Frost in a Clear Lens - Review

National Review, May 3, 1999 by Jeffrey Hart

Robert Frost: A Life, by Jay Parini (Holt, 528 pp., $35)

As we end the 20th century a rough consensus has emerged. The preeminent poets writing in English have been Yeats, Eliot, and Frost. A bit lower many would place Stevens, Pound, and maybe Auden. I note that Americans score well; also that, taken as a whole, this has been a glorious century for poetry in English, perhaps the best since the 17th.

Parini's fine new biography of Frost enters a strange situation. We have the three-volume biography (1966-76) of Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick. That project had a grotesque aspect. Thompson, a competent scholar, was chosen as biographer by Frost himself, but well into his massive undertaking Thompson discovered that he loathed Frost. To every aspect of his subject he gives the darkest possible interpretation. The subtitle should be "Frost as Monster." When Thompson died, the third volume had to be completed by his colleague Winnick.

In 1984 William Pritchard, an Amherst professor and talented critic, came to the rescue with Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Pritchard, who had known Frost well, provided a credible but far from hagiographic portrait. A practical approach to Frost thus became Thompson-Winnick for their massive accumulation of fact, but corrected by the balanced judgments of Pritchard.

At this point can Parini, a Middlebury professor, poet, and novelist, add more? The answer is a very firm yes. He has uncovered much that is telling in letters, tapes, and other material. He has also conducted a great many interviews with people who knew Frost at various stages of his life. Among them are Robert Penn Warren, Richard Eberhart, Peter Stanlis, Edward Lathem, Hyde Cox, and John Sloan Dickey. These varied voices in montage bring the poet forward in a portrait that is credible and indeed often very moving.

It bears repeating that the public notion of Frost is far from the truth. He was not a sort of cuddly, reassuring, white-haired Will Rogers who also wrote some easy poems.

From early on he had a steely determination to be a great poet. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard only briefly and rebelliously, but he was comprehensively learned. Here one notes the title of his first volume, A Boy's Will (1913), which established him as a poet when he was almost 40. That noun "will" is important. William James wrote "The Will to Believe," Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea, Nietzsche The Will to Power. These were psychological declarations of a "will" against pessimism and nihilism, moral reconstruction efforts. Frost, too, was a man of that certain late-19th-century outlook which understood "will" as the antidote to despair, likewise to psychosomatic and other illness.

Frost's external biography, in contrast to his inner biography, to which Parini is very alert, sounds like something out of the House of Atreus. There were terrible tensions within his marriage to Elinor White. They lost their firstborn in infancy, an adult son to suicide, a daughter and Frost's sister to madness, and another daughter to early illness. Tuberculosis ran in the Frost family. No wonder Frost had frequent spells of melancholy. But his "will" prevailed.

As Parini makes clear, there were also joys, serious friendships, intense intellectual life, heights of artistic triumph, some odd boyish mischievousness, animosities (against Eliot, Pound, and others), many acts of courtesy and love, and always the insistence on his achieved and unique voice in poetry, prose, and lecture. That voice is recognizable in every phrase.

Parini has uncovered many special things. When Frost, having left Dartmouth, was courting Elinor, who was at St. Lawrence, he "published" an edition of two copies containing five short poems. Leather-bound, it was called Twilight. He journeyed to St. Lawrence and presented it to her. When she was unimpressed, he destroyed his own copy. Her copy later became a collector's item.

As a Dartmouth professor myself, I treasure this next one. After collecting a writing assignment from a class of Dartmouth students, Frost asked them whether what they had written had any permanent significance, if only to themselves. No one raised his hand. Frost threw the essays in the wastebasket, saying that if they were unimportant to the students, they were unimportant to him.

Parini is, with occasional lapses, a skillful literary critic. I can also report, and dance in the street as I do, that there is almost no academic jargon here. Yet amid all of his expert commentary, he misses one or two important things. Frost swung for the bleachers, by which I mean that at some moments he consciously goes up against such masters as Pascal and Dante. When he does, Parini doesn't always give evidence of having appreciated the nuances.

That having been said, he does accurately place Frost in friendly connection with the Southern Agrarian group, especially Tate and Ransom. Like Frost, they used traditional verse forms but refined them in a contrarian way to express modern themes of personal and cosmic loneliness, quest, existential irony, and our complicated relations with history and nature. Parini is surely right that Frost was a New England agrarian individualist. In a footnote, he discloses that Frost's wife Elinor hated the New Deal even more than he did.