Robert Frost, Romantic

Author(s): Sheldon W. Liebman

Source: Twentieth Century Literature , Winter, 1996, Vol. 42, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp.
417-437
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/441875

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 Robert Frost, Romantic

SHELDON W. LIEBMAN

Although Frost once called himself a romantic, he usually used the

word pejoratively.' In a letter to Louis Untermeyer in 1915, for
example, he referred to Edgar Lee Masters as "too romantic," by which
he meant too "false-realistic" (Letters 189). In 1938, in a letter to R. P. T.
Coffin, he called Edwin Arlington Robinson a Platonist and a romantic:
"By Platonist I mean one who believes that what we have here is an
imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else's bed"
(Letters 462). It is hardly surprising, then, that an overwhelming
majority of Frost's critics believe that, whatever else he may have been,
Frost was not a romantic. Like Lawrance Thompson (43, 93, 98), they
are willing to grant that he grew up in the romantic tradition.2 Yet,
again like Thompson (43-49), they insist that Frost either greatly modi-
fied his romanticism or abandoned it altogether.3 Hyatt Waggoner (59)
and Reginald Cook (214-15), among others, have argued that Frost's
poetic vision is fundamentally different from Emerson's.4 Robert
Langbaum (331) and Marion Montgomery (140-41) have made the
same point about Frost and Wordsworth.5
This view of Frost is based on two assumptions. First, Frost's critics
tend to define romanticism as metaphysically naive, morally irrespon-
sible, and epistemologically regressive.6 Second, most of Frost's critics
see the poet as a skeptic who regarded nature as an antagonist, stoicism
as a moral ideal, and visionary experience as an illusion.7 To many of
them, Frost saw the external world as indifferent, alien, hostile. To
most, he proffered religious affirmations only equivocally or ironically.
And to some, he used poetry not as a means of discovery but as a
defense against nature-therapeutically and self-protectively. Of course,
if romanticism is defined as a simple-minded picture of human experi-
ence that no sane and sober adult would take seriously, then Frost was

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

not a romantic. And if Frost's poetry shows him to be a toug

realist who believed that no affirmation can be more than "a momen-
tary stay," then, once again, Frost was not a romantic. Howeve
believe that both of these assumptions are wrong for reasons th
hope to make clear.
Not that the case for Frost as realist and skeptic cannot be made
Frequently, as in "Spring Pools," "Reluctance," and "Nothing Gold Can
Stay," his poems deal with the irreversible change of seasons and
mutability of things. The joys of summer are brief, and the loss
brought about by the fall (both seasonal and theological) are expe
enced in winter as a kind of spiritual death. Indeed, in many poem
such as "Stars," "Design," and "Once by the Pacific," the universe
portrayed as indifferent to human needs and even destructive of
human life. The world of human beings, too, as Frost suggests in "Th
Bear," "Pod of the Milkweed," and "The Vanishing Red," is replete wi
evidence of vanity and violence. The fears that separate men fr
women, the miscommunications that keep them apart, and the loneli
ness that makes hatred harden into hostility are documented in
dramatic narratives of North of Boston and throughout Frost's poetry
all of these poems, the realms of the real and the ideal are separated
a barrier that cannot be penetrated, transcended, or circumambulate
Yet, although this worldview is prominent in his poetry, Frost d
not always espouse it. In his letters and essays, for example, he of
contradicted his own antiromantic statements. After saying in "
Emerson" that "a melancholy dualism is the only soundness," Fro
added, "The question is: is soundness of the essence[?]" (Prose 11
Having defined romanticism as a futile yearning for the ideal, he sai
"Many of the world's greatest-maybe all of them-have been rang
on that romantic side" (Letters 462). In a letter to Thompson in whic
he called himself a dualist and questioned Arnold's enthusiasm f
Emerson, he suggested that Arnold "was probably carried away by th
great poetry." Frost then explained, "Wisdom doesn't matter too mu
(Letters 584).
Indeed, despite the frequency with which Frost portrays the ind
ference of nature and the cruelty of human beings, he just as of
gives at least intimations of a monistic vision. Moments of joy are tr
sitory, he says, but they remain occasions for celebration regardless
their brevity. Even the most trivial event can alter the poet's mood
suggesting to him the possibilities of communication and even comm
nion between people and God, people and people, and people and
things, as he suggests in "The Dust of Snow": "The way a crow / Sho

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 ROBERT FROST

down on me / The dust of snow / From a hemlock tree / Has gi

heart / A change of mood / And saved some part / Of a da
rued" (270). In "Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter," Frost indi
laments the passing of summer into winter and realizes that the
with angelic gift" he saw before has abandoned the tree and left
single leaf' behind. But as he looks out from his vantage point o
he sees something like a brushstroke across the blue sky and "a
little star" shining through it (287). Again, walking by uniden
flowers along the highway, in "A Passing Glimpse," he wonders,
something brushed across my mind / That no one on earth w
find?" (311).
Sometimes, of course, the "glimpse" is so brief as to seem in
quential or even questionable, as in "For Once, Then, Somet
There can be little doubt, however, that the clock of "Acquainte
the Night" is really only the dark side of the moon of "Moon
Compasses," in which the heavenly body "exalts" a mountain in the way
that loving hands embrace a face (393). And the stars in Frost's poetry
are not always signs of cosmic meaninglessness, as they are in "Stars"
and "Bond and Free." They are also, in "Take Something like a Star,"
images of steadfastness and dependability and, in "I Will Sing You
One-O," intimations of eternity, "Beyond which God is" (265).
Similarly, the mowed fields that signify a change of seasons are not
merely indications that the pleasures of summer are gone and the
sorrows of autumn are imminent. In "The Last Mowing" and "The Tuft
of Flowers," they are also occasions for communions with those who are
either present to share in the tumultuousness of flowers, when "The
place for the moment is ours" (338), or, though absent, nevertheless
able to send "a message from the dawn" and induce a feeling of
brotherhood (32).
Frost offers a similar view of man and nature in three visionary
poems: "Going for Water," "Two Look at Two," and "Iris by Night." The
speaker in the first poem sets out with his companion to fill a pail with
water from the brook in the midst of the woods. The two first hear the
musical notes of the brook and then see moonlit "drops . . . on the
pool," which look like pearls, and a sliver of moonlight running across
the brook, which looks like "a silver blade" (26). In this poem, th
momentary union of heaven and earth (represented by the light of th
moon hitting the surface of the water) is not regretted because of its
brevity, but celebrated, as if it were meaningful and even miraculous.
Another night journey into the woods in "Two Look at Two" begin
with a characteristically Frostian lament as the two travelers prepare t

