Octavio Paz and Robert Frost: El polvo y la nieve que se deshacen entre las manos

Comparative Literature, Summer 1995 by Zubizarreta, John

While scholars of Octavio Paz may be familiar with his 1945 interview of the American poet Robert Frost, few readers of Frost are aware of the literary connections between the two great writers. The last twenty volumes of the annual MLA bibliography, for example, list no titles indicating a comparative focus on both poets, and Frank and Melissa C. Lentricchia's compilation of 1976 is the only substantial bibliography that includes the interview as a source. None of the available Frost biographies--not even Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1966 (1976), the third volume of Lawrence Thompson's meticulous and slanted account of Frost's complex life, or William H. Pritchard's balanced and sympathetic Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984)--mentions Paz's visit with Frost in Vermont. None of the various collections of letters, interviews, or reminiscences brings up Paz. Furthermore, in "On Octavio Paz," Richard Poirier only briefly refers to the "afternoon's conversation with Frost" (6), and neither Lesley Lee Francis, Frost's granddaughter and a scholar of Spanish language and literature, nor Mordecai Marcus and Judith Oster, the authors of two recent studies of Frost's poetry, cite Paz's talk with Frost. Nor do any of the contributors to Earl Wilcox's forthcoming compilation of essays dealing with Frost's influence on modern writers discuss Paz, the 1990 Nobel laureate.

The interview reveals as much about Paz's aesthetic concerns and formal techniques as it does about Frost's, and both poets range over subjects such as the relationships between creativity and solitude, art and nature, individual talent and tradition, humor and passion. Frost's answers to Paz's questions bolster the American's image as a sophisticated modern pastoral poet preeminently concerned with the imagination's struggle to carve out of the chaotic flux of the quotidian and of human experience momentary constructs of order that help defer the confusion of nature, time, and death. The subjects broached by Paz indicate the interests of a writer who--though separated by language, landscape, and culture from the endemically New England Yankee poet--is equally intrigued with the nature of art as "a momentary stay against confusion" and as a process by which the poet, speaking in the language of his land and time, may define the dichotomies of the human self and the natural world, the solitude of the poetic voice against the void (Frost, Prose 18). Paz and Frost are widely regarded as the laureates of their respective cultures: one, the poet of Mexico's native identity and history, its pervasive and indigenous, hot, acrid dust, a symbol of Mexico's particular reality and of the characteristic Latin American preoccupation with time and death; the other, the Yankee bard of northern snow and dark woods, equivalent symbols of Frost's restless anxiety over outer chaos and over even more troubling inner "desert places" (Frost, Poetry 296). Using Paz's interview of Frost, then, as a starting point for intertextual study, we may discover that the Mexican and the American share numerous qualities in their respective works, especially the central theme of how the power of the poetic word may stay for a moment "ese polvo [o esa nieve] que apenas se toca se deshace entre las manos..." ("that dust [or that snow] which, when you barely touch it, sifts through your fingers...") ("Visita" 39; "Visit" 9).

Both poets, for instance, acknowledge vigorously the particularities of the phenomenal world, the irreducible thereness of the physical while also invoking the ineffable mystery of being, the ghostly incandescence of spiritual life and desire. Frost writes in "Mowing," one of his earliest poems, 'The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows," a line that reflects the poet's blurring of the division between fact and dream, between the equally vivid forces of outer and inner realities (Poetry 17). The blurring is a function of what Poirier calls Frost's "work of knowing," a process that fuses vision and "a sense of persistent and demanding daily reality" in the "mythic properties of language itself" (Work 275). Many such moments of fusion appear in Frost's work. In "After Apple-Picking," the speaker is midway up a ladder "sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still," caught between the actual world of bough, barrel, and "hoary grass" and the spectral world of dream, desire, and imagination, the drowsy seduction of "Essence of winter sleep." But the physical world, the distinct "scent of apples" beckons his return, anchors him to nature's tones and touch:

And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

(Poetry 68-69)

The "creaking room," "clomping here" and "clomping off," shifting log, and "roar / Of trees and crack of branches" in "An Old Man's Winter Night" demonstrate similarly Frost's acute sense of the physical life around him (Poetry 108), and the robust immediacy of imagery in "Birches" reflects the poet's grounding in primary experience, in a world "Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs / Broken across it, and one eye is weeping / From a twig's having lashed across it open." As in "After Apple-Picking," however, the speaker of "Birches" wants both access to heaven and contact with earth: