Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: "What to Make of a Diminished Thing"

Author(s): Todd M. Lieber

Source: American Literature , Mar., 1975, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1975), pp. 64-83
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/2925034

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: ""What to
Make of a Diminished Thing"

TODD M. LIEBER
Simjpson College

I0 OBERT FROST AND WALLACE STEVENS have long been recognized

AX as two of the most important twentieth-century American poets,
but scholars have made little effort to examine the relationships be-
tween their work. The critical tendency has been to portray them as
opposites or at least as representatives of divergent "schools" of poetry
and poetics.1 This tendency has been unfortunate; for, despite the
fact that Frost and Stevens took little interest in one another's work,
and although the styles of their poetry differ greatly, their sense of
what they were about, and of its importance, was essentially the same.
By recognizing their commonality it is possible to learn a good deal
about the imaginative activity that underlies and unifies diverse
poetic idioms.
The similarity between the two poets springs initially from the
common environment in which they wrote. As twentieth-century
men they shared twentieth-century concerns, and like most serious
contemporary writers they faced the problem of coming to terms

1 Lawrance Thompson, for example, mentions Stevens as a young poet influenced by

Eliot and Poe toward an "art-for-art's-sake" doctrine, maintaining that "poetry has nothing
to do with practical or moral ideas," in contrast to Frost, who leans toward Emerson's "art-
for-wisdom's-sake." See Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost (New York,
I96I), p. I2. Roy Harvey Pearce, in The Continutity of American Poetry (Princeton, N.J.,
I96I), recognizes the closeness of Stevens to Frost (see p. 427); but in his broad groupings
Frost is a "stock-taker" whose poems represent "a pause . . . in the continuity of American
poetry" (p. 273), whereas in Stevens "the continuity of the most deeply rooted tradition of
American poetry . . . reaches the point of no return" (p. 376). The lack of interest Frost
and Stevens took in one another's work has probably discouraged comparative studies.
Stevens's only published comment on Frost's poetry was that, "I do not know his work well
enough to be either impressed or unimpressed. . . . His work is full (or said to be full) of
humanity." Letters of Wallace Stetcens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York, I966), p. 825. Frost
expressed dislike for Stevens's "Peter Quince at the Clavier" because he felt a "bawdy" poem
should not purport to make me think." The Letters of Robert Frost to Loulis Untermeyer,
ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York, I963), p. 17. And late in his career he disclaimed any
sense of affinity with Stevens. See his interview with Richard Poirier, reprinted from the
Pa-is Review (Summer-Fall, I960) in Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery
Lathem (New York, I966), p. 230.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 65

with a world that seems to lack real spiritual si

often visualized as a waste land. Monroe K. Spear
recent book on modernism that in the twentiet
of the present as a waste land, now that civiliza
human nature changed, becomes, with its wrenc
the dominant myth."2 The modern waste land is commonly per-
ceived as cloven into inner and outer realms: an "objective" natural
world, lacking meaning or intention; and the "subjective" worlds in
which each individual exists alone. In sociological terms the vision is
that of an alienated individual lost in the absurdity of a technocratic
mass society. The challenge facing the artist has been the necessity
of dealing with the loss of unity, order, and belief that seems to
characterize the modern world; or, as Frost put it in "The Oven
Bird," "what to make of a diminished thing."g
Frost and Stevens were primarily concerned with the metaphysical
rather than the sociological dimensions of the waste land myth; for
it was their inclination to view social conditions as the outgrowth of
intellectual commitments. Each wrote poems that convey this "di-
minished" vision of the world: Frost, for example, in "Desert Places"
and "Acquainted with the Night," with their suggestions of "an
external emptiness awaking Frost to fear the abyss in his own soul";"
Stevens in the stark barrenness of winter soulscapes such as "The
Snow Man" and "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters," which convey
the sense of the mind as "the inner nothingness, while reality is the
barren external world."5 But neither Frost nor Stevens reacted to the
waste land vision with enduring pessimism, and ultimately neither
poet accepted it as truth. They sought a more accurate vision of the
self and the world. Searching not as philosophers but as poets, they
found an alternative vision implicit in the experience of writing
poetry. Each in his own idiom arrived at an understanding of poetic
activity which enabled him to see poetry as a response and a correc-
tive to the malaise of the modern spirit. I shall first briefly describe

2 Dionysuis and the City: Modernism in Twentieth-Centtury Poetry (New York, I970),
P. 33.
3 The Poetty of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Cpnnery Lathem (New York, I969), p. I20.
All further references to this edition wvill be found in parentheses in the text, preceded by the
notation PRF.
4 James P. Dougherty, "Robert Frost's 'Directive to the Wilderness," American Qularterly,
XVIII (Summer, I966), p. 2II.
5 J. Hillis Miller, "Wallace Stevens' Poetry of Being," in The Act of the Mind, ed. Roy
Harvey Pearce and J. Hillis Miller (Baltimore, I965), p. I45.

