The flip side of Frost
The first critical edition of the poet's varied, often playful prose
The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
Edited by Mark Richardson
Belknap/Harvard University, 378 pp., $39.95
A year ago "The Notebooks of Robert Frost" appeared, the first of a number of works by Frost to be published by Harvard University's Belknap Press. Now, following on its heels, comes this welcome edition of Frost's prose, 76 items ranging from a paragraph to a few pages, edited by Mark Richardson in exemplary fashion; that is, in addition to adhering to the most scrupulous editorial practice, Richardson has provided 120 pages of notes. The notes don't merely identify people and allusions - allusions often, as is Frost's wont, that are cryptic or teasing - but provide valuable documentation of "Frost's habits of composition" so as to make up a "loosely consequential narrative of Frost's total career as a writer of prose."
As Richardson states in his introduction, Frost was reluctant to publish his prose, even to write it with publication in mind. His Norton lectures at Harvard in 1936 were supposed to be collected into a book; he neglected to do this, and if there ever was a manuscript it has been conveniently lost. "Something in me still fights off the written prose," he wrote a correspondent about the book he had just fought off. Richardson doesn't say as much, but I suspect this impulse had to do with Frost's fear that in writing prose about poetry - about his own poetry - he might be providing readers with what he didn't want to provide: a systematic theory of how writing poetry was or should be done. His letters, especially the ones written home from England in 1912-13, are full of declarations about matters such as the sound of sense, the play of voice rhythm against metrical pattern, and the need for each line of verse to have its special vocal posture. But he was wary of putting the vivid life of something tossed off in a letter or a lecture into book form. Although he promised to give his publisher, Henry Holt, a collection of his prose in 1941, no such collection was forthcoming. After his death, a slim volume of his prose was published; now Richardson has sought out and included all the prose Frost was known to have prepared, with whatever mixed feelings, for print.
About a third of these items are early ones, some of them columns and editorials Frost wrote for his high school newspaper in Lawrence. There are also a few stories he wrote for his children, and others he published in a poultry magazine when he was an unsuccessful chicken farmer. Richardson describes the prevailing tone of many of these early pieces as "both coy and cocky." It was a manner he never really lost, inasmuch as even his later, most serious reflections about poetry and life were seldom put forth without an aggressive air of keeping always one step ahead of the reader. "I am never more serious than when joking," he said more than once. In his "serious" essay "The Figure a Poem Makes," he speaks trenchantly of poetry as beginning in delight and ending in wisdom and as "a momentary stay against confusion." But the essay begins abruptly and confusingly by declaring: "Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day." Who is speaking, and about what? He continues: "Why can't we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we can't in practice. Our lives for it." Even a reader tuned to Frost's playful mode will have trouble locating himself in relation to those sentences that are hardly even sentences. The disorienting of readerly expectations is always part of the game.
"The Figure a Poem Makes," for many years placed as an introduction to Frost's "Collected Poems," is one of a number of valuable, original essays in which, without overtly theorizing, Frost gave us his theory of poetry. Richardson thinks "The Constant Symbol" is his greatest essay in poetics; I would give the award to "Education by Poetry" and single out for special note his introduction to E. A. Robinson's "King Jasper," in which among other things Frost distinguished between griefs and grievances, poetry's subject being the former. Also wonderful, although not exactly an essay, are the 28 pithy brevities he titled "Poetry and School." Any teacher of first-year college students would do well to share some of these brevities, such as "We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we hadn't learned in High School. Once we have learned to read the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us."
Frost's ambiguous, even disdainful relation to higher education is well known, and he was convinced of the baleful effect studying poetry can have on its appreciation. Education by poetry - true education - proceeded in a more wayward and disinterested manner. As early as 1910 he described his English curriculum at the academy in Derry, N.H., where he was teaching, as follows: "Expression in oral reading rather than intelligent comment is made the test of appreciation." Poetry, he always insisted, was a deed, and the student does a true deed when he can read aloud with expressively correct feeling the lines of a poem, instead of writing a paper about its theme or meaning. One hundred years later we have not taken the measure of many of the radical thoughts that fill these meditative monologues.
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A note: In my Feb. 17 review of Helen Vendler's "Our Secret Discipline," I should have credited (as she does in the book) her student Nathan Rose with pointing out the number symbolism in Yeats's poem "Easter 1916."
William H. Pritchard is professor of English at Amherst College. His most recent book is "Updike: America's Man of Letters." 