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

abandon their walk: "This is all" (282). Yet suddenly a do

unfrightened by their presence and willing to remain. C
travelers' mood is full of awe at the sight. "This, then, is all. W
is there to ask?" they either think or say--as if the "all" mea
thing." Finally, they see a buck that similarly stays for a mom
must be all," they conclude. And the narrator comments: "It w
they stood / A great wave from it going over them, / As if t
one unlooked-for favor / Had made them certain earth returned their
love" (283). The final four lines of the poem serve as the culmination
of a gradually escalating emotion that begins as disappointment and
ends as rapture. Indeed, the narrator twice verifies the couple's percep-
tion of the event: first, by echoing their statement that the experience
was "all" and, second, by confirming their sense that they have received
an "unlooked-for favor."

In "Iris by Night," Frost describes another evening walk, this tim

down a mountainside. The hikers, acting as "one another's guide," firs
grope through the darkness and then come upon "a moment of
confusing lights," which Frost compares to the moment before a frag
mented sun "could concentrate anew and rise as one." The travelers
see a "moon-made" rainbow "like a trellis gate," and as if the
entering another realm entirely they are "vouchsafed the miracle
never yet two other two befell." The "wonder" is that the rainbo
not recede as they walked toward it but "gathered [its ends] toge
a ring." Frost's conclusion underscores both the sudden but m
tary suspension of time and the brief but astonishing comm
between friends: "And we stood in it softly circled round / F
division time or foe can bring / In a relation of elected friends"
As all of these poems suggest, it is difficult to prove that Fros
pied one philosophical position or another. For all his seeming
accessibility, he is, as Richard Poirier has shown, an exceptionally
elusive and allusive poet. In his prose works, too, in which he might be
expected to be less opaque, he is too often indirect and metaphorical
to be easily pinned down. And even when he seems to be speaking
spontaneously and unguardedly in his lectures and interviews, he can
be very misleading. In a 1961 interview, for example, he said: "It's hard
to get into this world and hard to get out of it. And what's in between
doesn't make much sense" (Interviews 295). The point seems clear
enough, but when the statement is understood to be (as it may be) a
paraphrase of Lord Bolingbroke, by way of Emerson's "Montaigne," it
takes on a very different meaning, especially in the context of
Emerson's ultimately unskeptical essay.8 For Emerson, Bolingbroke's

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 ROBERT FROST

sentiment is merely a stepping-stone to a broader and deeper

tion. Statements or propositions, Emerson believed (and Frost
have agreed), have no meaning at all outside a poetic cont
even poems (whether in verse or prose) reveal their ultima
only in the context of a poet's entire work. Thus, poems like
and "The Bear" must be understood in relation to the rest of Frost's
oeuvre. "Pod of the Milkweed," for example, appears to be less
expression of irremediable pessimism than a meditation on Plato's v
of human suffering in The Phaedrus.9 In answer to the question Fro
asks in his poem-"why so much / Should come to nothing"-Pla
wrote The Phaedo as well as The Phaedrus. And perhaps in response to
same concern, Frost wrote "Trial by Existence" as well as "Pod o
the Milkweed."

In Frost's visionary poems, the woods are not the abode of dis
lusionment that they are in "The Demiurge's Laugh." Nor are th
couples in them paralyzed by their fears or trapped in their houses, a
in "Storm Fear" and "Love and a Question."10 Like the men and
women in "The Generations of Men" and "West-Running Brook," they
enter a domain in which the fundamental conditions of life are mixed,
even paradoxical. Yet they "trust" themselves "to go by contraries" and,
in effect, transcend the conflicts and confusions that haunt Frost's
couples in other poems. In a similar world of reconciled opposites, the
conjunction of "love" and "truth" engenders a "fact" that is also a
"dream" ("Mowing"); a ladder joining earth and heaven defines a
magical sphere of half-sleep in which dream, vision, and reality are
commingled ("After Apple-Picking"); and an abandoned road leads to
a cellar hole and a children's playhouse where the truths of change,
loss, and death merge with make-believe to create a vision "beyond
confusion" ("Directive").
To some critics, of course, the poems of joy and communion
cannot be taken seriously. They represent the regrettably sentimental
Frost whose solaces are escapist and therefore unacceptable. At best, in
Frost's own words, they are "momentary stays against confusion"--but
only momentary and therefore negligible.1 To other critics, Frost's
affirmations are the willful assertions of an essentially skeptical poet
who knows that order or form or meaning is imposed on nature as an
expression of human need-not as a revelation of nature itself. In this
view, the creation of form is either a heroic but ultimately futile act
rooted in courage or a pragmatic act driven by the requirements of
survival.2 To a third group of critics, these poems represent the bright
side of a coin that the poet tosses thoughtlessly and indifferently as the

