Weeks ago when a poem of Robert Frost’s was not only unearthed and published, it made all of us think of the mystery of missing archives: where are the lost poems, the lost works–Walter Benjamin and his mysterious (and misplaced) suitcases full of who knows what? Equally intriguing is another artefact of writerly consciousness: the notebook or journal. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a writer about journals and notebooks. We discussed our own failures to keep such journals in the face of what little time any of us–committed writers no less–can eke out for this our vocation. The publication, in January, of The Notebooks of Robert Frost offers us all the opportunity to reconsider our love of such fragments. Harper’s helps us immensely in this task by offering a sneak peek of these notebooks.The fragments range from engimatic to prosaic to predictable. One the one hand, the sentence possesses an almost mystical quality: “the sentence has a sound of its own apart from the words…It was before the words were. It still has existence without the embodiment of words in the cries of our nature.” On the other, “In composing poetry I am packing up to go a long way on wings.” Poetry and wings: what to say?
So many of the other notes are ideas for poems: story of the unhappy child at the amateur theatricals, story of not being chosen by the eagle for Jove’s cup bearer. In addition to tales of not-quite Ganymede’s, we learn a little about Frost’s process: “Of an idea for a poem comes to me when I am playing golf at the club, I just tell it to trot along for the present and come round to my office tomorrow morning.” I suppose by the time Frost was relaxing on the gold course, he felt he had enough poems on the page to let one or two slip away. Frost also liked “crudity” he tells us: the “raw material” of life being worked upon.
Do we always really want to know of the inner workings of the minds of writers we admire? If so, what constitutes mind–do we get to chose which aspects of mind we want to experience? If notebooks provide the raw materials when do we encounter the inner workings of the shaping force of mind that makes matter blossom into shape?