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 66 American Literature

this shared conception of poetry, then examine its most important

characteristics through their embodiment in a few poems by Frost
and Stevens, and finally attempt to summarize its significance as an
alternative to the assumptions of the waste land vision.

II

Frost was no more eager than any other poet to define poetry, but
when he spoke about it he generally used such phrases as: "a way of
grappling with life," "a little voyage of discovery," "a way out of
something."6 All these phrases represent poetry not as entity but
activity, and, more specifically, as "a way," that is, as method. In the
essay "Education by Poetry," Frost suggests that in coming close to
poetry the student enters the world of metaphor and, through meta-
phor, learns what it is to think: "it is just putting this and that
together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another."7 He is not
speaking of trivial comparisons but the most profound thinking
humans engage in. "Unless you have had your proper poetical educa-
tion in metaphor," he writes, "you are not safe anywhere. Because
you are not at ease with figurative values: you don't know the meta-
phor in its strength and its weakness. You don't know how far you
may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are
not safe in science; you are not safe in history" (SP, p. 39). The fig-
ure Frost uses to describe metaphor in this sentence is itself worth
attending to: we "ride" our metaphors. Metaphor should be con-
strued not merely as an identification of resemblance but as an instru-
ment used to get somewhere, a tool for thinking, the vehicle, perhaps,
on which the poet undertakes his "voyages of discovery." Poems
become methods of moving toward new insights on the strength of
the poet's figures, dynamic activities in which, to quote Elizabeth
Sewell, "the mind unites with a figure of its own devising as a means
toward understanding the world."8 The process is that used by Frost's
"God" in "A Masque of Reason." He says to Job: "You helped me /
Establish once and for all the principle / There's no connection man
can reason out / Between his just deserts and what he gets. . . . I

6 Lathem, Interviews with Robert Frost, pp. 58, I I7, I73. See also p. 202.
7 Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York,
I966), p. 4I. All further references to this edition will be found in parentheses in the text
preceded by the notation SP.
8 E. Sewell, The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History (London, I960), p. 20.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 67

should have spoken sooner had I found / The word I wanted....

We groped it out together" (PRF, pp. 475, 480). God and Job are
agent and instrument working together to "grope out" the figures
that make life comprehensible.
In one of his "Adagia" Wallace Stevens says much the same thing.
He writes: "The relation of art to life is of the first importance
especially in a skeptical age since, in the absence of a belief in God,
the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone
from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what
they validate and invalidate, for the support that they give."9 A state-
ment about the relation of art and life, this is also an indication of
method, for art itself is the process in which "the mind turns to its
own creations and examines them." Its creations are its concepts, its
figures. "Poetry," Stevens says in "Effects of Analogy," "is almost
incredibly the outcome of figures of speech or, what is the same
thing, the outcome of the operation of one imagination on another
through the instrumentality of the figures. To identify poetry and
metaphor or metamorphosis is merely to abbreviate the last re-
mark."'0 Like Frost, Stevens views poetry, at least in one of its
aspects, as a method of thinking, a way to enter the unfamiliar and
the unformed, "the act of becoming engaged with something unreal
(OP, p. 239)." Poet and philosopher alike, Stevens says, form con-
cepts in order to probe for an integration of experience, but "the
philosopher intends his integration to be fateful; the poet intends his
to be effective" (OP, p. I97). The poet, in other words, develops
alertness to the potential usefulness of his figures for shaping reality
in new ways.
This gives poems a certain doubleness, for their substance is both
the figures the artist has shaped and his sense of the potential of those
figures for further explorations. Stevens identifies this doubleness as
"the true subject" of the poem and "the poetry of the subject":

9 Opus Posthumous, ed. Samuel French Morse (New York, I966), p. I59. All further
references to this edition will be found in parentheses in the text preceded by the notation
OP.
10 The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York, I95I), pp.
I I7-I8.

11 It should be noted that by "unreal" Stevens does not mean "non-existent." He gives
as examples of such poetic acts, "looking at a photograph of someone who is absent," "writ-
ing a letter to a person at a distance," or, for a member of the middle class, "the act of
thinking of the life of the rich" (OP, pp. 239-240).