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

passing mood moves him. Together with poems like "Desig

"Desert Places," they add up to uncertainty and confusion. They
Frost's inability or unwillingness to make up his mind, and the
the absence of any coherent vision in his poetry.13
In direct response to the first group of critics, Frost said t
illuminating moments he records in "Going for Water," "Two L
Two," and "Iris by Night" are not in fact mere moments, forgott
passing of time and therefore meaningless. As he explains in on
Bread Loaf lectures in 1960, he meant much more than that in the
phrase "momentary stays against confusion." "Is that all there is to it, is
momentary?" he asks.
You know that kind of insults me. Do you know what the humani-
ties are-what they call the humanities? They are the
accumulation of those momentary stays that have survived. That's
what the humanities are. They weren't momentary, they were
good because they went on. (Voice 171)
If Frost had made this point only in his old age, of course, it might
easily be dismissed as wishful rethinking. The same theme occurs,
however, in a poem from A Witness Tree (1942), "Happiness Makes up in
Height What It Lacks in Length." Despite all the evidence of chaos in
the universe and despite the profound ignorance of its inhabitants,
Frost says, "I can but wonder whence / I get the lasting sense / Of so
much warmth and light." Mistrusting the evidence, he says, "It may be
altogether from one day's perfect weather" (445). Ironically, then,
happiness lacks nothing in "length." Somehow it endures and sustains.14
Suggestively, this "fair impression" came to the poet under familiar
circumstances: when the speaker and his companion "went from house
to wood"-like the couple in "Going for Water"-"for change of soli-
tude." Perhaps, then, all such experiences possessed for Frost the
staying power of that "one day's perfect weather." That is, as he says in
"Skeptic," these are the "times when I am apt / To feel [the universe]
close in tight against my sense / Like a caul in which I was born and
still am wrapped" (549). He implied, after all, that these moments,
untranslatable though they may be, contribute to the poet's develop-
ment. In "The Poet's Next of Kin in a College" (1938), he says that "the
growth of the poet is through flashes" and that poetry is made of "these
flashes of light"-"sight and insight" (Poetry and Prose 374). Like
Emerson, Frost seems to have believed that "faith comes in moments"
and that "there is a depth in those brief moments, which constrains us
to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences" (2:267).
For surely, as Frost describes them, "these moments confer," in

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 ROBERT FROST

Emerson's words, "a sort of omnipresence and omnipoten

asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy of th
commensurate with the work to be done, without time" (2:317
Frost's belief that certain experiences are cumulative and l
reminiscent of Wordsworth's theory of "spots of time." In Bo
The Prelude, Wordsworth explains, "There are in our existenc
time, / That with distinct pre-eminence retain / A renovatin
(11.208-211). In "Tintern Abbey," he says that he receives not
sure and "tranquil restoration" from such memories but a
sustenance. The two examples of "spots of time" in Book X
Prelude are similar in imagery and structure to several o
visionary poems. In the first (11.225-269), Wordsworth d
journey down a "rough and stony moor," like the journey of t
in "Two Look at Two," which took place after he had lost h
Frightened and "stumbling on" through the field, he "ca
bottom," where he saw a gibbet on which a murderer had bee
After running away from the terrifying scene, he saw a pool
under the moon and a girl-carrying a pitcher and walking aga
wind. Later, when he returned to the place with his "loved on
side," he saw, like the couple in "Going for Water," the po
moon illuminated by "A spirit of pleasure and youth's golden
In the second example (11.287-335), Wordsworth descr
experience that occurred a few days before his father died. Ti
restless, he "went forth / Into the fields" on an unusually
stormy day. Climbing to the summit of a hill, he looked out i
mist "in the deepest passion." Afterward, "all the busines
elements" and wood, water, and mist "were kindred spec
sounds"-to which he often returned, "and thence would drink
a fountain." Both "ordinary" events, these two incidents ne
represented "visionary" moments characterized by strong feel
feeling comes in aid / Of feeling," Wordsworth explains, "and
of strength / Attends us, if but once we have been strong."
These "spots of time" occur, Wordsworth says in The
"Among those passages of life that give / Profoundest kno
what point, and how, / The mind is lord and master" (11.220-
they "Are scattered everywhere," he continues, "taking th
From our first childhood" (11.223-25). Among Frost's poem
such "knowledge" is given, "In a Vale" is, appropriately, about
hood experience. The poet recalls a time "when [he] was yo
flowers spoke to him "Of things of moment": "And thus it is
well / Why the flower has odor, the bird has song. / You hav

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

ask me, and I can tell" (21). Again, the poem seems to deal
"mere" moment (or, better, a series of moments), but one that
retrospect, to Frost at least, to have lasted. Despite the fact,
incessant change, despite the meaningless succession of "joy and
Frost says by way of summary in "I Could Give All to Time," som
endure:

I could give all to Time except-except

What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There.
And what I would not part with I have kept. (447)
Unlike many of Frost's visionary poems, this one implies that th
speaker has not only "crossed to Safety" in the past but also that he i
now, even as he announces his former triumphs over the constraints
"Time," beyond joy and grief: "I am There."
In "The Figure a Poem Makes," Frost suggests that the "forbidden
things that he has held and kept and that he refused to yield to Time
presumably those timeless moments of "belief"-are "the long los
memories that the poet remembers with "delight" when he begins
write a poem: things he "didn't know [he] knew." Frost implies that a
immediate impression in some sense touches off and connects with pa
impressions. Then "Step by step the wonder of unexpected supp
keeps growing"-that is, other lost memories are summoned. Echoin
Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality," Frost says,
The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I
was unaware of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is
come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of
us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to
strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere.
Frost continues, "All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my
material . . . to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived
through" (vii). For these reasons, Frost says in "A Concept Self-
Conceived," "Great is the reassurance of recall" (Clearing 38).15
Of course, to call Frost a romantic is to risk saying nothing at all
about him or his poetry. T. S. Eliot abandoned the term in 1933
because it had become so overused as to have lost any definite
meaning. And a glance at the vast number of critical treatises on the
subject published in the last 50 years may only serve to justify Eliot's
decision. However, if the word romantic can be taken to refer to literary
works in which a moment of communion or transcendence is

