It has been almost half a century since Robert Frost’s first book was published, and he is now the oldest and most honored American poet. After all these years and honors gathered, what perspective do we have on Frost? What is his character as a poet? This ought to be an easier question to answer than it is. In fact, Frost’s handsome reputation, the extensive anthologizing of his poems, and the availability they have all make it a little harder to see what kind of poet Frost is. 

Many different images of Frost exist. In England he was first welcomed as a poet who had created new effects in poetry by relying on the qualities of spoken language. As he became popular in America, the image of what Randall Jarrell calls “The Official Robert Frost” took shape: a New England American, writing undeniably good poetry full of wit and wisdom that we can all understand. Satisfaction with Frost, in other words, was not all repose. It was armed with shafts directed at other poets who were either “un-American” (expatriates) or obscure or both. The deplorable skirmish that went on in print in the late thirties and early forties found Frost’s critics calling him smug, reactionary, and irresponsible; while Frost’s friends called their enemies radicals, social planners, Marxists, obscurantists, or simply, with menacing understatements, avant garde. 

And Frost, of course, provokes this sort of thing. He is an unexpected combination of quietism and cantankerousness. He never replies or argues. He speaks of that “perfect detachment from ambition and desire that can alone rescue us from the round of existence.” He speaks in understatements. But Richard Church once shrewdly observed that Frost’s understatement is a means of exerting authority. For this reason his refusal to contend is often as irritating as contentiousness itself. Frost relishes the role of Devil’s Advocate. He is a kind of moral copperhead as his father was a political copperhead—a man from a family five generations in New England who named his son Robert Lee. Frost’s public utterances are always spiced with “shockers” that never fail to irritate someone. His poetry has its more serious “shockers,” which treat abhorred notions like vengeance and destructiveness with a detachment amounting to acceptance. 

Frost’s admirers have done his poetry more disservice than his detractors. The worst of them were well described by Robert Lowell as “a whole dunciad of babbling innocence.” Even the best of them neglect his poetry to write about Frost the wise man. They are alike in quoting more from Frost’s conversation than from his poetry and in taking the two forms of discourse as equivalent. Mr. Reginald L. Cook, in the latest volume to appear on Frost: (The Dimensions of Robert Frost. Rinehart. $3.95.) discusses the poetry by means of elaborate categories. But he too is overwhelmed by the personality of his friend. His image of Frost’s benevolence (that famous “twinkle in his eye” is blinding) causes him seriously to misread such poems as “Design” and “Two Witches.”

The root of the problem of Frost’s reputation is that he is known too much at second hand—through his anthologized poems, rather than by the whole body of his work. Anthologies are excellent means for getting at a minor poet. But sampling distorts the major poet in a serious way. His range cannot be sensed by means of a judicious selection. Moreover, in the complete work, meaning accumulates until a structure emerges, beyond individual poems, in which even the bad poems have their place. 

Some critics, of course, have termed Frost minor, lacking in “intensity” and “engagement.” He is compared with Eliot and Yeats and found flat and voiceless. The mistake here, I think, is in treating Frost as a lyric poet. He is essentially a dramatic poet even in his short poems. Frost himself tells us what his models are: “I first heard the voice from a printed page in a Virgilian eclogue and from Hamlet.” Hamlet is apparent in the dramatic monologues, even to the recurring themes of madness, ghosts, and murder. It is the quality of “voice” and the implied character in voice that makes Frost’s short poems dramatic. 

Frost’s analysis of this method (in a letter to Sidney Cox) shows how deliberate these effects are: “The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom and meaning of a sentence…. It goes and the language becomes dead language, the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables.”

Frost declared his intention to show “by examples that a sentence as a sound in itself apart from the word sounds is no mere figure of speech. I shall show the sentence sound saying all the sentence conveys with little or no help from the meaning of the words. I shall show the sentence sound opposing the sense of the words, as in irony.”

The drama in the tone of voice arises out of what is dramatic in Frost’s attitude. “All truth is dialogue,” Frost once remarked. Not dialectic, it should be noted, with its implications of opposites synthesized into one; but two voices, remaining distinct. This is why Frost’s voice in the poems never speaks in the impassioned statement of the lyric with its power of rhetoric. The reader is always at a distance. He overhears the voice and can imagine another voice in reply. This acute sense of the “other” is proper to dramatic talent. What life wants, Frost says in “The Most of It,” “Is not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original response.” 

Frost’s attitudes as a dramatic poet emerge as themes in his poetry. He sees two kinds of life, but the values assigned to them constantly shift, making them vary in their relationship. Reason is often represented as order, law, sanity. It takes backward steps to gain a point of vantage. But it may also limit and constrict life. Its retreats are sometimes allied with fear (“scare” is a word that recurs almost obsessively in the poems). Opposed to reason is impulse, the delight in life and the source of love and courage. But it may lead to disorder, madness, and waste. It may care too much (“care” is another important, recurrent word). Neither direction can emerge as the right way of life. The truth is the dialogue itself. The drama is in the conflict between the two. 

