“Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” Reviewed
Robert Frost presented himself as a simple man. Not for him the literary circles of London or the stilted dinner parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was he at home in academia. He dropped out of college twice, citing a need for independence, and although he spent his middle and later years teaching at universities, he was constantly fleeing them, retreating to farms in rural New England. He didn’t read book reviews—or so he claimed—and he didn’t write them, preferring instead to let his poems find their natural audience, which turned out to be a wide one. He mocked literary critics and shunned intellectual debate, though he was a great talker and loved to tell stories. His ideal days, he said, were spent in the countryside, going on long, solitary walks or chatting with his farmer neighbors, appreciating the patterns and tones of their speech.
The simplicity of his life informed his work. Ascending to fame at a time when Anglo-American poetry was growing increasingly difficult and obscure, Frost set himself apart. A lyric poet inspired by Longfellow, he described the hard lives of country folk—a war widow, a hired man—and the hard landscapes that they worked to tame. In “ ‘Out, Out—,’ ” a poem from 1916, a boy loses his hand to a buzz saw and dies, perhaps from shock; his family, “since they / Were not the ones dead,” swiftly move on. Some of Frost’s poems have the lilting quality of lullabies; others seem to deliver their morals in unambiguous terms. “I took the one less traveled by,” declares the speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps Frost’s most famous poem, after meeting a fork in the path. “And that has made all the difference.” His were, and still are, poems for everyone: schoolchildren, casual readers, the makers of greeting cards. One doesn’t need to be versed in the literary tradition to read a poem by Frost—only, as one poem goes, to be “versed in country things.”
But, as with most aspects of Frost’s persona, his simplicity was a pose, an act, one that concealed its opposite. Frost was very much a man of letters, a classicist and, alongside his future wife, Elinor, a co-valedictorian of his high school, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was steeped in the literary tradition, as well as in philosophy and psychology (he was a big fan of William James). Ambitious and competitive, he orchestrated positive reviews of his early work and became enraged about negative reviews of later collections. A failed poultry farmer and a listless homesteader, he never quite fit in with the country people who populate his poems.
The poems, too, are deceptive. A Frost verse may be written in plain language, but it is tonally ambiguous and open to competing interpretations. Take “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” from 1923, which ends like this:
Are these lines said gratefully or ruefully? Is the speaker appreciating a peaceful winter scene or barely suppressing a death wish? One could ask similar questions about “The Road Not Taken”: How sincere is our speaker, who imagines his future self “telling this with a sigh”? Has his choice of road made any difference at all? It’s tempting to understand the poem as ironical—a “cunning nugget of nihilism,” as Dan Chiasson wrote in this magazine—but, as soon as you do, its rousing ending and triumphant “I” urge you to consider that it may well be in earnest.
To read Frost is to wonder which parts of a poem to take seriously—and to sense his presence over your shoulder, laughing at your mistakes. “I like to fool . . . to be mischievous,” he told the critic Richard Poirier in an interview, in 1960, for The Paris Review. One could, he suggested, “unsay everything I said, nearly.” By his own account, he operated by “suggestiveness and double entendre and hinting”; he never said anything outright, and, if he seemed to, then suspicion was warranted. In both his poetry and his personal life, Frost was a trickster, saying one thing and almost always meaning another, and perhaps another still. He was like the playful boy described in the lovely poem “Birches” (1915), bending tree branches beyond recognition, then letting them snap back to their natural state, all for his own amusement. As readers of his poetry, we’re just along for the ride.
The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost’s poems in “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost’s personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man.
Plunkett is not the first critic to trouble the popular conception of Frost as a wise woodsman dispensing comfort and inspiration. Astute readers have been challenging the naïve interpretation of Frost’s work for decades. The effort could be said to have started with Lionel Trilling, who, at a party for Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, declared the guest of honor to be “anything but” a writer who “reassures us by affirmation of old virtues, simplicities, pieties and ways of feeling.” Frost was, rather, “a terrifying poet” and “a tragic poet.” (Frost, listening in the audience, appeared nonplussed.) Trilling was channelling the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who, for years, had urged readers to turn away from Frost’s sentimental poems and consult instead the writer’s darker, spikier efforts, such as “Provide, Provide,” a sardonic paean to success, and “Acquainted with the Night,” as lonely a poem as there ever was.
