I got it in my head to write a series of posts based on Robert Frost poems. But first I want to write in very generalized terms about Frost’s poems, and why they are so amenable to blogging about.
The way I see it, there are three Great American Poets. Emily Dickinson:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
It asked a crumb – of me.
Walt Whitman:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
and Robert Frost:
All three poets are writing, more or less, about joy. But that’s about where the similarity ends, except that Frost and Dickinson both happen to get joy from a bird (Dickinson’s being metaphorical). The three poets are very different, and these three poems capture a characteristic difference between them. Whitman is a poet of non-reflection. “Let the astronomers analyze,” he says, “I need none of that to be happy: just give me some fresh air and night sky”. Dickinson is reflexive all the way: she is a poet who describes. “Here is hope,” she says. “But you already know what hope is. Let me show it to you, let me introduce the two of you up close and personal”. And she proceeds to describe, from a number of angles, what it is that hope means to her, what it looks like, what it feels like. Frost is also reflexive, but his reflection has the opposite impulse from Dickinson’s. I like to think that Dickinson’s poems turn inwards: they start with something formal, like “hope”, and make it internal, personal. Whitman’s poems go in a circle: often, they involve some sort of journey the speaker goes on to end up just where he started, contented with nature and just in time for tea, like the Hobbit would, if it were a poem. Frost’s poems move outwards. He starts with something imprecise within himself and then translates it into something external and accessible to the reader. Instead of starting with a contour and coloring it in like Dickinson, he sketches a minimalist picture to pinpoint a certain nuanced point. Take the example of the poem above. We’ve all experienced the feeling he describes in his picture, but he has no name for it. So instead he starts with the crow and leads us to it. “Here”, he says, “I can’t name it but here it is”. It’s no wonder that a number of Frost’s poems have become synonymous with particular states of mind. His short poems are condensed to the point of being impossible to condense further. If you remove a line or two from Dickinson or Whitman’s poems, they would be less complete, to be sure, but their point would most likely remain intact. Frost’s poems aren’t as elegant in form as Dickinson or Whitman’s, but their content is thought through to perfection. Every line is essential: even the detail of the “hemlock tree” with its intimation of a toxic mood being brushed off to a lighter one adds an essential bit of content.
Perhaps because of my profession, which involves describing nuanced things in minimal terms, I am absolutely in awe of Robert Frost. I use his poems to fix in my mind a number of moods, of models of the world, and even of modes of conduct. In the next couple of blog posts I’ll try to demonstrate a little of what I mean.
Schrödinger's Cat Escaped 