In the poem called “The Code,” a hired man who resents the bullying of his master “goes about to kill him fair enough.” It was a wrong word of the master’s that made the code operative, and the master himself is made to approve the hired man’s action: “He knew I did just right!” As it is in many of Frost’s poems the irony here is compound. First there is dramatic irony: the actor considers his action right; the reader replies within himself that it is wrong. The reader is in a dialogue with the actor. But there is a third voice, that of the poet-narrator. The reader slowly realizes that this narrator finds the action “neither wrong nor right.” 

The two poems grouped under the title of “Two Witches,” though almost never discussed in print, are major works. Both show how impulse destroys. In each poem an old woman tells the story of a “great” time in her past, though the reader is made to see it as a tragically destructive time. The “wildness” of each woman manifests itself sexually. The shorter of the poems, “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” is a kind of ironic version of the story of Susannah and the Elders and we must go back to the Renaissance for any comparable sense of the wrongness to which life can be turned: “I loved this woman,” says a character in The Changeling, “in spite of her heart.” 

In “The Witch of Coos,” Frost’s greatest poem, the woman tells of a night when she imagined that the bones of her lover, whom her husband had killed, walked out of the cellar where they were buried and up into the attic. Only that event is narrated, and nothing is told directly of the events before and after. The poem is like Oedipus in its concentration of dramatic ironies. We know, for example, all we need to of the failure of the marriage: 

The only fault my husband found with me— 

I went to sleep before I went to bed, 

Especially in winter when the bed 

Might just as well be ice and the clothes snow. 

The irony here, as Frost says, is a matter of the sentence intonation opposing the sense of the words. In the same way we see that the love affair was destructive, but have a sense that it was a time of happiness and release. 

Her hallucination is an attempt to save herself from the unbearable pressures of her contradictory feelings. She is overwhelmed by guilt toward both husband and lover. In one sense, she never gives the lover up. But she wants him out of the “cellar,” where he is undermining her, and into the “attic,” where his existence can be rationalized. The conflicts in her attitude are shown in one way by her uncertainty of what pronoun to use for reference to the dead man. She speaks of him (the man), of it (a spirit), and most fearfully, of them (the bones). Once “in the attic,” they are sealed up again. The door is nailed and the headboard of the bed is pushed against it. But “they” are restless and they sometimes 

Come down the stairs at night and stand perplexed 

Behind the door and headboard of the bed, 

Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fingers. 

All that wildness is gentled, perplexed. And the “witch” too is perplexed. Time and emptiness of life have made her wonder why she ever cared. Still, at the end, she looks for the finger bone she said she struck off when the bones came toward her. It may be in her button box, she says, though she can’t find it there. The wildness is not easy to tame, as she perhaps suggested earlier when she spoke of the attitude of outsiders toward her trade as a medium: 

Summoning spirits isn’t ‘Button, button, 

Who’s got the button,’ I would have them know. 

Though Frost is well known as a conservative, his sympathy with “wildness” is apparent in the dramatic monologues and in the short poems about wild flowers and brooks. He has written a Masque of Mercy, as well as a Masque of Reason. He writes most about what is fragile, vanished, or lowly: 

Late in life I have come on fern. 

Now lichens are due to have their turn. 

Essentially what he prizes is what the imagination sees and what would otherwise remain unnoticed. 

In the imagination, reason and impulse are reconciled, because the poem begins, as Frost describes it, in the impulse of delight and does not know its end or direction. But out of what Frost calls its “wildness” an order is discovered so that the poem can be fulfilled. Many of Frost’s poems use “discovery” as their structure. The narrator is on a walk, free of purpose, but ends in finding something. In the best of these poems the discovery is muted—ambiguous or ironic. The walker, often enough, sees waste, decay, and “emptiness flayed to the very stone.” In “The Most of It” the reply to the cry for “counter-love, original response” is a great buck pushing through the water. 

In the real unexpectedness of the discovery we can see the usefulness to Frost of what many poets have liked to think of as their association with Satan. In his poems, personal willfulness becomes elemental, counter-impulse. In “The Axe-Helve,” which proposes to be a poem about knowledge, the dangerousness of knowledge is everywhere implied. By the end, the narrator sees the good helve (whose “crookedness” is “native to the grain before the knife expressed it”) as its maker balances it upright: 

Erect, but not without its waves, as when 

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden. 

Frost’s sympathies are with impulse; his control is the detachment of reason that knows dangerous things. In the sonnet “Acquainted With the Night,” Frost speaks most clearly in his detached, “third voice.” He walks at night through the rain beyond the houses and lights of the city—whatever of reason and custom they stand for. He walks past an emblem of law, the “watch-man,” to whom he is “unwilling to explain.” At the end of the walk 

One luminary clock against the sky 

proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. Such an attitude makes it impossible for Frost to offer long poems of the scope of Milton’s or Wordsworth’s. But his whole work is not therefore a collection of shards. It has coherence, depth, wit, flexibility, and a unique life. It speaks with an original voice a common language kept fertile, but controlled so that it can sustain the dialogue of life.