets but of contemporaries of Frost’s, I thought less and less of Frost. I couldn’t shake this perception of him being old school and thus irrelevant. But during graduate school I attended a play by the Peterborough Players, in Peterborough, New Hampshire, called “An Evening’s Frost,” written by Donald Hall, a series of one-act plays based on the poems of Robert Frost. It was through the dramatization of the poems that I discovered Frost after having dismissed him. Or was it a rediscovery? Nonetheless, I remember the one-act colloquies of the poems “West-running Brook” and “Home Burial” in particular, and how I was transfixed and transported by the poems in a way I will never forget. If you have not read these poems, you must. Go fetch them now, take a break and read.
I now believe Frost to be one of America’s most accomplished modern poets, if not the most. His ability to combine colloquial speech within the structures of formal verse is unmatched by any American poet from his generation. Doesn’t mean Jarrell, Lowell, Stevens, McLeish, Pound and Eliot were not accomplished. I think too it was Frost’s New England connection, the distinction not only of the vernacular but also of the region’s history and place in the American psyche, that helped his popularity. Frost represented the true American, a hardscrabble farmer who was also sensitive and educated in the high arts of literature and poetry.
I have read that he was often on the short list for the Nobel Prize, and the fact that he never won it was a source of disappointment for him. It is unfortunate that he did not win it, for all the reasons and more I have noted here.
Finally, I want to make the comment that Frost’s poem “To Earthward” is perhaps my all time favorite poem. It is a poem I come back to again and again, for inspiration, for curiosity, for sheer joy. It is a love poem and a loss poem in one. It is a poem about the exquisite experience of dwelling as we do in material bodies, feeling the weight of those bodies at rest on the hard lap of earth. And yet, juxtaposed by the sweetness and lightness of being. It is also a poem that is beautifully, intricately lyrical. Its metrical scan, while a consistent three beats per line in the first three lines of each four line stanza, and the fourth line being two beats, gives the feeling of being loose, free, untangled by consistent structure. Every time I read this poem I hear the song of the veery cascade flute-like and ubiquitous through the woods of a New England summer day—the wind still, dusk just an hour or so away, the smell of freshly cut hay permeating the air.
To Earthward
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things
The flow of—was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.