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 68 American Literature

One is always writing about two things at the same time in poetry and
it is this that produces the tension characteristic of poetry. One is the
true subject and the other is the poetry of the subject. The difficulty of
sticking to the true subject, when it is the poetry of the subject that is
paramount in one's mind, need only be mentioned to be understood. In
a poet who makes the true subject paramount and who merely em-
bellishes it, the subject is constant and the development orderly. If the
poetry of the subject is paramount, the true subject is not constant nor its
development orderly. This is true in the case of Proust and Joyce, for
example, in modern prose. (OP, p. 22I)

In Stevens's poetry the "true subject" is rarely constant and its

development rarely orderly; for Stevens concerns himself centrally
with "the poetry of the subject," the potential of his figures as instru-
ments of thought. Canto 22 of "The Man with the Blue Guitar"
helps to clarify Stevens's position:

Poetry is the subject of the poem,

From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,

Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it

An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun's green,

Cloud's red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,

In the universal intercourse.'2

A paraphrase of the canto might read: the poetry of the subject,

whatever the subject might be, is the true concern of the poem.
Within the poem itself there is "an absence in reality" because the
poet is not dealing with things as they are but with their potential
usefulness as instruments of discovery. But is the poetry of things
really separable from the things themselves? Is it accurate to say that
the poem withdraws from reality when in fact it asserts the reality

12 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York, I969), pp. I76-I77. All further
references to this edition will be found in parentheses in the text preceded by the notation
CP.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 69

of the poetry of things?'" In the interaction of imagination and reality

the poem draws on things as they are; perhaps it also gives to them
new forms and shapes, new structures of intelligibility. The canto
represents poetic method working on itself, as Stevens uses metaphor
(issue, absence, return, intercourse, etc.) to inquire into some of the
implications of poetry as a method of thinking.

III

Because of their concern with poetry as a process of inquiry, Frost

and Stevens wrote poems designed to reveal poetic method and make
it manifest to the reader. Like "The Man with the Blue Guitar,"
these poems are radically reflexive. They figure the act of figurative
thinking and thus enable the reader to become involved in the poetic
experience of the poem. Frost suggested that it is possible to "come
close to poetry" as well by reading as by writing it, so long as it is
read "not as linguistics, not as history, not as anything but poetry"
(SP, p. 43). Stevens remarked in the "Adagia" that "to read a poem
should be an experience, like experiencing an act" (OP, p. i64)."1
Frost and Stevens utilize structure, diction, and grammar to incorpo-
rate method into the substance of the poem in such a way that the
attentive reader will himself participate in or reenact the poetic mode
of thought.
As an initial example, consider Frost's "The Lesson for Today,"
a poem that contains "statement, question, and method, at one and
the same time."" The question has to do with the alleged "darkness"
of "this uncertain age in which we dwell" (PRF, p. 350). The open-
ing lines suggest that it is not "really as dark as I hear sages tell,"
but the rest of the first paragraph considers what Frost would do if
it were; and as he proceeds in the poem to do what he describes, he
arrives at a basic ambivalence which it becomes the work of the poem
to resolve. What he "would do," and does, is to engage in a hypo-
thetical conversation with a medieval scholar. As he elaborates his

13 This speculation is central to the whole poem. In the early cantos of the poem the
audience requires the guitarist to play "a tune beyond us, yet ourselves" (CP, p. I65).
This, Stevens explained to Hi Simons, is "because that is exactly the way they are" (Letters o
Wallace Stevens, p. 359). Throughout, Stevcns develops the idea that man exists fully in his
figurative extensions of himself.
14 Cf. "Authors are actors, books are theatres' and "The reading of a poem should be an
experience. Its writing must be all the more so" (OP, pp. 157 and I70).
15 Sewell, P. 4.

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70 American Literature

figure it suggests the commonness of man's sense of insignificance:

"We both are the belittled human race, / One as compared with
God and one with space. . . . One age is like another for the soul"
(PRF, pp. 353, 354). Underlying the assertion of historical continuity,
however, there remains the problem of responding to this diminish-
ment. The structure of the poem embodies Frost's response; he cre-
ates a figure and uses it as a tool to shape an understanding of his
situation. Although the language of Frost's "conversation" seems to
work toward philosophical statement, the poem ends not with a
logical answer to the question of the opening stanza but with a meta-
phor which figures the poet's uncertainty in a meaningful way. As
opposed to "philosophical distention," Frost suggests: "I had a lover's
quarrel with the world" (PRF, p. 355).
The same structural principle is evident in many of Frost's narra-
tive and dramatic poems, where the persona or the dramatic charac-
ters engage in figurative thinking; to read the poem "as poetry" is
to follow the process by which one figures experience and, to para-
phrase Stevens, examines his figures for what they reveal and vali-
date or invalidate. Diction and syntactical progression often direct
attention to what is happening in the poem. In "Birches," for exam-
ple, Frost introduces the figure with the phrase, "I like to think some
boy's been swinging them," and he resumes it, after the interlude
about the ice storms, with "I should prefer to have some boy bend
them" (PRF, p. I2I; italics added). The digression that separates
these two phrases indicates that the figure of the boy is only one of
several possible ways of understanding the appearance of the trees; but
it is the one the poet finally chooses. As the figure is expanded and
elaborated, the syntax becomes descriptive and declarative rather than
hypothetical. Finally the figure is used to identify the proper relation-
ship of man's spiritual and earthly concerns, and diction and sen-
tence structure return to the subjunctive: "That would be good both
going and coming back. / One could do worse than be a swinger
of birches" (PRF, p. I22). "Birches" records thought in action, and
throughout the poem the grammatical forms provide clues to the
shifting activities of the thinker.
Many of Stevens's poems show a similar structure: a proposition is
suggested, worked out, revised, sometimes dropped, sometimes re-
solved, sometimes left in ambiguity. Among the earlier poems, for
example, both "Sunday Morning" and "The Comedian as the Let-

