by Anonymous Logician, Copyright January 29, 2007, all rights reserved.
So far we've noticed the similarities and differences between Frost and the major American poets preceding and contemporaneous with him. But what of the poetry that emerged after Frost's death? Has he exerted a tangible influence on postmodern American poets, or does he remain as unique and unclassifiable as before?
Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets represent a significant turn in the course of American literature after 1960. The Beat generation was largely one of protest, in which authors like Ginsberg complained that the "best minds of [their] generation" were being "destroyed by madness."
Ginsberg and his colleagues were rebels–rebels against tradition, against modernism's confidence, against moral and literary constraints. Philosophically, the Beat movement might be compared to postmodernism, which combined trenchant critiques of modernist dogmas with a startling and sometimes painfully naive ignorance of its own dogmatic presuppositions.
Postmodern poetry in these early years was largely an expression of anger, particularly at "the Man"–the corporate/governmental juggernaut that dominated the era of Jim Crow, Watergate, and the Vietnam War. The poets of Ginsberg's generation were, as the 1976 film Network would later put it, "mad as hell, and not going to take it anymore."
The title of Ginsberg's most famous work, Howl, encapsulates this anger. Ginsberg's inaugural performance of his poem, in fact, is said to mark the birth of the Beat movement. Howl, which sounds as though it were meant to be read aloud, rolls angrily off the tongue like a litany from the Spanish Inquisition. Ginsberg denounces the Man and applauds the hippies who
reappeared on the West Coast investigating the FBI in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square weeping and undressing while the sirens of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed . . . .
Yet it would be naive to view Ginsberg's rebellion solely as some kind of Jeffersonian resistance to injustice. The Beat poets' target was not merely industrial-politico bureaucracy, but the very moral and philosophical fabric that affirmed that art was indeed subject to the boundaries of decency. Can we honestly say that Ginsberg's protest was not at least partly motivated by ethical factors, or lack of them? Given Howl's frequent inclusion of drug abuse, crudely irresponsible sex, and the F-word, Ginsberg clearly had more than capitalism on his mind.
How would Frost have responded to Ginsberg et al.? Frost's later skepticism and coolly ironic voice suggests that he might have seen more than a struggle for justice in the Beat movement. Too, Frost's sarcastic commentary on Darwinism demonstrates that he was not one to follow movements blindly simply because they were popular. Frost might, however, have shared common ground with Ginsberg in his reaction to the oppressiveness of modern materialism, driven by an impersonal Science which is supposed to have all the answers humanity needs. Frost sees through this scientific idol in "Why Wait for Science":
Sarcastic Science, she would like to know,
In her complacent ministry of fear,
How we propose to get away from here
When she has made things so we have to go
Or be wiped out . . . .
Science is viewed here as a cruel mistress who claims to have the answers but is herself part of the problem.
Frost differed even further from the Beat Generation in the startling innocence of his work. Frost was at once a cynic and a farm boy. He could roughly question religion, science, and love; yet he could also run to the pasture to fetch the calf and clear the spring. Not only does Frost succeed in arresting our minds without the exaggerated shock value of Ginsberg's sex talk; he presents us with a positive innocence, innocence every bit as robust and militant as Ginsberg's rebellion. Perhaps no poem demonstrates the American vitality of Frost's innocence more clearly than "Birches":
-----When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them. . . .
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
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by Anonymous Logician, Copyright January 27, 2007, all rights reserved.
Frost is generally considered a modernist poet; he lived and wrote during the twentieth century, along with such American titans as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams. Yet here, among his modernist contemporaries, Frost's uniqueness is the sharpest. The pastoral bard from New England claims our attention as an independent twentieth-century voice.
Frost shares little in common with Eliot and Pound, expatriate writers and members of High Modernism. Eliot's work is intensely complex, packed with subtle emotion and rich in classical allusions. Eliot's poems employ a rhythmic, almost harmonic use of language. Indeed, when Eliot is at his most arcane, one wonders whether the meaning of the words matters as much as the music.
