W. B. YEATS, THE RHYMERS’ CLUB, EDWARD THOMAS, ROBERT FROST
When Wilfred Owen was a boy Yeats was already camped above the snow line on Parnassus. He was active on many fronts, in England, Ireland and America; he communed with the spirit world, with his own mythologized past, and with the legends of Ireland. Through the Rhymers’ Club he knew the latest French poetry. When Owen was an adolescent, Yeats was running out of puff, but help was on its way, crossing the high seas: the young Ezra Pound, bound for Europe.
William Butler Yeats’s life is a tangled complex of fortuitous meetings, chance influences, intellectual inconsistencies, a sequence of dramatic public and private conflicts played out in a personality that was in crucial ways very simple: his docile vanity, the sincerity of his political vacillations, his human devotion. A man alive in his time, he never stood still but built and built on what had come before—not a coherent Palladian edifice but a Disneyland castle of halls and turrets and pinnacles and buttresses. The late poems follow the same thematic concerns as the earlier, but the poet of the fin-de-siècle is different in kind from the engaged twentieth-century poet. From 1887 to 1939 he moved from a deliciously resigned passivity to tense engagement, from adjectives to verbs. His more than half a century of verse constitutes an oeuvre more exemplary and, in the end, more coherent than any other poet’s of his time except for Eliot and Stevens. How much more “intolerable struggle with words and meanings” there is in late Yeats than in late Eliot; how much less tinsel even in the over-decorated poems of the fin-de-siècle than in Stevens’s luminous constructions.
Yeats was born in Dublin in 1865. His father, John Butler Yeats, was an accomplished painter. His mother, Susan Pollexfen, was a member of an old Anglo-Irish family that Yeats liked to consider aristocratic. The Anglo-Irish background—Protestant in religion, yet guardedly Republican in sentiment—was characterized by strongly held and hotly debated opinions on various topics, not least art and literature.
Much of his childhood he spent in London, where his parents moved in 1867. They lived off income from family lands in Kildare until 1880, when the Land War put an end to it. In 1875 Yeats entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and visited Ireland during the longer school vacations, when he stayed with the Pollexfens in County Sligo. An early poetic impulse was to change the name of his toy yacht from Sunbeam to Moonbeam. It was a decisive act.
In 1880 the Yeats family returned to Dublin, and until 1883 William attended the High School in Harcourt Street. Then he entered the School of Art. The first of his verses were published in 1885. This precocious apprentice work was shown to Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, then serving in Dublin. The priest described the work in a letter to Coventry Patmore as “a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on; people think such criticisms very prosaic, but common-sense is never out of place anywhere...) but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery.” It was a long time before Yeats and common sense reached some sort of accommodation. In a review of William Morris written late in 1896, Yeats foresaw a time when William Morris, not Shelley, would become “the type of the poet: for he more than any man of modern days tried to change the life of his time into the life of his dream.” His review plays with the giant counters of beauty and the age, hovering some distance above its subject and saying volubly almost nothing at all. He was repaying a debt to a poet he admired, who had expressed admiration of his work. It was a rhetorical gesture of piety.
Fatefully, in 1886 Yeats attended his first séance. His passion for spiritualism and magic was already far advanced: whatever voices he heard on that occasion exacerbated his enthusiasm and he set up regular rendezvous with the spirits, who generously provided him with occasions for verse. A passion for things Irish developed too, and he read Irish poetry and the Gaelic sagas in translation. He began to question the motives of the Anglo-Irish. In 1887, a resolute Irishman, he moved back to London and became a Theosophist.
In London he was active in literature and politics. One particular event in 1889 proved crucial: he met and fell in love with the fiery Republican who haunted him for the rest of his days, Maud Gonne. His biography, from 1889 until Maud Gonne’s marriage, is punctuated by the statement, “Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne.”
It was 1891 when he became involved with the Rhymers’ Club, a group of poets who met regularly at the Cheshire Cheese, Fleet Street, and discussed everything—especially poetry. Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson became his close friends. Johnson instructed him in philosophy. Arthur Symons, the outstanding poet-critic of the 1890s, frequented the club and Yeats shared rooms with him in 1895. Symons laid out European literature before him, directed his attention to Mallarmé, Calderón, St. John of the Cross and others. Unlike the Rhymers, who, apart from the harsh and impecunious John Davidson (a substantial figure), practiced an aesthetic of “art for art’s sake,” Yeats came to feel that “literature must be the expression of conviction, and be the garment of noble emotion, and not an end in itself.” Perhaps his Irish convictions made him proof against the feathery seductions of aestheticism, but he never denied his debt to the “Poets with whom I learned my trade, / Companions of the Cheshire Cheese...”