Frost’s first major biographer, Lawrance Thompson, seemed to take his cue from such critics. In a three-volume biography published after Frost’s death in 1963, Thompson emphasized Frost’s darkness, detailing the poet’s frequent depressions and his jealous rages, such that reviewers declared Frost to be “a monster of egotism” and “a mean-spirited megalomaniac.” In the decades since, critics and biographers have pushed back on this dim view of Frost. William H. Pritchard, in “Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,” from 1993, which has long been the gold-standard biography for many Frost enthusiasts, emphasized the poet’s ingenuity and playfulness, both in his work and in his life. Even when Frost was boastful or inconsiderate, Pritchard suggested, one couldn’t help but appreciate his cleverness.
Plunkett, like Pritchard, admires Frost in all his guises. Throughout, he stresses the poet’s multiplicity, his ability to exhibit opposing attitudes in the same poem, sometimes in the same line. Interpreting “The Pasture,” an early poem, Plunkett shows how its refrain—“You come too”—can be understood “in at least four ways at once,” as “a suggestion, an insistence, a command, a plain statement.” Recognizing all possible meanings, Plunkett argues, allows us to access “a mind in its nakedness weighing how it means to use the phrase, why it means to use it, and what it wants and needs of you.” To read the line simply as a benign invitation—or, conversely, as a straightforward command—is to miss the point: the poem is exploring the different ways that people connect, rather than insisting on one kind of intimacy.
“Love and Need”—which takes its title from Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” from 1934—proceeds in loosely chronological fashion, taking us from love poems that Frost wrote for Elinor during their courtship to later poems such as “The Gift Outright,” which an eighty-six-year-old Frost recited at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. (Kennedy went on to eulogize Frost at Amherst College, noting that many readers “preferred to ignore his darker truths,” just weeks before the President’s assassination.) Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, moved across the country following the death of his dissolute, larger-than-life father, and made a series of homes in mill towns north of Boston with his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and his younger sister. He came to poetry in high school—his first poem, “La Noche Triste,” composed when he was a sophomore, was inspired by a book about the Aztec Empire—and published the lyric “My Butterfly” in The Independent in 1894. A long fallow period followed, during which he married, raised four children, tried his hand at farming, and taught high school, all the while writing poems but publishing very few. In 1912, he moved his family to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who championed his work. Frost’s first book, “A Boy’s Will,” was published in 1913. At thirty-nine, he finally had a taste of literary success.
In Plunkett’s hands, “A Boy’s Will,” sometimes seen as one of Frost’s less impressive collections, becomes newly intriguing. (In a generally positive review, Pound called the book “a bit raw.”) Plunkett reveals the book to be a “spiritual autobiography” modelled on Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850), which commemorates the poet’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam. There are striking similarities between Frost’s collection and Tennyson’s poem; many of Frost’s poems refer directly to a corresponding canto in Tennyson’s work. The difference is that Frost’s poems are mourning not a friend but the pastoral life the poet has left behind, and mourning, too, his eldest child, Elliott, who died at age three, of cholera, in 1900. “Though not a literal story of mourning, A Boy’s Will suffuses its every texture in an atmosphere of mourning,” Plunkett writes. “The poems are tinged throughout with a sense of amorphous loss, the other side of which is a depth of gratitude.”
The connections Plunkett draws between Frost’s lyric poems and their literary influences are valuable, particularly for anyone taken in by Frost’s aw-shucks persona. Though Frost sometimes disavowed his literary education—“I haven’t had a very literary life,” he told Poirier in the Paris Review interview—he was an avid reader of poetry and the owner of several well-thumbed poetry anthologies, which he regarded as superior to any literary magazine. (Too many critics in the latter.) He used canonical poems to inspire his own. The early poem “Flower-Gathering” is patterned on “Carpe Diem,” a love song from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and the late poem “The Wind and the Rain” owes something to Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” Frost’s range of references was as impressive as that of any modernist poet—though his poems, unlike T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” didn’t come with a set of footnotes.
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