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 ROBERT FROST

recounted, the experience is spiritually uplifting, and, most i

it is so emotionally powerful as to compel belief in a "higher"
then the term can be used to distinguish one kind of poet
another and, in particular, one aspect of Frost's poetry from
Frost was a romantic, then, insofar as he dramatizes in his
poems moments of illumination that, as he explains in "H
Makes up in Height," "Skeptic," and "I Could Give All to
found not only consoling but also lasting.'6 Critics have tried
the opposite by comparing Wordsworth's and Emerson's ap
Frost's oranges. The Wordsworth of the middle books of The P
the Emerson of "Fate" and "Experience" are ignored, while the
"Design" and "Desert Places" is brought to stage center accomp
the authors of "The Tables Turned" and "The Rhodora." T
logically faulty and critically irresponsible.
Even allowing for their staying power, however, one m
wonder just what Frost's "momentary stays" ultimately mean o
The question asked by some of Frost's critics is not wheth
visionary experiences are enduring and uplifting but whether
real. That is, granting their capacity to console-and even in
Wordsworth's "beauteous forms" in "Tintern Abbey"-one
question their epistemological status. Are they merely solacin
as they satisfy the human need to believe? Are they comfortin
resulting from the suppression of reality and the suspen
consciousness? Or are they cognitive experiences in which
ness is fully engaged?
In this context, it is useful to remember that some poets, i
Frost, have laid claim to a special mode of knowledge-in fact,
edge of the most profound and important kind. To Word
"poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge"
Shelley, it is "at once the center and circumference of k
(503). One might dismiss these statements as the inevitably
ated beliefs of wild-eyed romantics. Yet one finds similarly la
made for poetry in the writings of Wallace Stevens and T. S.
Stevens, "poetic truth is factual truth, seen, it may be, by th
range in the perception of fact-that is, whose sensibility-
than our own" (59). To Eliot, simply, poetry deals with "re
prose only with the "ideal" (30). Frost, equally extravagan
"Education by Poetry," "Poetry begins in trivial metaphor
metaphors, 'grace' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest
that we have" (Prose 36; my emphasis).

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

In fact, to Frost, poetry is thinking precisely insofa

metaphor. Poetry is metaphor, he explains in "The Constant
in that it says "one thing in terms of another" (Prose 24
activity of the mind is "the height of all thinking" because
the fundamental structure of the universe. The "greatest" e
metaphor is, after all, the "attempt to say matter in terms o
spirit in terms of matter" (Prose 41). This kind of metaphor
plary because it is paradigmatic: It reenacts the Creation. As
in "Kitty Hawk," "Spirit enters flesh / And for all its worth
into earth / In birth after birth." God himself risks "spirit /
tiation," and humankind instinctively ventures into "the
through poetry (or any kind of labor) at a similar "risk of t
(Clearing 48-50). In this respect, "all poems are the same old
always." That is, every poem is "a symbol" or "an epitome" o
plunging "deeper and deeper" into "commitments" or "br
entanglements"-again, risking substantiation. Metaphor (
the "end" of these commitments ("a rounded conclusion"), a
of these entanglements ("the final unity"), because it is t
embodiment of spirit: "The bard has said in effect, Unto thes
I commend the spirit" (Prose 24-25).
Thus, although "all metaphors break down somewhere" (P
there is such a thing as a "constant symbol"-an enduring
Poetry always evolves out of "the breathless swing betw
matter and form"-spirit and matter-which "embrace in
(Prose 28). And the "constant symbol" that is the offspr
embrace is also a paradigm of the meeting and marriage
sites: heaven and earth, male and female, play and work,
wisdom, sound and sense, truth and make-believe, fact and dream.
"Mind you, we are Mind," Frost says in "Kitty Hawk" (Clearing 48). And
when metaphor succeeds in marrying mind and matter, it does so not
because it provides a solacing myth or imposes a ready-made form, but
because "the mind fit[s] closely into the nature of the universe" (Prose
102). When this occurs, the poet "gives off... shimmers of eternity,
and the reader receives "an immortal wound" (Prose 60-61). Thus,
again, poetry is not a momentary stay, except in the most superficial
sense. As metaphors, which inevitably reflect the "greatest" metaphor,
poems are "the great thoughts ... lasting to the end" (my emphasis). And
the great poems-"the noble metaphors"-therefore constitute "the
richest accumulation of the ages" (Prose 42-43).
It is important to emphasize that Frost more than suggested that
he derived his beliefs from such experiences, not, as some of his critics