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 7I

ter C" are structured by the interplay between

matic protagonist and experiences which challe
the later poems personae tend to replace dramat
structure remains essentially the same, that of
a series of propositions, testing their usefulne
uses diction and grammar to make the reader aware of the process
of thought in the poem. The grammatical progression is generally
one in which a figure is presented as a hypothesis, by words such as
"if," "when," "until," or a phrase such as "it may be," and the
"hypothesis is continued, and vivified, and taken seriously as a
vehicle for reflection."'6 Often Stevens uses the imperative together
with the subjunctive, as in poem nine of "Credences of Summer."
The poem begins with a command that establishes the figure: "Fly
low, cock bright, and stop on a bean pole." The figure of the bird
in the abandoned garden is then used to make a statement-"A com-
plex of emotions falls apart, / In an abandoned spot"-and to sug-
gest further possibilities: "And on your bean pole, it may be, you
detect / Another complex of emotions . . . , and you make a sound,
/ Which is not part of the listener's own sense" (CP, p. 377; italics
added). To follow Stevens's use of these constructions is to experi-
ence an act of inquiry and thus to become aware of poetry as a
method of thinking.
One of the most successful of Stevens's attempts to communicate
this awareness is "The Idea of Order at Key West," for here the
relationship that Stevens was trying to establish with the readers of
his poetry is embodied in the poem by the relationship of the observ-
ers to the singer. She shapes the world in her song; and by attending
to this process the observers are able to share not only in a particular
ordering of experience but in "the idea of order"; thus they recognize
that the activity is basic to their own human nature. This poem also
reveals those essential characteristics of poetic method which led Frost
and Stevens to reject the assumptions of the "waste land" world view.
The poem transcends the generally accepted dualism that separates
the self and the world and sorts things out into the categories of

16 Helen Hennessey Vendler, On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens' Longer Poems

(Cambridge, Mass., I969), p. 30. I am indebted to Professor Vendler for pointing out the
frequency with which such usage appears in Stevens's poems. However, as wvill become evi-
dent, my interpretation of its significance is quite opposite from hers.

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 72 American Literature

subject and object, mind and body, knowledge and belief, thought
and feeling. The key lines in the poem are these:

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.
(CP, p. 129; italics added)

In the activity of the singer, self and sea become one reality. Her song
embodies the sea, making it intelligible, something more than "the
heaving speech of air." In the poem, phenomena themselves, not, as
philosophic idealism would have it, a subjective image, are sensed
clearly and directly. But they are not objects to be sensed or con-
templated simply. In the poem they become instruments for shaping
human reality. As Elizabeth Sewell writes, "a mind speculating in
the poetic mode . . . draws into itself the very facts it is thinking
about, so that it can not only think about them, but think with them.
For poetry, all objects and happenings in the universe are for think-
ing with, and phenomena or events are always available to poetry
as method, at the same time as they are available as objects of
contemplation."'
Furthermore, the instrument-the song that figures the sea-is one
into which the singer has so extended herself that it has become par
of her own person, "the self that was her song." The singing involve
passionate commitment on the part of the singer. Michael Polanyi
suggests that this sort of commitment is present whenever a man uses
a tool or an interpretative framework. He writes: "We pour ourselves
into them and assimilate them as parts of our own existence. We
accept them existentially by dwelling in them."'8 Polanyi's choice of
"personal" as a better term than ''objective" or ''subjective" to describe
the nature of the understanding that derives from this process seems
an appropriate description of Stevens's figure in this poem. Polanyi
writes: "In so far as the personal submits to requirements acknowl-
edged by itself as independent of itself, it is not subjective; but in so

17 The Human Metaphor (South Bend, Ind., I964), p. 68. This seems to me to be
what Stevens implies in identifying his concern with "the poetry of the subject' as para-
mount to a concern with "the true subject."
18 M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towa-ds a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York.
I964), p. 59. There is no evidence that either Frost or Stevens was familiar with Polanyis
work, but through poetry each came to an epistemological position essentially the same as
Polanyi's.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 73

far as it is an action guided by individual passion

either. It transcends the disjunction between
tive."'9 Stevens keeps constantly before him the "veritable ocean";
but he sees equally the central role of individual passion, "the maker's
rage to order words of the sea" (CP, p. 130).

