Robert Frost. West Running Brook. New York, Henry Holt, 1928.

“I am my own salesman”

Robert Frost received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, four times, including for the first time in 1924 with New Hampshire, a poem with notes and grace notes (1923). In 1923 and in 1928 Frost published the first of his many composite volumes, these two both Selected Poems. In many ways the twenties were the apogee of Robert Frost, but there was much more to come. In his lifetime over 40 honorary doctorates, and countless awards and medals. He was, and is one of, if not the, best-loved poets of the Twentieth Century, and most notably, was chosen by John F. Kennedy to read at his inauguration. Yet among many, his work is still controversial, and he has been called by a number of often contradictory labels, including both “classical” and “romantic.” He is often counted both an optimist and as a dark soul. The most dramatic of poets and fellows, Frost was his own best publicist and critic and was just as ambitious and “modern” as either Pound or Eliot, shaping his own legend during his lifetime.

Although it does not contain many of his most famous poems, West Running Brook is in its contents, typical of Frost. Within a landscape largely New England, it reflects his core concerns, including a fear of loneliness, the difficulty of intimacy, the nature of overwhelming sorrow, and the role of the individual in society (always one of his primary concerns). Frost most famously and energetically, opposed the theory of evolution at podium and in poems, and was sometimes characterized as anti-intellectual. It is however, more likely that his ambition and troubled personal and family life led him to meditate on contradictions. Frost believed that poems should be conversational and “a revel in the felicities of language'. In fact, much of his work is highly indeterminate, often saying the opposite of what he thinks, for instance. A suave certainty on the surface of his poems reflects on the deeper uncertainty and ambiguity, both hallmarks of the modern.

Marxist critic Granville Hicks in The Great Tradition (New York, Macmillan, 1935) provides a perceptive and telling sketch of Frost:

“Can one believe that it is by accident that he has never written of the factory towns, now so abjectly in decay, or of the exodus to the cities and its failure, now so apparent, to bring deliverance? Has he never heard of the railroads and their influence on the state’s politics, touching the smallest hamlet? Do not auto0mobiles and radios exist in New Hampshire. No, Frost is too shrewd not to be well aware that he is excluding from his poems whatever might destroy their unity. He knows the full value of his self-imporsed limitations, and he is even willing to boast of his good fortune in the parable of the star in the stone boat:

Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

Much of Frost’s experience is close to ours, and we can share his appreciations and his insights. His strong narratives, his clear and unpretentious lyrics, and his thoughtful, sensible allegories are more satisfying than most poetry of our day."