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 ROBERT FROST

have contended, from need. Speaking of his "four beliefs" in

"Education by Poetry," he says that the first, "the personal belief," is "a
knowledge that you don't want to tell other people about because you
cannot prove that you know." The other beliefs are circumscribed by
the same limitation: "We cannot tell some people what it is we believe,
partly because they are too stupid to understand and partly because we
are too proudly vague to explain." Frost's critics to the contrary, such
beliefs are not made "true" because they are "believed in," as William
James maintained. Rather, when they are "believed in," they are
completed-that is, expressed or presented. And this occurs when the
belief founded on "emotion," which is a kind of foreknowledge, is
funded by more knowledge and eventuates in a work of art: "And
anyway it has got to be fulfilled, and we are not talking until we know
more, until we have something to show" (Prose 46). Thus, "in his fore-
knowledge [the believer] has something that is going to believe itself
into fulfillment, into acceptance" (Prose 44). Belief in this sense is not a
willed faith in something yet to be proved. It is rather a kind of
prescience that initiates a "relationship" between the knower and the
known and that brings the possibility into fulfillment, the seed into
bloom: "When familiar friends approach each other in the street both
are apt to have this experience in feeling before knowing the pleasantry
they will inflict on each other in passing" (Prose 27).
Thus, "having a moment" is an event of some significance, for
although the experience yields neither information nor explanation, it
provides something more important: not consolation, but realization-
a kind of feeling that is also a kind of knowing. Such moments are not,
however, unambiguous and unequivocal. They cannot be verified, and
they cannot be communicated, unless, perhaps, the reader shares some
common ground of experience with the poet. "The great thing," Frost
says in "Poetry and School" (1951), "is to know when you have one"
(Poetry and Prose 413). And the challenge to Frost's readers is to know
when he had one (or at least described one in his poetry). As Frost
suggests in "One More Brevity," he gets, at best, "An intimation, a shot
of ray" (Clearing 20). In this poem, Frost implies that spiritual and celes-
tial realities are embodied in material and earthly things. And when he
experiences them they seem to convey "A meaning [he] was supposed
to seek, / And finding, wasn't disposed to speak" (Clearing 26). In a
letter to Untermeyer in 1924, he said that the best kind of "belief" came
from moments in which he was "rapt" (Letters 300). Therefore, his
objective was, he says in "In a Glass of Cider," "to get now and then
elated" (Clearing 94). The "brevities" seem to have possessed for him,

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

then, a meaning and a value that eludes those who do not see
what they are-or at least what they were to Frost.
Frost makes this point even more emphatically in "All Re
"Take Something Like a Star," and "An Unstamped Letter in O
Letter Box." In the first poem, a scientist looks into the crys
cavity of a geode with a cathode ray. As (figuratively) "his h
in as for the view," he asks a series of questions about the
event of seeking and questioning lasts only a "moment," how
speaker concludes that either the geode as a thing-in-itself or
tist's presumably tentative answers to his own queries wer
"Strange apparition of the mind"-that is, a mental proje
having said this, the speaker acknowledges that "the impervi
/ Was entered," and its crystals "glowed / In answer to t
thrust." Implicitly asking the same question that is asked in
at Two," "The Most of It," and "For Once, Then, Someth
speaker answers that the glow was a response of like to like,
to "mind": "Eyes seeking the response of eyes / Bring out
bring out the flowers." As Frost says in a notebook he kept d
1940s, "What life craves most" is not meaning in the ordinar
"signs of life." And in poems like "Two Look at Two" and "All
Revelation," life gets what it wants: "The certainty of a source outside of
self-original response" (quoted in Hall 40). In other words, the scien-
tist's observation of the geode is a special case of the quest of "life" for
"life." And when the geode glows, Frost can unequivocally conclude,
"All revelation has been ours" (444).
In the same fashion, the speaker in "Take Something Like a Star"
implores another object-this time, a star-to reveal its nature. He
grants it the right to "obscurity" and "mystery," but he wants something:
"to be wholly taciturn / In your reserve is not allowed." In response, the
star only says, like the geode, "I glow," an answer that does not initially
satisfy the speaker. However, he claims that the star "does tell some-
thing in the end" although he neglects to say what it is. Furthermore,
apparently because of its response, the speaker refers to the star as
"steadfast," which, if nothing else, gives it the capacity to "stay our
minds" (575). The letter-writing tramp in "An Unstamped Letter"
similarly comes "face to face ... with universal space," in which he sees
two stars merge to make "the largest firedrop ever formed." Just as the
speaker in "All Revelation" can elicit a response from the stars (as well
as the flowers), here the coalescing stars inspire a like response in the
tramp, in whose mind two memories join together. At this point he
claims, "And for a moment all was plain, / That men have thought

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 ROBERT FROST

about in vain" (524). That is, he too has had a revelation that
remains unexplained.
As I said earlier, the poet's flashes and insights are also moment
of illumination. A "perfect moment of unbafflement," Frost says i
"How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the
Situation," provides the poet with an opportunity to "summons out of
nowhere like a jinni" not only the words he needs to complete hi
thought or fulfill his vision, but also the vision itself. The "Freedom t
flash off into wild connections" is "The freedom of [the poet's] own
material"-which is, ironically, spiritual as well as material. And th
experience-whether it is a poet's, a tramp's, or a scientist's-is so
exhilarating that no one can help desiring it again: "Once to have ha
it nothing else will do" (Clearing 83). Thus, one may "blame the stars /
For looking and not participating," but their "detachment," their tran-
scendence, does not preclude their accessibility, their immanence, a
Frost implies in this poem and demonstrates in "Take Something Like
a Star" and "An Unstamped Letter."
This view of Frost's poetry suggests yet another connection with
romanticism-the belief that visionary experience is not only inspiring
but redemptive. It is life-changing and lifesaving because it is not
projection of one's own needs or desires. Rather, it is actually cognitive
The spiritual reality that such experience discloses is, after all, real. And
the perception of it is an intuition that is felt to be the basis for a
knowledge. This intuition is not achieved when the self-as-subject eithe
passively perceives the other-as-object or actively imposes order an
value on it. It is a mutually creative act in which subject and object ope
up to each other and reveal their essence, their spirit. Again, "Eye
seeking the response of eyes / Bring out the stars, bring out the
flowers." That is, as any Neoplatonist, Bhuddist, or Christian myst
would argue, when the self becomes spiritualized, it acquires the
capacity to perceive the world spiritually. For, as it undergoes this
process of self-transcendence, the cosmos is likewise liberated from its
material embodiment and discloses the sacred.
If we grant that Frost portrays visionary experience as genuin
revelatory, one question remains. In the words of Frost's third gr
critics, what is the relationship between his visionary poems a
poems that seem to contradict them? That is, how can the contras
views of human experience in "The Skeptic" and "Once by the Paci
or "I Could Give All to Time" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay" be
ciled? To understand the relationship between these opposing v
it is useful to turn to the writings of Mircea Eliade, in which a sim