IV

The vision revealed in "The Idea of Order at Key West" looks

further toward two particular propositions. The first is that phe-
nomena themselves are vital to man's method of thinking about both
them and himself, that epistemologically the self and the world are
not separable. The second is that knowledge requires an act of
personal commitment to one's instruments of thought.
In Canto 28 of "The Man with the Blue Guitar" Stevens asserts:

I am a native in this world

And think in it as a native thinks,

Gesu, not native of a mind

Thinking the thoughts I call my own,
Native, a native in the world
And like a native think in it.
(CP, p. i8o)
Stevens rejects the notion that man is "native of a mind." As man
thinks with his instruments-his songs, his figures, his poems-, so
thought itself must be understood to be taking place within the world
and not, as Plato or Descartes assumed, in a mind separate from the
world. Canto 28 concludes:

Here I inhale profounder strength

And as I am, I speak and move
And things are as I think they are
And say they are on the blue guitar.
(CP, p. i 8o)

That final couplet should not be read as two consecutive propositions

which separate thinking (in the mind) from saying (on the instru-
ment). On the contrary, context, rhythm (the caesuras after the sec-
ond and third "are"), repetition, rhyme, and internal rhyme all de-

19 Ibid., p. 300.

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 74 American Literature

mand that "on the blue guitar" mod

the saying and make of them a singl
This is not idealism; nor is it an identification of the self with
nature; or that attempt to transform nature into something human
which Stevens earlier in the poem calls "the chord that falsifies"
(CP, P. 171). Throughout Stevens's writing appears a deep rever-
ence for reality in its vital non-humanness and an abiding conviction
that a major function of poetry must be to achieve "contact with
reality as it impinges on us from outside, the sense that we can touch
and feel a solid reality which does not wholly dissolve itself into the
conceptions of our own minds."20 That nature is neither mind nor
mental the poetry finds a source not of despair but joy. The joy is
perhaps best expressed in the final lines of "How to Live, What to
Do," a poem Stevens said he especially liked "be?ause it so definitely
represents my way of thinking" :21

There was neither voice, nor crested image,

No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound

It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.
(CP, p. 126)

A like sense of joy in the fundamental differentness of man and

nature is central to Frost's vision. He stresses this in poems such as
"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things." The clearest exam-
ple is probably "The Most of It," where the sudden appearance of a
great buck redeems the loneliness of a man who "thought he kept
the universe alone" (PRF, p. 338). Far from distrusting the phe-
nomena of the world, Frost and Stevens insist that they be seen
clearly and accepted as things independent of the human mind upon
which man can and must rely for knowledge.
Stevens figures this process explicitly in "Landscape With Boat."
The poem presents an "anti-master-man," amalgamating Plato and

20 The Necessary Angel, p. 96. Stevens is paraphrasing H. D. Lewis's essay "On Poetic
Truth." See OP, p. 236.
21 Letters of Wallace Stevens, p. 293.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 75

Descartes (cf. OP, p. 236), for whom truth transcends or exists

independently of phenomena:
He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue.
(CP, P.241)

Though this idealist could not avoid living in the world of sense,
he refused to accept it as part of his thinking: "He received what
he denied. / But as a truth to be accepted, he supposed / A truth
beyond all truths. . . . He never supposed / . . . that if nothing
was the truth, then all / Things were the truth, the world itself was
the truth" (CP, p. 242). Consequently he became "like a phantom
in an uncreated night . . . projected by one void into / Another"
(CP, p. 242).
Frost's later poetry offers a parallel version of the loss of the world
that results when man divorces thought from physical phenomena,
particularly from the body itself. The poem is "Etherealizing":
A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed:
Such as that flesh is something we can slough
So that the mind can be entirely freed.
Then when the arms and legs have atrophied,
And brain is all that's left of mortal stuff,
We can lie on the beach with the seaweed
And take our daily tide baths smooth and rough.
There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish
At evolution's opposite extreme.
But now as blobs of brain we'll lie and dream,
With only one vestigial creature wish:
Oh, may the tide be soon enough at high
To keep our abstract verse from being dry.
(PRF, pp. 394-395)

The blob of jellyfish and the blob of brain reflect the same impotence.
In the first figure man is an organism without spirit; in the second
he is a disembodied mind. Frost suggests that either condition re-
moves poetic thought from its essential center. The final "creature
wish" is to be touched again and redeemed by the physical world.

