On Robert Frost

I had read very little Frost prior to a twofer I just picked up, including A Boy's Will and North of Boston. Certainly, the classic poems are unavoidable – “Acquainted with the Night,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken” – but considering my own development as a poet, I had made some kind of shadowy and half-thought-out pact with myself early on not to pay Frost that much attention. (Even though I went to the University of Michigan with a blood relative, Gordon Jay Frost.) Somewhere along the line, however, I decided that I needed to revamp that pact, and look more closely at his work. This was due to a combination of reading about Frost (the man as well as the poet) and discussions with fellow poets and/or readers.

Most recently, it was Paul Muldoon's essay on “The Mountain,” in The End of the Poem that got my juices flowing. Muldoon's book is pretty daunting, both in heft as well as depth of analysis; despite the chatty nature of these collected lectures, Muldoon hits his topics at various angles, drawing on myriad, sometimes disparate sources. I admire the approach, but I'm barely a quarter of the way through the book, which was a gift two Christmases ago. This is because I like taking my time and enjoying the writing, which I return to between other bouts with books, magazines or periodicals, and also because I must take my time. Ordinarily, I'm a fast reader, and have to make myself slow down, but here I am literally forced to read slower, owing to the incredible amount of information and opinion Muldoon packs into each piece.

Without dragging myself back into the fascinating mire that is Muldoon's essay, let me just say that it was reading the reprinting of “The Mountain” preceding it that really grabbed me. I knew some, but not all of the poems Muldoon chose to address, which was part of what attracted me to the book; and for those I didn't know, I read them right before getting into the essays themselves, rather than ahead of time. I was stunned by “The Mountain,” which struck me, perhaps initially in the context of collected lectures on topic, as quite unlike the Frost I (thought I) knew.

A Boy's Will was more 'that' Frost, the one I 'knew' when I made my earnest, if short-sighted pact to sidestep him in my own development. (I'd gotten into Williams by then, and he seemed a more stylistically as well as philosophically valuable replacement.) These poems sound to my ears anachronistic, even for 1913, whereas, for example, Arnold's “Dover Beach” sounds like a 20th century, rather than a 19th century poem. What amazes me, though, is how much of a step forward North of Boston seems, published only a year later. Perhaps it's the length of many of the poems that initially sets them apart, physically, from the prior volume's, but of course it's more than that. There's something kind of precious and quaint about A Boy's Will, that North of Boston completely eschews – as if Frost had undergone some kind of physical change that in turn underpinned the topics and even tone of his writing at the time. I know this is very elementary thinking, but it comes from the gut too and I look forward to delving more deeply into these two books, as well as more of Frost's work.