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

dualistic vision is presented. In The Sacred and the Profa

describes the universe of "religious man" in a way that sh
familiar to anyone who has read Frost's "Kitty Hawk" or cons
foregoing remarks in Frost's essays:
Whatever the historical context in which he is place
religiosus always believes that there is an absolute rea
sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this
world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real. He further
believes that life has a sacred origin and that human existence
realizes all of its potentialities in proportion as it is religious-
that is, participates in reality.
By contrast, the world of the profane-like Frost's universe of "chaos"-
is unstructured, amorphous, homogeneous, and meaningless. In it, as
in Frost's poems of loss, mutability, and death, all truths are relative,
and nonreligious man (who dwells in it without respite or relief) is
necessarily confused and sometimes even paralyzed because his experi-
ences are "purely subjective" and therefore illusory.
To both Frost and Eliade, this dualism is resolved in the assertion
that, although the sacred and the profane (or, to use Frost's terms, the
spiritual and the material) are, in one sense, merely two aspects of
human experience, only the sacred (or spiritual) is ontologically "real."
Religious man has access to the sacred through what Eliade calls hiero-
phanies, or breaks in space that reveal "the fixed point, the central
axis" of the cosmos-in Frost's poetry, a ladder ("After Apple-Picking"
and "Directive"), a tree ("Birches" and "Sycamore"), or a pole ("The
Silken Tent" and "On a Tree Fallen across the Road"), all of which
represent a meeting point between heaven and earth.17 These "intervals
of sacred time," says Eliade, occur at "the center of the world" and at
"the beginning" of time, where the hierophant "communicates with the
gods" and reconnects with the "real."
For Frost, as for Thoreau, the journey to the center must be
reenacted periodically, like an annual rebirth ritual. As Frost explains
in "Build Soil," periods of inner and outer awareness succeed each
other: "We are always too much out or too much in." At the present
time, we are "out" and must therefore go "in." We must retreat from the
"market" in order to return to it strengthened and renewed. Thus, in
"Directive," the return to "a time made simple," the journey under the
direction of a guide "who only has at heart your getting lost," the need
to be "lost enough to find yourself," and the arrival at the "source" of a
brook, which is "lofty and original," are the components of an old

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 ROBERT FROST

ritual, a spiritual exercise that requires the abandonment of an

and the acquisition of a new.'8 As Emerson says in "The Am
Scholar," "When the artist has exhausted his material," implic
spiritual energy, "when fancy no longer paints, when thoughts
longer apprehended and books are a weariness-he has alway
resource to live"-that is, to return to the real, the origin, the c
"The stream retreats to its source" (1:99).
To Frost, however, the journey is not made casually or
Indeed, to get beyond confusion, the initiate must go thro
(According to Eliade, the ritual begins with a "separation" fr
quotidian world and a "retrogression . . . into chaos.") In "Dir
Frost invites the reader-as-initiate to embark on an arduous journ
results in the loss of the kind of consciousness Wordsworth called
meddling and murderous. That is, the "detail" of profane life, w
"too much" (and, in some respects, too little), is not simply i
suppressed, or forgotten, but "burned, dissolved, and broken off
experience that purges and purifies not only the consciousness b
the data of consciousness. Oddly enough, this end is achieved
making the "too much" less, but by making it more-by revealin
initiate the glacial and imperious forces of nature (11.10-19), the
yard of all houses and metaphors (11.20-22), and the fact of
and implacable change (11.2S-28).
The means to the end of soul saving is thus outwalking the fa
city light and becoming acquainted with the night-that is, lo
sense of ordinary time and space. In this context, being "lost eno
find yourself" is not a platitude but another way of figuring ab
disorientation in the midst of what Frost elsewhere calls "utter chaos"
and in this poem implicitly names "confusion." For the reader-
initiate, Frost's ambiguous tone (playful and serious) and mixtur
truth (in 11.10-28) and "make-believe" serve a similar purpose. He, to
is groundless, ontologically uncertain, lost. But his descent into c
prepares him for an ascent to "the height / Of country," whic
reached by a "ladder road"-the dwelling place of the gods. Follow
Frost's "directive," the reader leaves his present dwelling, his hou
which has ceased to hold "the sacred," and, like the couple in "T
Generations of Men," seeks to build a new house on an old foundation.
Under these circumstances-and only then-can he "make [himself] at
home" (1.39), "at home in the metaphor" (Prose 39).
At the world center, represented in all of Frost's poetry by cellar
holes (to Eliade, "initiatory graves"), brooks ("primordial waters"),
trees and ladders ("cosmic pillars"), and moons (standing for the

