To the Laodiceans

Back in the days when “serious readers of modern poetry” were most patronizing to Frost’s poems, one was often moved to argument, or article-writing, or saying under one’s breath: What is man that Thou art mindful of him? In these days it’s better—a little, not much: the lips are pursed that ought to be parted, and they still pay lip-service, or little more. But Frost’s best poetry—and there is a great deal of it, at once wonderfully different and wonderfully alike—deserves the attention, submission, and astonished awe that real art always requires of us; to give it a couple of readings and a ribbon lettered First in the Old-Fashioned (or Before I900) Class of Modern Poetry is worse, almost, than not to read it at all. Surely we (I don’t know exactly whom this we includes, but perhaps I could say that it means “the friends of things in the spirit,” even when the things are difficult, even when the things are in the flesh) are not going to be like the Saturday Review readers and writers who tell one how completely good Frost is, and in the next breath tell one how narrowly good, limitedly good, badly good Eliot is. Surely it is the excellence most unlike our own that we will be most eager to acknowledge, since it not only extends but completes us; and only we, not the excellence, are harmed by our rejection of it.

Frost has limitations of a kind very noticeable to us, but they are no more important or essential than those of other contemporary poets; and many of the limitations, less noticeable to us, that these poets share, Frost is free of. If it makes good sense (but a narrow and ungenerous, though essential, sense) to say about Frost, “As a poet he is not in Rilke’s class at all,” it does not make such sense if you substitute for Rilke’s name that of Eliot or Moore or Stevens or Auden, that of any living poet. We can already see, most vividly, how ridiculous posterity is going to find the people who thought Marianne Moore’s poems “not poetry at all,” The Waste Land a hoax, and so on; but is posterity going to find any less ridiculous the intellectuals who admitted Frost only as a second-class citizen of the Republic of Letters, a “bard” whom it would be absurd to compare with real modern poets like—oh, E. E. Cummings? Frost’s daemonic Goethean gift (and of living poets, he is in some ways the most like Goethe) of always getting on the buttered side of both God and Mammon; of doing and saying anything and everything that he pleases, and still getting the World to approve or tactfully ignore every bit of it; of not only allowing, but taking a hard pleasure in encouraging, fools and pedants to adore him as their own image magnified—all this has helped to keep us from seeing Frost for what he really is. And here one has no right to be humble and agreeable, and to concede beforehand that What he really is is only one’s own “view” or “interpretation” of him: I am certain that any of the regular ways of looking at Frost’s poetry are grotesque simplifications, distortions, falsifications—coming to know his poetry well ought to be enough, in itself, to dispel any or them, and to make plain the necessity of finding some other way of talking about his work.