Two writers sharing: Sterling A. Brown, Robert Frost, and "In Dives' Dive."

African American Review, Fall, 1997 by John Edgar Tidwell

Frost takes his place in an American tradition which proposes that since you are most inconsequential when you are most "included" in any system or "stated plan" you are, paradoxically, most likely to find yourself, and to be saved, when you risk being excluded or peripheral. This is a tradition full of political implications. The placement of the self in relation to the apparent organizations of things is one of the major concerns of Frost's later poetry, but it is a political concern only while it also reveals his more general contempt for a tendency in modern liberalism to discredit the capacity of ordinary, struggling people to survive in freedom and hope without the assistance of the state or any other kind of planning and despite the arrogant solicitude of those who think that such people would be better off if "provided" for. (264)

I wish briefly to consider one implication of this marvelous observation. Frost, rooted in the New England-Yankee tradition of self-help, railed against the New Deal fashioned by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The consensus among reviewers and critics that A Further Range was Frost's most polemical collection to date focused squarely upon its aphoristic, didactic quality as masking a rather thinly veiled but scathing denunciation of authority. Frost's conservative politics were fairly well-known, and thus this collection revealed to critics a direct opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, an attack which they characterized as ad hominem. It is true, as Burnshaw writes, that the New Deal represented for Frost an erosion of sorts. The dignity, the courage, the spirit of self-help that had made America America had suffered because of the Depression. To Frost, though, the New Deal not only bailed out many American people but threatened to create a class of "no-good dependents" by "infantilizing" them. The New England virtues of self-reliance, courage, and independence defined, for Frost, the quintessential American citizen, and the New Deal, according to this perspective, threatened to "take the starch out of self-reliant people" (Burnshaw interview).

Along with the question of denouncing authority, more than one critic wondered whether A Further Range represented a further elucidation of the human condition or a shriveling up of an enervated poetic talent capable only of a polemic masquerading as poetry. The basis for attacking this collection usually focused on its moralistic or didactic features, not Frost's poetic experimentation and ingenuity. It is precisely this kind of "telling" that many reviewers - some of whom were Leftists anyway - seized upon as evidence of a diminishing poetic talent whose political conservatism was out of step with current thought.

Brown, of course, agreed with Frost regarding the necessity of people to be free from systems or institutions that abridged individual freedoms. Like Frost, he appreciated the ruggedness of individual efforts and initiatives. The characterological qualities often found in Brown's portrait poems include stoicism, philosophical indifference, tonic shrewdness, and the like. However, Brown did not enjoy Frost's racial privilege, and, as a consequence, he parted company with Frost on the role of governmental systems. Brown's editorship for the Federal Writers' Project was made necessary by the proliferation of stereotyped representations of African Americans. The self - the Black self - in Brown's view declared itself against a world view of racial stereotyping. What rescued the dignity of Blacks from warped imaginations and projections of difference was sheer will or an indomitable spirit. And it is this will that forced Brown into an imagined reckoning with the self and with the self in society.