Eliot's use of metaphor and simile also differentiates him from Frost. Frost is creative and striking in his own right, but Eliot's images have a power and style all their own. For instance, the evening is "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table." Streets twist and turn like "a tedious argument / Of insidious intent." The image of English fog also occurs several times in Eliot's poetry. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" Eliot makes use not only of metaphor but of arresting personification:
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle upon the windowpanes,
Licked its tongue into the corner of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that fell from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
Pound, a longtime friend, advisor, and editor of Eliot's, also shares the "High Modernism" that Frost avoids. Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme" (Portrait of a Lady) is similar to Eliot's rich, European-tinged lines. For instance, Pound writes that "your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, / London has swept about you this score years / And bright ships left you this or that in fee . . . . / Great minds have sought you–lacking someone else. / You have been second always. Tragical?" Pound rivals Eliot in terms of dramatic language and classical allusions: "And Anticlea came, whom I beat off, and then Tiresias Theban, / Holding his golden wand, knew me, and spoke first: / 'A second time? why? man of ill star, / Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?'" Pound's journey here mirrors Aneas' trip to the underworld, and readers of Sophocles will recognize the blind prophet Tiresias.
Contra Pound and Eliot, Frost remains close to Earth, both in the sense that his language is accessible–almost homespun–and also in the sense that his content is often earthy and pastoral. While tackling the same emotions as Eliot and Pound–loneliness, joy, despair, optimism, skepticism–Frost chooses to address these impulses through the medium of story. Concern over fate and freedom, for example, finds expression in "Design," a poem about a spider and a moth. The unity of mankind emerges in a poem about a seemingly-insignificant bunch of flowers spared by a mower. When Frost grapples with death, he does so by telling us stories about a hired hand come home for the last time, a young boy whose hand is cut by a buzz-saw, or even a darkly comic tale about tiny ant funerals.
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by Anonymous Logician, Copyright January 24, 2007, all rights reserved.
In the sphere of Frost's nineteenth-century predecessors, probably none stands as tall as Walt Whitman. Whitman's exuberance, openness, and groundbreaking innovations opened the door for modernist poetry, and no study of Frost's place in American literature would be complete without reference to the bearded poet from New York. As with Bradstreet, Poe, and Emerson, Frost shares common elements with Whitman. This common ground lies mostly in the gregarious embrace of humanity found in both men's poetry (though of course this theme is much more pronounced in Whitman).
Whitman's poetic democracy is evident. In "I Hear America Singing," Whitman glorifies the common American, whether that American is black or white, male or female, professional or laborer.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck. . . .
For Whitman, his brotherhood with American men and women was more than simply a poetic theme. It was his life; as Jefferson could not live without books, so Whitman could not live without people. Humanity fueled his art, as
in "I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing":
[I]ts look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its
friend near, for I knew I could not. . . .
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide
flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.
Frost too is gregarious, and lays stress on knowing other people. In "The Tuft of Flowers," he uses an ordinary farm chore like mowing to convey both loneliness and the gradual realization of companionship. Frost is turning the grass after a fellow-worker who mowed earlier. Frost looks for him and listens for the sound of his scythe-sharpening. "But he had gone his way, the grass all mown, / And I must be, as he had been–alone, / 'As all must be' I said within my heart, 'Whether they work together or apart.'" Yet as Frost continues his chore, he notices a tuft of flowers the mower had deliberately spared from the mowing. Even though the mower left the flowers "from sheer morning gladness at the brim" and not out of any thought for Frost, Frost still rejoices in the existence of an unseen but kindred spirit: "'Men work together,' I told him from the heart, / 'Whether they work together or apart.'" Like the detective Gabriel Syme in G. K. Chesterton's novel *The Man Who Was Thursday, Frost lives the paradox of one who fancies himself alone when he is really surrounded by friends.
Yet, as with his other predecessors before Whitman, Frost maintains his independence. Though Frost is a "sociable" poet, he is not a *social poet in the same sense as Whitman. Whitman's human exuberance carries underlying civil implications; his democracy is political as much as it is poetic, and leads to the almost explicitly partisan "Oh Captain! My Captain!' and "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day." These poems exalt Abraham Lincoln's person and policies in a way far out of Frost's comfort zone. Frost is even more laconic on politics than on religion; his poem for John F. Kennedy's inauguration is as close as he gets to political, and even this work is general and seems to express surprise that the "august" state would ask poets to participate in its events. We might also note in passing that Frost did not prefer Whitman's free verse, even joking about it in "How Hard It Is to Keep From Being King When It's in You and in the Situation." In this poem/story, the son of the ex-king remarks,
"I'm not a free-verse singer. He was wrong there. . . .
I write real verse in numbers, as they say.
I'm talking not free verse but blank verse now. . . .
Free verse, so called, is really cherished prose. . . .
It has its beauty, only I don't write it.
And possibly my not writing it should stop me
From holding forth on Freedom like a Whitman. . . ."
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