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

"reconciliation of contraries"), the initiate undergoes a spiritu

and acquires spiritual knowledge. And his entire journey is
ment of the creation of the cosmos out of chaos, the foundin
universe. The initiate's final encounter with the saddest of time's
treacheries-in "Directive," the shattered debris of the children's world
of make-believe-adds pity to terror and leads to his attainment
(through sympathy) of childlike innocence, the final purification. In
this way, says Eliade, "the work of time" is "undone," and in the ensuing
"existential crisis," which is always "religious," the sacred is recovered
and reintegrated.
To be sure, these revelations appear to occur randomly and fortu-
itously, as if they were unearned and unwarranted. In "How Hard It Is,"
Frost says that the causes of such moments are indeterminable: "We
know not what we owe this moment to." However, all of Frost's visionary
poems follow the pattern of Wordsworth's spots-of-time experiences.
That is, illumination follows disappointment ("The Dust of Snow," "Two
Look at Two," "The Tuft of Flowers"), a mood of despondency in
response to fall or winter ("Looking for a Sunset Bird," "Going for
Water," "I Will Sing You One-O"), confusion or despair induced by a
vision of universal chaos ("I Could Give All to Time," "Happiness Makes
Up in Height," "Iris by Night"), or a sense of futility ("One More
Brevity," "All Revelation," "Take Something Like a Star"). In "Skeptic,"
the moment of insight follows a series of negations ("I don't believe ...").
In "How Hard It Is" and "Time Out," it succeeds a cessation of struggle
or competition. Thus, in every case, the routine of everyday life is
suspended, ordinary consciousness is abandoned, and the candidate
for revelation descends into darkness-baffled, hopeless, and lost, but
only for a moment.
The point is that visionary experience in Frost's poetry occurs only
after intellectual exhaustion, spiritual despair, or metaphorical break-
down-that is, after the kind of experience that Frost portrays in his
darker poems. And because these interludes of darkness always precede
illumination, it seems reasonable to conclude that they are a precondi-
tion for it. In this respect, revelation is not just an escape from
confusion and disappointment but a consequence of them. And it is
not merely given, but suffered for. Under such circumstances, darkness
is "precious," as one of Frost's characters says in "The Literate Farmer
and the Planet Venus":

We need the interruption of the night

To ease attention off when overtight,
To break our logic in too long a flight,
And ask us if our premises are right. (511)

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 ROBERT FROST

In short, the dark is not merely a contrasting backdrop against

the stars can be better seen, but the medium through or the me
which they appear-the via negativa without which vision is impo
"The groundwork of all faith is human woe" (472).
In Frost's poetry, darkness leads to illumination, and ch
becomes cosmos. But this can happen only when the prospe
"hierophant" goes into the woods ("Birches") or returns to a cella
("Directive")-that is, when the prospect of becoming "whole
beyond confusion" is made possible by a turn away from the quo
and into darkness, chaos, or oblivion. Having entered the woo
candidate for revelation is ready for the kind of self-transcenden
Frost found in Emerson's "Brahma": "the perfect detachmen
ambition and desire that alone can rescue us from the round of exis-
tence" (Prose 97). At this new level of consciousness, the initiate is
baffled, hopeless, and lost. Ultimately, however, he attains not only
solace and sustenance, but also knowledge of a different-and
deeper-reality.
In this context, it should be clear that poems like "Design," "Stars,"
and the tragic narratives of North of Boston are neither at the center of
Frost's poetic vision nor in real opposition to his more affirmative
poems. Rather, they merely express the nature of the profane world,
and they are subsumed in the process of illumination, which ultimately
reveals the cosmos, the sacred. They are the Everlasting Nay to Frost's
Everlasting Yea, the experience of alienation before the blessing of the
water snakes, the expression of disillusionment that precedes the ascent
of the sacred mountain. Not that these poems are trivial or incidental.
Rather, although the picture they present is neither final nor absolute,
it is indispensable for a thorough comprehension of human existence,
and it must be accepted before understanding is actually completed by
illumination.

In my view, then, Frost was not a sentimental escapist, a brooding

nihilist, or a pragmatic Greek who courageously faced chaos in order
impose meaning on it. As a romantic, he did not believe that truth
simply willed into being; nor did he believe that beauty is merel
created. According to his own testimony, truth and beauty are discov
erable in reality. They come into being when thinker and artist
transcend their ordinary selves and allow experience to complete itsel
Like Emerson, Frost believed that one "sees" when the intellect is
"where and what it sees" (3:26). And he agreed with Wordsworth that
"the individual Mind" is "fitted" to "the external World," and vice versa,
but only in the act of creation, when both Mind and World act "with

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

blended might," as Wordsworth says in "Home at Grasm

"Tintern Abbey" and throughout The Prelude.19
All things considered, Frost must have been amused b
responses elicited by the question in "The Oven Bird": "Wh
to make of a diminished thing[?]" (150). The answer, I thin
in two poems. On the one hand, he says in "At Woodward
"It's knowing what to do with things that counts" (380). B
other hand, he adds in "Hyla Brook," "We love the things we
what they are" (149). What we do with them and what they ar
of course, on what we are. And that depends on where we
and where we are going. Creation, in Frost's view, is a matter
and doing simultaneously and a means by which "diminish
subjects and objects, material things, can be seen spirituall
as parts, as Frost suggests in "Fragmentary Blue," but also as
whole. Even a stone can be a star, Frost says in "A Star in a S

Such as it is, it promises the prize

Of one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise. (215)