Blake and Shelley, too, alerted the young Yeats to the fact that there was more potential in poetry than was dreamed of in the Rhymers’ philosophy. With Edwin Ellis, he prepared an edition of Blake’s poems (1893). Blake and Shelley had more impact on his beliefs and sentiments—his sense of the poet’s identity, social function and imaginative scope—than on his poetic techniques, though he may have learned from their grandiloquence, and he was not above borrowing a phrase or two when he needed it. Blake opened a wider highway toward symbolism than the French poets Symons set before him.
London and Paris were his meccas at the time. In Paris he encouraged the dramatist John Synge. In 1896 he met Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932) and formed a courtly and devoted friendship with her which proved durable and creative. In succeeding years he spent time at Coole Park, her estate, studying folklore and plotting an Irish renaissance. In 1897 they invented the Abbey Theatre, which opened in Dublin in 1904. Yeats wrote many of his verse plays for the Abbey. Indeed, it exercised his patience, rhetoric and spleen for years and helped to modify his naïve social idealism because of the politics it elicited.
In 1908 his Collected Works were issued in eight volumes. He was forty-three, a poet of established reputation, a dramatist and prose writer, a lecturer at home and abroad. He felt drained of energy. He had reached the end of his first period of creative activity. It was to this period that Owen was indebted.
Critics lay insufficient stress on the effect Ezra Pound had on Yeats’s development. Returning from the funeral of Synge, he met the young Pound in 1909, and Pound, who had admired his work since his school days, was often with him from that time until his death, at one time an intimate friend who acted as best man at his wedding and witnessed his will. Pound entered Yeats’s life when Yeats seemed played out, his way forward unclear. He was reading Ben Jonson, he was trying to speak in verse, to find new energy. In Basil Bunting’s terms, he was trying to escape from the aesthetic to the documentary tradition.
Yeats had never encountered a character like Pound: American from the Midwest, not New England, passionately devoted to his art, hugely well read (without scholarly inhibitions), opinionated, free of the English burden of tradition, willing to consider poetic resources from far afield. From the time of their acquaintance, new particularity and concreteness enter Yeats’s verse. The change is not in the approach to content only, but in diction as well. Pound, the younger man, almost in the role of apprentice, must have discussed corrections and revisions with Yeats, bringing out tendencies already implicit in his style. We can imagine him hacking away at the lush undergrowth of adjectives, resisting the passive voice and weak verbs, as he was to do so decisively when, later, T. S. Eliot gave him the typescript of The Waste Land.
In 1913 Yeats was awarded a Civil List pension and in 1915 refused a knighthood, the Irish in him strengthening against institutional seductions. In 1917 he bought his “castle” in Ballylee—near Coole Park and Lady Gregory. Little more than a broken tower and cottages, it was to Yeats replete with legendary resonances. This was altogether an active year. It included three proposals of marriage to three different women. The last accepted, and at fifty-two Yeats was married.
The Nobel Prize for literature came his way in 1923; later he was a senator in the Irish Parliament. His health began to deteriorate and, in 1924, suffering from high blood pressure and respiratory problems, he repaired to Sicily, where he was enthralled by the Byzantine mosaics. In his illness he entered an intensely creative period, composing The Tower poems and some of The Winding Stair. His friends’ deaths, his own slow physical deterioration, the political turmoil of Ireland and Europe, bore in upon him. His most heartfelt loss was Lady Gregory, who died in 1932. He wrote her a heroic and tender elegy. Certainly, without her he would have been a very different poet.
Taking practical steps to retain his sexual potency, he subjected himself to the Steinach operation in 1934. But he was unarguably old. Spending more and more time in the congenial climate of southern France, he died in 1939 and was buried at Roquebrune. His body was returned to Sligo and reinterred there in 1948.
Yeats was haunted by the idea of the great poet more than the great poem. Poetry was a mode of identity; the poems often divert attention back to the poet as a kind of vates, or priest. He works toward an irrefutable art, evanescent, mysterious, hermetic, which only yields up its content fully to the initiate. Art defends and defines the self. He takes a cue from the Irish bards, but at the same time aligns himself finally with the dwindling Anglo-Irish aristocracy. In “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” he writes, “We were the last romantics—chose for theme / Traditional sanctity and loveliness,” embattled in a world hostile to art. “My poetry is generally written out of despair,” he reports. “Like Balzac, I see increasing commonness everywhere, and like Balzac I know no one who shares the premises from which I work.” That conscious identification with great writers of the past is characteristic. He seeks a lonely legitimacy by association with other solitary geniuses. The autobiography to which he treats us is never quite true. The lines are boldly traced, but significant details are omitted. Pure reality withers him. He fails to understand psychology, to credit causal relationships. His eye is always on the larger form and on its effect, what it tells and how the teller appears in it. This helps to explains the simplicity of his political and social views: at points of crisis they define themselves in tendentious ways. The reluctance of Irish people to accept his or his friends’ art—at the Abbey, or at the Art Museum—soured his political optimism. Though he thought he despised bourgeois interests, he voted as a senator with peers, bankers, lawyers and businessmen against the representatives of the humbler classes. Many poems develop the theme—notably “Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation” and “To a Wealthy Man who Promised a Second Subscription to the Dublin Municipal Gallery if it were Proved the People Wanted Pictures.”