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76 American Literature

"To keep our abstract verse from being dry," mind and phenomena
must be accepted equally as instruments of thought and used to
interpret one another.
Frost has not belabored the point in prose like Stevens, but it is
often manifest in his poetry. One of the clearest examples is "West-
Running Brook." The theme of the poem, baldly stated, is that love
depends upon a balanced union of contraries. But the central drama
of the poem presents the attempt of a young couple to better under-
stand their relationship to one another and their uses of the brook
as a figure to help them understand. The brook figures contrariness
in three ways: in running west, while the other brooks run east; in
the standing wave where it seems to run counter to itself; and, most
importantly, in the contrary manner in which the husband and wife
use it. The wife uses herself to think about the brook: "It must be
the brook / Can trust itself to go by contraries / The way I can
with you. . ." (PRF, p. 258). Conversely, the husband uses the brook
to think about human life: "It is this backward motion toward the
source, / Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in. . ."
(PRF, p. 260). Their temperaments lead them to almost opposite
interpretations, hers romantic, his nearly nihilistic. But as in each case
the brook leads to a figuring of balanced contraries, so the activity
of thinking with and about it together leads the couple to a clarifica-
tion of their relationship with one another and acceptance of their
own contrariness.

The second proposition about poetic method can be seen as the

converse of the first. Because in the poetic mode the self and the
world are not separable, poetic thinking requires personal commit-
ment to the figures one creates and uses. Like Stevens's singer in
"The Idea of Order at Key West," the poet "dwells in" his songs.
The poetic method of thinking is not a method of doubt and rejec-
tion, awaiting final proof, but a method of supposition and choice,
the deliberate holding and the creative use of unproven beliefs. That
this proposition may be the converse of the first becomes apparent in
"Landscape With Boat," for the kind of thinking that dismisses the
phenomenal world as suspect and unreliable for discovering truth
figures in the poem as a kind of thinking that insists also on the
impersonal nature of knowledge and refuses to accept the necessity

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 77

of individual commitment in establishing it. Thus Stevens says of his

"anti-master-man": "He never supposed / That he might be truth,
himself, or part of it. . ." (CP, p. 242). In the conclusion to the poem
Stevens proposes poetic method as an alternative to his ascetic's
search for an impersonal truth and his method of doubt and denial:

Had he been better able to suppose:

He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming Emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer's track
And say, "The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestial pantomime."
(CP, p. 243)

As a gloss on these lines there is none better than the speeclh of

Stevens's "figure of the youth as virile poet": "1 am myself a part of
what is real and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only,
that I hear or ever shall."22 The young poet recognizes himself as a
part of the reality of the natural world but also as part of what is
"unreal," the "imagination of life" on which truth depends. The
essay concludes with an address to the "mystic muse," who has been
rejected as a mythical goddess but is now reacknowledged as a power
of the mind:

Inexplicable sister of the Minotaur, enigma and mask, although I am

part of what is real, hear me and recognize me as part of the unreal. I
am the truth, but the truth of that imagination of life in which with
unfamiliar motion and manner you guide me in those exchanges of
speech in which your words are mine, mine yours.23

Stevens recognized that at the root of knowledge lies a commit-

ment to unproven figures and structures, "fictions" that depend
wholly on belief in them. He began "Asides on the Oboe" with the
lines:

The prologues are over. It is a question, now,

Of final belief. So say that final belief
Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
(CP, p. 250)

22 The Necessary Angel, p. 6o.

23 Ibid., p. 67.

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 78 American Literature

To say, "final belief must be in a fiction," is not to say, "I believe in

something I know to be false," but to say, "I recognize that what I
ultimately must believe in are the figures I have made to dwell in and
think with about myself and the world." This conviction led Stevens
to the idea of a "supreme fiction, recognized as a fiction, in which
men could propose to themselves a fulfillment."24 The idea of a
supreme fiction suggests an inclusive structure of belief, such as that
which Stevens attributes to Santayana, "a total edifice, / Chosen by
an inquisitor of structures / For himself" (CP, pp. 510_511).25 But
the supreme fiction also includes, necessarily, the process which
creates that "edifice"; "in the long run," Stevens wrote to Henry
Church, "poetry would be the supreme fiction."26
As such, the supreme fiction is "not a light apart, up-hill," some-
thing to be attained at the end of a quest, but the activity that sup-
ports daily life, "the essential poem at the centre of things." Cantos 4,
5, and 6 of "A Primitive like an Orb" are worth quoting in their
entirety as a summary of Stevens's poetics:

One poem proves another and the whole,

For the clairvoyant men that need no proof:
The lover, the believer, and the poet.
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language, when it is themselves.
With these they celebrate the central poem,
The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,
Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree

