Poetry Notebook Read Free Page B

they frown on that activity.) But we can always remember that it struck us as being all of a piece.
    Frost made that his aim. Even in his longer poems, the aspiration to self-containment was always there. His often-stated ideal ‘the sound of sense’ was meant to be a unifying
element. Sometimes the dialogue passages in the longer poems got too high above that unifying tonal range. In ‘Snow’, the hero, Meserve, is meant to be naturally eloquent, but anyone
talking about him becomes eloquent too, so exchanges crop up that sound like nothing ever spoken since the Elizabethan theatre was in flower.
    ‘He had the gift
    Of words, or is it tongues I ought to say?’
    ‘Was ever such a man for seeing likeness?’
    It isn’t that Frost’s dialogue isn’t good. It’s too good: too good for the otherwise well-separated poem. But you’d hardly call the fault
characteristic. It comes from a high, indeed hieratic, ambition; and his more usual ambition, the more demanding ambition, was the genuinely humble one of ‘lodging a few poems where they will
be hard to get rid of’. There is no need to think that he was poor-mouthing himself when he talked like that. He knew very well that the poem that could be remembered as a whole, and not just
read through, was the hardest target to aim at. And he hit it dozens of times. If some nervous graduate recites ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ at a commencement ceremony, that
isn’t a sign of how Frost played the grizzled wiseacre, although he sometimes did: it’s a proof that he attained his object as a poet.
    When they knew each other back in England before the First World War, Ezra Pound – excellent critic that he was, when not in the grip of mania – could see the essential strength of
the early Frost’s diction. For one thing, it was so classically schooled. (Even today, when so much biographical and critical work on Frost has accumulated, it is often forgotten that it was
Frost, and not Pound or Eliot, who really knew Greek and Latin.) But Pound wanted modern poetry to go in a less formal direction, in which a poem could be sustained by its moments – a
direction in which a long poem made of fragments might be possible. (In fulfilling that plan some of Pound’s later imitators were to be more convincing than he was: Galway Kinnell with
The
Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World
, Christopher Logue with his
War Music
.) We have to make our own minds up whether the evidence of the short poems in
Personae
proves that Pound was really such a master of set forms he could afford to abandon them, but what matters is that he did so, and was prepared to back those who did the same. One of
them was Eliot, who really was a formal master: but his informal poems, especially
Prufrock
and
The Waste Land
, changed everything, and deserved to, because the moments were many and
unforgettable. Alas, one of the side effects was to create the impression that anyone could do it, and that everything could be said by saying anything.
    Frost had a keen and worried eye for trends. He was never as nastily jealous of his turf as his most influential later biographer, Lawrance Thompson, made out. But Frost did have a roost to
rule, and he felt it threatened by the runaway vogue for poetry that made a virtue of lacking discipline. How could his concealed discipline be a merit in a field where discipline itself was held
to be an inhibition? By the late 1930s, lecturing at Amherst or at Harvard or just dropping funny remarks at any whistle-stop in his endless tour through the poetry-reading circuit that he
invented, he was ready to trash Pound’s name: politely, but decisively. But Frost the patriarch was all too aware that his lifelong emphasis on craft had become an anachronism, if poetry were
to be measured by the sheer number of people writing it. A great Frost poem like ‘The Axe-Helve’ (even Baptiste’s ethnically flavoured dialogue fits it exactly)