NOTES

'In 1894, Frost wrote to Susan Hayes Ward that "we Scotchmen
to be romanticists-poets" (Letters 20). According to Dorothy Judd
"once observed that 'a romanticist and a realist both fall in love f
don't know.' However, he continued, 'the realist falls in love with the
mystery, the more mysterious mystery'" (23).
2See also George Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Fr
Duke UP, 1960) 117; and John Napier, "A Momentary Stay Agains
Virginia Quarterly Review 33 (1957): 385.
See also John Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (New Hav
1960) 167; William Pritchard, "Diminished Nature," Massachusetts Review 1
(1960): 447; Irving Howe, "Robert Frost: A Momentary Stay," New Republic 148
(Mar. 1963): 27-28; Richard Eberhart, "Robert Frost: His Personality," Southern
Review 2 (1966): 783; and James L. Potter, Robert Frost Handbook (College Park:
Penn State UP, 1980) 147-55.
See also Margaret Edwards, "Pan's Song, Revised," Frost: Centennial Essays,
ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1973) 108; and Thomas
McLanahan, "Frost's Theodicy: 'Word I Had No One Left But God,'" Frost:
Centennial Essays II, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1976) 112-13, 115.
5See also Sydney Lea, "From Sublime to Rigamarole: Relations of Frost to
Wordsworth," Robert Frost: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House, 1986) 86, 102.

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 ROBERT FROST

6 See, for example, Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost (New
Oxford UP, 1963) 94, 179; John Nims, "The Classicism of Robert
Saturday Review of Literature 46 (Feb. 1963): 62; and Gorham Munson,
the World in General," Recognition of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Thornt
York: Holt, 1937) 202-203.
7This judgment is so pervasive in Frost criticism that a list of r
books and articles would have to include almost everything written on t
Suffice it to say that James M. Cox, Reginald Cook, John Lynen,
Brower, Frank Lentricchia, Lawrance Thompson, Philip Gerber, Sid
and James L. Potter have portrayed Frost in this manner.
"'There is so much trouble in coming into the world,' said Lord
Bolingbroke, 'and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that
'tis hardly worth while to be here at all'" (4: 154).
9 Socrates says,
The rest of the souls are also [like the gods] longing after the upper
world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they sink into
the gulf, as they are carried round, plunging, treading on one another,
striving to be first; and there is confusion and extremity of effort, and
many of them are lamed or have their wings broken through the ill-
driving of the charioteers; and all of them after a fruitless toil go away
without being initiated into the mysteries of being, and are nursed with
the food of opinion. (Plato 3:406)
Frost asks what it is that still "eludes": "Is it food to eat? / Or some dim secret
of the good of waste?" (Clearing 14). Socrates says, "The reason of their great
desire to behold the plain of truth is that the food which is suited to the highest
part of the soul comes out of that meadow; and the wing on which the soul
soars is nourished with this."
0 In Frost's spiritual geography, houses are often places of paralysis and
entrapment because they are metaphors of metaphors. As such, they may b
alive, dying, or dead. They can endure if they are renewed by an experienc
the sacred (e.g., an annual visit from Silas in "The Death of the Hired Man"
a periodic journey to the brook in "West-Running Brook"). Otherwise, Frost
houses become structures of rigidity, conflict, and eventually death. They ca
reborn only in a new marriage of opposites (as in "The Generations of Men"
"On Frost's escapism, see Granville Hicks, "The World of Robert Fros
New Republic 65 (Dec. 1930): 77-78; Louise Bogan, Achievement in Amer
Poetry, 1900-1950 (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951) 48-50; Isadore Trasch
"Robert Frost: Some Divisions in the Whole Man," Yale Review 45 (1965): 57-
and John Lynen, "Du Cote de Chez Frost," Frost: Centennial Essays, 587.
2On Frost's heroic assertiveness, see Philip Gerber, Robert Frost (New Yor
Twayne, 1966) 168-70; Richard Foster, "The Two Frosts and the Poetics o
Confession," Frost: Centennial Essays III, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: UP
Mississippi, 1978) 350-55; and Robert Pack, "Frost's Enigmatical Reserve: The
Poet as Teacher and Preacher," Robert Frost: Modern Critical Views, 10-12, 19.
13On Frost's philosophical uncertainty and moral confusion, see Jose
Warren Beach, "Robert Frost," Yale Review 43 (1954): 216; W. W. Robson, "T
Achievement of Robert Frost," Critical Essays on Robert Frost, 213-14; and T. R
Sharma, Robert Frost's Poetic Style (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 198
136-140.

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TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

4 In "Experience," Emerson says,

All our days are so unprofitable while they pass, that 'tis w
where or when we ever got anything of this which we cal
poetry, virtue. We never got it on any dated calendar day. Som
days must have been intercalated somewhere, like those th
won with the dice of the Moon, that Osiris might be born
5 "The mind is a baby giant who, more provident in the crad
knows, has hurled his paths in life all round ahead of him like
given-data so-called" ("The Constant Symbol," Prose 28).
"6Richard Poirier calls Frost a visionary (84), but very few other c
called Frost a romantic without equivocation or denigration. To Jay
"is especially an American romantic-one whose primary source can
back to Emerson" (207). See also Priscilla M. Paton, "Robert Frost: 'T
the sweetest dream that labor knows,'" American Literature 53 (1981
7 Frost said, "With so many ladders going up everywhere, there
something for them to lean against" (Reichert 418).
18 Marie Boroff discusses "Directive" as an initiation ritual the
significance" of which the reader must understand in order to
saving moral message" (53). Similarly describing the poem as a t
reader, David A. Sanders says that negation leads to insight, uncertai
mination (272-73). See also Todd M. Lieber, "Robert Frost and Wallace
Stevens: 'What to Make of a Diminished Thing,'" American Literature 47 (1975):
81-82; and S. P. C. Duvall, "Robert Frost's 'Directive' out of Walden," Critical
Essays on Robert Frost, ed. Philip L. Gerber (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982) 138-43.
9 In The Prelude, see XIII, 11.135-36, 283-84, 290-293, 375-78; and XIV,
11.82-99.

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