And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud,
Lose the old uses that they made of them,
And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform
Each other by sharp informations, sharp
Free knowledges, secreted until then,
Breaches of that which held them fast. It is
As if the central poem became the world,
And the world the central poem, each one the mate
Of the other, as if summer was a spouse,

24 Letters of WVallace Stevens, p. 820.

25 For a lengthy and lucid examination of structural imagery as a figure for the supreme
fiction, see James M. Baird, The Dome and the Rock: Struicture in the Poetry of Wallace
Stevens (Baltimore, I968).
26 Letters of Wallace Stevens, p. 430.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 79

Espoused each morning, each long afternoon,

And the mate of summer: her mirror and her loo
Her only place and person, a self of her
That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one
The essential poem begets the others. The light
Of it is not a light apart, up-hill.
(CP, P.441)

"The central poem" refers to poetry itself, the ac

knowing in which the self and the world are em
give form and meaning to one another, the process of discovery
through which man liberates himself from the bonds of customary
formulations by pouring himself and his world into figurative lan-
guage, language chosen with the desire and resting on the passionate
commitment of "the lover, the believer, and the poet."
Love, belief, and poetry. Frost also associates these three, and
through that association he expresses the same vision of poetic ac-
tivity that Stevens articulates in "A Primitive like an Orb." Frost
often used love as an analogy for poetry, as, for example, in saying
that "the figure a poem makes . . . is the same as for love" (SP,
p. i8). But love is more than an analogy for poetry; it is also Frost's
name for the positive force that impels poetry, the energy behind all
true thinking. In "Accidentally on Purpose" love is called the basic
instinctual force that underlies "intention, purpose, and design" in
the universe:

How happily instinctive we remain,

Our best guide upward to the light,
Passionate preference such as love at sight.
(PRF, p. 425)

In "Kitty Hawk," an ode to the power of human thought to build

upon itself and thrust its way into the unknown, Frost compares this
same instinctual drive to the Incarnation: "Pulpiteers will censure /
Our instinctive venture / Into what they call / The material /
When we took that fall / From the apple tree. / But God's own
descent / Into flesh was meant / As a demonstration / That the
supreme merit / Lay in risking spirit / In substantiation" (PRF,
PP. 434-435).
For Frost love and poetry function as twin figures of the creative
activity in which man commits himself, with "passionate preference,"

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8o American Literature

to a certain tacit foreknowledge that he has and, by believing in it,

brings it to fulfillment. In "Education by Poetry" he wrote that, in
connection with learning about thinking, "the person who gets close
enough to poetry, he is going to know more about the word belief
than anybody else knows, even in religion nowadays" (SP, p. 44).
Like the relationship of two people in love, the process of poetic
thinking demands the act of "believing the thing into existence,"
and in poetry as in love one learns that the indwelling of the human
spirit in its forms is essential to all creation and to all knowledge.
Like Stevens, Frost came to see poems as individual embodiments of
a single, central activity. In a later essay, "The Constant Symbol," he
wrote: "There is a sense in which all poems are the same old meta-
phor always. Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or
great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper and
deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether any
original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost"
(SP, p. 24).
Like the man in "slouching pantaloons" in Stevens's "Notes To-
ward a Supreme Fiction," who is "looking for what was, where it
used to be" (CP, p. 389), those who bewail the loss of belief in the
modern world have misconstrued the nature of belief in searching
for some kind of objective entity apart from the self which might
satisfy them. The complaint of Jesse Bel in "A Masque of Mercy" is
typical. She says:

Something's the matter, everyone admits.

On the off-chance it may be lack of faith,
I have contributed the empty cellar
To Paul to see what he can do with it
To bring faith back. I'm only languidly
Inclined to hope for much. Still what we need
Is something to believe in, don't we, Paul?
(PRF, pp. 514-515)

For Jesse Bel "something to believe in" implies something external

to herself. The belief that Frost associates with poetic method is
rooted in the self; it is a tacit foreknowledge "that you don't want
to tell other people about because you cannot prove that you know.
You are saying nothing about it till you see" (SP, P. 46). This is the
belief embodied in "The Strong Are Saying Nothing." The poem

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 8I

figures the implicit faith present in the farm

unprovable belief in their activity which the
into in relationship with the soil and the weat
fillment. In the last stanza the poem expands
"four beliefs" Frost enumerates in "Education
tionship we enter into with God to believe th
the hereafter in" (SP, p. 46):
Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wav
But carries no cry of what is hoped to be.
There may be little or much beyond the grave
But the strong are saying nothing until they s
(PRF, p. 300)

