all have images of Robert Frost and actual images in your mind

when you think of this poet.

He's a familiar face in American literature,

and I've gathered some of them that seemed representative.

This is Frost in old age, as an American bard from a

magazine. This is the Frost that you

probably know, as if he were born with white

hair, right? And a kind of,

well, kindly and monumental, and yet approachable figure

that is familiar from American school rooms.

Here's another image of that same guy, Robert Frost,

painted by Gardner Cox, reminding us of Frost as a kind

of link to nineteenth-century life, to rural Vermont.

Another image of Frost, this one from The Times,

just a little story: "President Hails Bond With

Frost" – that president would be John F.

Kennedy – "On TV He Extols Poet Who Calls New Frontier 'Age

of Poetry and Power.'" And perhaps you have seen

images of Frost reading his poem, "The Gift Outright," at

Kennedy's inauguration.

It was a kind of powerful moment in American culture where

the president allied himself with poetry in this way.

Oh, more pictures.

This is Frost with grandchildren,

Frost with his pet calves.

He was kind to animals, and a farmer.

This one I like. This is Frost with a stick,

or Frost with a branch.

You can think about that when you read "Birches."

This is Frost boyish, even in age,

Frost who also likes to play and even who looks just a little

bit, don't you think, malevolent?

All of these images would seem to make Frost not a modern poet

at all, not a modern poet in the sense that Eliot and Pound

established; that is, a difficult poet in

ways that I suggested last Wednesday, a poet resistant to

ordinary language and common frames of reference,

formally innovative, disorienting,

urbane, metropolitan.

I think of nineteenth-century art as being horizontal and

stretched out like agricultural life in New England.

And modernism is all about verticality, from a certain

angle. This was the Stieglitz picture,

City of Ambition, I showed you last Wednesday.

Another pairing, this wonderful landscape by

Martin Johnson Heade, and we could contrast it with

these images of Brooklyn Bridge by Walker Evans,

or even underneath the bridge.

The bridge seems to – a figure of crossing – it seems

here to rise up and out of the city and the river.

This is Frost before he had white hair, Frost at 18,

which is, I believe, 1892 or so: boyish.

And his first book is entitled A Boy's Will;

A Boy's Will, Robert Frost.

This is a cover of the first edition that you can go over to

Beinecke and see.

When you open it up and look at the table of contents,

you see titles of poems, and underneath those titles are

little legends and moralizations.

"Into My Own" (title).

"Legend": "the youth is persuaded that he will be rather

more than less himself for having foresworn the world."

Or "Storm Fear": "he is afraid of his own

isolation." These are poems,

in other words, that come with little labels to

tell you what they mean and what they're about.

Modernism in Eliot and Pound is, in some ways,

founded on expatriation, on a kind of internationalism.

Frost's poetry seems resolutely American, or at any rate it

seems to be. There is, in fact,

another Frost, a modernist Frost,

a Frost that is, in fact,

as international as Pound and Eliot, who began his career,

in fact, beside them, as a London expatriate.

This is more of the table of contents.

You can see how it's laid out.

This is the Frost who published that book.

This is Frost at thirty-nine, Frost in a suit made by a

London tailor in London.

And when we go to the title page of A Boy's Will we

see that this New England poet publishes his first book,

in fact, in London in 1913, there on New Oxford Street.

Interesting. North of Boston,

a great book that follows A Boy's Will,

is a title that locates these poems in a specific place in

northern New England.

It, too, is published in London, this time on Bloomsbury

Street. You don't really think of Frost

as part of Bloomsbury, do you?

But there he is, publishing his book in that

place, just like Prufrock,

also published on Bloomsbury Street – this in 1917,

North of Boston in 1915.

You remember that table of contents page I showed you a

moment ago with the titles and the moralizations that Frost has

for A Boy's Will?

Well, here's the modernist table of contents of

Prufrock, and of course,

what would the legend for "The Love Song of J.

Alfred Prufrock" be?

"He wanders around in a melancholy way,

quoting Hamlet for..."

Well no, it--Eliot didn't do that.

When we look at the table of contents of this book,

which is North of Boston, well,

it looks a lot like Eliot's.

Those little tags that seemed to explain the poetry have

disappeared and instead we simply have the titles of these

very great poems: "Mending Wall,"

"The Death of the Hired Man," "The Mountain," "Home Burial."

There's something in Eliot's--the presentation of

Eliot's work and indeed in the work itself that is affronting,

resistant, impersonal.

