Arts and Letters

The old poet and the young President who on a cold day not quite three years ago did public honor to each other both are gone. If in this present year our loss is double, theirs is single because it is mutual, though in some dimension beyond our sight. Yet mutual in such a case could not mean equal; for one of them had lived much longer than the other and endured much more, both of grief and of joy; he had grown old in grief as he had grown young with joy; so that his view of what has happened, supposing him to have a view, would be all but impossible for him to state.

Robert Frost, in the memory of most living persons, was always an old poet. Of course he was not always old; he had been a boy in California and he had been a young farmer in New Hampshire. Yet it is true that he did not emerge into fame until he was forty; and after that he was given almost fifty years in which to become the massive, sculptured man we all remember. Nor did we ever begrudge him the name of poet because he looked and talked and wrote like one who had been on the earth since time began. Indeed, that was the chief reason we recognized in him the profession of which he was so proud. Good poets die young, but by and large the best ones live long and die late. It is an ancient tradition, honored in our age by the examples not only of Frost but of Hardy and Yeats. And we ourselves can be a little proud because, in the face of a thousand temptations to do otherwise, we recognized and accepted the tradition.

Most poets in any age put forth theories about life which life itself will disprove. So they are dismissed at last as foolish men, and their profession is dishonored as one that seeks no serious connection with the truth. Dishonored, that is, in the minds of those who do not know what poetry at its best has always been. Poetry at its best is knowledge of the world; and not of the world as it might be, or ought to be, or in some moonstruck moment maybe is, but as it plainly and complexly is, beyond the shadows of doubt and falsehood. And it takes time to learn all this: time, and experience, and a deep respect for both; so that a poet is fortunate whom death does not cut down before he begins to see what life is like. Life is like nothing but itself: a simple statement, but it is not too simple for those like Robert Frost who understand that life is finally more important than the cleverest thing we can say about it.

The knowledge of the world Frost shares with us in his poetry is both intricate and obvious, both subtle and self-evident. He is forever probing for mysteries and coming up with things we have always known. He is tentative, yet terribly certain too. He is humorous at precisely the same moment that he is serious; for he knows how little we can know, yet is anxious lest we shall know nothing at all. These poles in him are firmly fixed, and his gaze goes forever back and forth between them. The contraries of which his thought was composed made him unique in his time—unique without being odd. The word for him, in fact, was always "wise."

But enough of his philosophy, if that is what it should be called. It came to us in a man who first and last considered himself to be a poet. If the two identities are in some sense inseparable, he himself was always clear about the difference. He made no secret of his interest in the poet's craft, and of his conviction that within whatever limits fate had imposed upon him he was master of this craft. Nor is anything so plain as that he succeeded in his art to a degree that no contemporary matched. One proof of this is his immense reputation; another proof is the cunning which any study of his work discovers: the conscious cunning, along with a deep, natural knowledge of what words are able at their best to do when musically placed. The music in his case is said by some to be scarcely noticeable; but it is everywhere, and it is the ultimate explanation of his power.

As for his power, what better proof of this could there be than that he wrote, along with many others, these poems?

The Pasture
Into My Own
Storm Fear
Mowing
Revelation
The Tuft of Flowers
Mending Wall
The Death of the Hired Man
Home Burial
The Wood-Pile
The Road Not Taken
An Old Man's Winter Night
The Telephone
Hyla Brook
The Oven Bird
Birches
The Hill Wife
New Hampshire
Two Witches
Fire and Ice
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Runaway
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
To Earthward
Good-bye and Keep Cold
Spring Pools
Once by the Pacific
Desert Places
Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
Build Soil
The Silken Tent
I Could Give All to Time
The Gift Outright
The Lesson for Today
Directive
A Masque of Reason
A Masque of Mercy
Away!
A Cabin in the Clearing
One More Brevity
In Winter in the Woods Alone

Long as the list is, to many it would be too short. Which only proves the point. Robert Frost thought as a poet, felt as a poet, labored as a poet, and triumphed as one.