Frost's best treatment of the role of belief and commitment in

establishing truth appears in "Directive," a poem about returning to
some basic source of wholeness and strength, "beyond confusion."
It begins with an introspective journey through a landscape of deso-
lation, marked by waste land imagery which makes it seem doubtful
that this journey can lead in a valuable direction. Yet a guide appears,
vague and phantom-like at first but increasingly more concrete and
personal toward the end of the poem. By the final lines it is clear that
the guide is the poet, and the source of wholeness he discloses is a
fundamental power within the self. The poet is a guide to the life of
the imagination, to the "broken drinking goblet like the Grail" taken
from the children's "house of make-believe." The goblet is "Under a
spell so the wrong ones can't find it, / So can't get saved, as Saint
Mark says they mustn't" (PRF, p. 379) ." In the Gospels the "wrong
ones" are the skeptics, legalistic Pharisees who, lacking faith and
belief, are unable to dwell in the world of figures and consequently
unable to understand the truth of the parables or the way parables
convey the truth. "Plain language" might cause them to "turn and
be forgiven" without having to make the genuine bestowal of them-
selves that salvation, and figurative understanding, demand. Like the
teachings of Christ, poetic truth depends on commitment and faith.

27 The reference is to Mark 4.10-25. Jesus has preached the parable of the sower and
the disciples ask him why he speaks to the people in parables. He replies: "To you has been
given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so
that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they
should turn again and be forgiven." This was a passage that Frost often referred to in dis-
cussions of poetic method. See, for example, Interviews with Robert Frost, p. I62, and
Selected Prose, p. 78.

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 82 American Literature

The power Frost guides us to in "Directive" is the power of belief

in ourselves and our figures, the power of poetry itself as a method
of thinking and knowing.

VI

The malaise that manifests itself in the waste land vision of the
modern world is closely related to the modern conception of thought
and knowledge, to the modern notion of inquiry. Polanyi has written:

It has been taken for granted throughout the critical period of philosophy
that the acceptance of unproven beliefs was the broad road to darkness,
while truth was approached by the straight and narrow path of
doubt. . . . In its stricter formulations the principle of doubt forbids us
altogether to indulge in any desire to believe and demands that we should
keep our minds empty, rather than allow any but irrefutable beliefs to
take possession of them. . . . The method of doubt is a logical corollary
of objectivism. It trusts that the uprooting of all voluntary components of
belief will leave behind unassailed a residue of knowledge that is com-
pletely determined by the objective evidence.28

In the twentieth century the "objective evidence" and the "irrefutab

beliefs" it supports have revealed a naturalistic universe that is, as
Joseph Wood Krutch put it, "one in which the human spirit cannot
find a comfortable home,"29 but which includes man as a part of it
and denies the reality of the spirit it cannot satisfy. That universe is
the diminished thing to which modern man must respond, and the
difficulty of responding satisfactorily seems to underlie much of the
metaphysical despair in Western literature at least since the beginning
of the Romantic age.
Frost and Stevens experienced the terror of this vision as acutely as
any modern artists, but they went beyond most modernists in their
recognition that no satisfactory resolution to the dilemma could be
found so long as the premises which produced the dilemma were
accepted as unavoidable. In their mature work Frost and Stevens
rejected the conceptual commitments on which the literature of meta-
physical despair was based: the separation of the self from the world,
the acceptance of doubt as a method of arriving at truth, and the
definition of truth and knowledge as "objective," hence independent
28 Polanyi, p. 269.
29 The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (New York, I956), p. xi.

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 Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens 83

of personal desire and belief. In writing poems a

experience, they came to see that none of these assumptions accu-
rately described the activity they were engaged in, that the assump-
tions were not only avoidable but manifestly false when measured
against a careful consideration of the way human beings think and
act. In poetry the inquiring mind does not back away from the world
toward a position of detached objectivity but plunges into the world
on the impulse of love and desire. Poetic truth is reached not by doubt
but by commitment. Poetic knowledge is not "objective" but always
figurative and personal, the result of an imaginative act that requires
the participation of the knower who is himself a vital part of what
is known. Finally, poetry speaks to man's image of himself. By com-
ing close to poetry man realizes that he is neither a disembodied
mind split off from the world nor a spiritless organism but a mind-
body in the world shaping the world and himself with his creative
power.
Frost and Stevens believed that all men were involved in at least
a rudimentary kind of poetic activity, that the method of poetry was
a true description of human thought not only in art but in science
and in our daily lives. Stevens wrote in his "Adagia" that "the theory
of poetry is the theory of life" (OP, p. 178), and Frost claimed that
"metaphor [is] the whole of thinking" (SP, p. 37). On the basis of
this conviction they deliberately attempted to make their poetry radi-
cally reflexive, manifesting its method in such a way as to com-
municate it clearly to the reader. They recognized that, in an age of
despair, the poet's responsibility must be to make us aware of how
we really think and live and thus restore us to the world and to
ourselves.

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