And the typography, the presentation of the book is

part of that. It's part of Eliot's whole

aesthetic. But North of Boston,

well, you know, when we start looking at these

two books together, it seems to share some of the

properties of Eliot's book; and indeed the poems that we

find when we open that book also have things in common with

Eliot's. The other Frost,

not the simple, familiar, monumental Frost but

the Frost who is a modernist poet who begins writing in

London, is really quite as

cosmopolitan, quite as learned as Pound and

Eliot at this moment.

And yet he uses his learning differently.

He uses it very often by concealing it,

in fact. Well, let me turn from pictures

to text. On your handout today,

the handout number two, we have--well,

there are several quotations from Frost's letters,

and let's look at the first one first.

Frost says at the time that he's publishing A Boy's

Will, to a friend: You mustn't take me too

seriously if I now proceed to brag a bit about my exploits as

a poet. There is one qualifying fact

always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success

called "of esteem" and it butters no parsnips.

It means a success with a critical few who are supposed to

know. But really to arrive where I

can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get

outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in

their thousands. I may not be able to do that.

I believe in doing it – don't you doubt me there.

I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds.

I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the

way my quasi-friend Pound does.

I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I

could do – if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.

[Frost to John Bartlett, November 1913]

Frost wishes to be so subtle as to seem altogether obvious.

It's not just that he seems obvious but is really subtle.

Rather, his subtlety shows itself in his deliberate

concealment of it, in the ways in which he masks

himself in obviousness.

The problems that Frost's poetry poses for us as readers

are not problems of reference.

They can't be solved by footnotes.

Compare the footnotes in the Frost poems to the footnotes in

The Norton that you find next to Eliot or Pound's poems.

The problems that Frost poses are problems of interpretation,

problems that provoke you to ask not, "what does he mean

exactly?" but "how does he mean that?"

Is he joking or is he serious?

Is there something on his mind that he's not saying?

The wonder of Frost is really in his tone, his way of saying

things without saying them in so many words.

Now, this guile of his, because that's what it entails,

this guile is something temperamental,

I think. It came naturally to him.

But it also reflects a specific literary situation.

The popular, old-fashioned Frost and the

elite, modern Frost--these roles point to a division in the

audiences for poetry that emerges clearly in this period.

The Frost who writes a familiar, crafted lyric that

would have been easily recognizable as poetry,

that we could give a little tag to after its title;

well, contrast this with the poet of The Waste Land,

say, whose work would not have been recognizable to many

readers as poetry and indeed was not.

On one level Frost was--spoke for and to an audience trained

by the genteel poetry of late nineteenth-century America,

readers who loved Longfellow, the Fireside Poets,

poets who published in Victorian popular magazines and

wrote those gilt-embossed books that cultured families kept

behind glass bookcases and that you can still find at tag sales

on New England greens.

That's the obvious Frost, the one that the subtle Frost

in many ways constructed, aiming all the time not at a

general reader at all but at an elite reader of the new

tiny-circulation, Little Magazines where the work

of Eliot, Williams, Stevens, Moore and others were

first published; those magazines I showed you

last week, magazines like Broom or Blast or

Rogue or The Criterion.

There's duplicity in Frost's poetry, and there's a certain

doubleness in the figure that he projects as a poet.

I like to think of his obsession with double meanings,

which he has, as a way of responding to a

division in culture, between popular and elite

readers, a division that he saw as expressive of a division in

American culture between money and esteem,

business and art.

In that quotation I read for you a few moments ago,

Frost opposes two kinds of success: one of "esteem,"

that success with a critical few that "butters no parsnips"

– You can see he brings in the kind of folksy term to,

well, to what? To disdain that kind of success

or put it in its place.

– and on the other hand, a success with the general

reader who buys books in their thousands.

Frost wanted both.

The opposition is between poetry that makes money and

poetry that, precisely because it is good poetry as modern

poetry defines it, does not.

Notice that the latter kind of poetry, the good kind that

"butters no parsnips," is associated here with Frost's

"quasi-friend Pound."

Instead of butter, Pound writes "caviare" – kind

of a European thing, right?

Caviar. By contrast,

Frost is declaring his ambition to reach out to a large

audience. It is for Frost a frankly

economic ambition.

By becoming a poet for all sorts and kinds,

Frost intends, as he says, to arrive "where I

can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else..."

This is ambition for a career, but it's also a desire for

personal autonomy.

For Frost, poetry is invested with a longing for autonomy in,

well, both simple and complex senses.

He wants to use poetry to stand on his own two legs.

He sees it specifically – and this is important – as a form

of work that will allow him to be self-sufficient and

self-determining.

Frost was born in 1874 into a working family.

His father's death, when Frost was a boy,