Robert Frost, romantic - poet

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Sheldon W. Liebman

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 recounted, the experience is spiritually uplifting, and, most important, it is so emotionally powerful as to compel belief in a "higher" reality, then the term can be used to distinguish one kind of poetry from another and, in particular, one aspect of Frost's poetry from another. Frost was a romantic, then, insofar as he dramatizes in his visionary poems moments of illumination that, as he explains in "Happiness Makes up in Height," "Skeptic," and "I Could Give All to Time," he found not only consoling but also lasting.(16) Critics have tried to prove the opposite by comparing Wordsworth's and Emerson's apples with Frost's oranges. The Wordsworth of the middle books of The Prelude and the Emerson of "Fate" and "Experience" are ignored, while the Frost of "Design" and "Desert Places" is brought to stage center accompanied by the authors of "The Tables Turned" and "The Rhodora." The ploy is logically faulty and critically irresponsible.

Even allowing for their staying power, however, one may still wonder just what Frost's "momentary stays" ultimately mean or signify. The question asked by some of Frost's critics is not whether these visionary experiences are enduring and uplifting but whether they are real. That is, granting their capacity to console - and even inspire, like Wordsworth's "beauteous forms" in "Tintern Abbey" - one may still question their epistemological status. Are they merely solacing insofar as they satisfy the human need to believe? Are they comforting illusions resulting from the suppression of reality and the suspension of consciousness? Or are they cognitive experiences in which consciousness is fully engaged?

In this context, it is useful to remember that some poets, including Frost, have laid claim to a special mode of knowledge - in fact, a knowledge of the most profound and important kind. To Wordsworth, "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge" (983). To Shelley, it is "at once the center and circumference of knowledge" (503). One might dismiss these statements as the inevitably exaggerated beliefs of wild-eyed romantics. Yet one finds similarly large claims made for poetry in the writings of Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot. To Stevens, "poetic truth is factual truth, seen, it may be, by those whose range in the perception of fact - that is, whose sensibility - is greater than our own" (59). To Eliot, simply, poetry deals with "reality" and prose only with the "ideal" (30). Frost, equally extravagant, says in "Education by Poetry," "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have" (Prose 36; my emphasis).