Early on he had a political ambition to reconcile the courteous Protestant with Ireland’s martyred, repressed Roman Catholic heritage. One vehicle for this, he thought, might be the recovery of Irish legend and poetry. Yet he did not want his writing to become local to Ireland. “I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” Later he wrote, “All literature created out of a conscious political aim in the long run creates weakness by creating a habit of unthinking obedience. Literature created for its own sake, for some eternal spiritual need, can be used for politics. Dante is said to have unified Italy. The more unconscious the creation, the more powerful.” It was not a new Ireland Yeats was prophesying. First he sang the ancient, and then the moribund, apparently heroic Anglo-Irish aristocracy. But the people who were Ireland’s present and future, by their actions and through their representatives, disappointed him.
He craved mystery rooted in the “unconscious.” In his parlance this is not a psychological term but something larger, a place of unalloyed (if unacknowledged) commonality. In an extravagant moment he claimed that he could believe in all that has ever been believed—the onus of disproof is on the unbeliever. The impulse toward the unknown led him to hermetic pursuits, yet his ideal worlds are—like his vision of the past—materialistic and literal, even when moonlit: this world made better, more heroic and powerful, more ceremonious, emancipated from old age and other human disabilities, but perceptible and rewarding to the five senses. Out of the desire to give form to mystery, and an inability to give it form except in images of our world, grew his interest in communication with other regions, even with the dead.
He evolved a pseudo-geometry, a system of gyres, lunar phases, degrees of subjectivity and objectivity. A desire for conceptual order complements a desire for mystery. He was, after all, an admirer of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish writers Burke, Berkeley, Goldsmith and Swift, whom he loved: their solidity and cogency attracted him. Fortunately his elaborate theories, elucidated at length in A Vision (1925), are not crucial to an appreciation of the poems, though Yeats found them enabling. The critic and classical scholar C. M. Bowra, who knew the poet during his time at Oxford, once told me that these airy constructs were as real for Yeats, “as a Christian’s faith is real.” Each aspect of them drew legitimacy from some hermetic antecedent, so that Yeats could claim to be not a discoverer but a rearranger and interpreter of received wisdom.
His systems certainly enabled him to externalize inner conflicts. From 1909 to 1911 he was intimate with the spirits. He discovered his spiritual opposite, Leo Africanus, and they corresponded: that is, Yeats wrote him letters to which he (through Yeats) replied. Leo helped him to a kind of self-knowledge. This self-clarification is apparent in several poems, notably “Hic et Ille,” a dialogue that Pound nicknamed “Hic et Willie.” To find himself, the poet had to discover an image of himself, through opposites.
Opposites provide a constant tension in Yeats’s work. He swings between extremities: spontaneity versus craft, laughter versus seriousness, mask versus face, spiritual excitement versus sexual agony. The poems set out to bring into tension and retain in tension contrasts or opposites, chiefly that between Leda and Lethe, physical love and death. He declared that “sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind.” Certainly his best poems are those written in expectation of death, with the joys of physical passion still agitating him.
From the outset he had two stylistic impulses in his writing: a highly cadenced style for shadows and mystery; and a stark, phrased, declarative style, with precise images for specific meanings. His development is in the shifting balance between the two styles in response to changes in his ambitions and passions. The early poems, rooted in romanticized Celtic legend, full of abstract emotion, are governed by the first style. In his middle period, where the poems draw on biographical, historical and local particulars, ideas and emotions become more specific and the two styles come into an unsatisfactory balance. The final period is characterized by a stark, precise and spoken style, the poems based on biographical and local particulars, but now with a specific emotional and intellectual content. Naturally in each period there are poems that foreshadow later developments or reecho earlier achievement.
In the early writing his evasive symbolism depersonalizes the poems. In the later work it becomes a probing instrument. But even those symbols drawn from life in The Tower have meanings ascribed to them. The meanings do not inhere in the objects in a particular context. In his middle and late poems Yeats frequently explicates symbols within the poem, for fear that we might miss their meaning. In “A Prayer for my Daughter,” for instance, we are reminded in the unsuccessful final explication, “ceremony’s a name for the rich horn, / And custom for the spreading laurel tree.” This is the problem of essentially arbitrary symbolism. Early symbols, the rose for example, tend to humanize the ideal. Later symbols, especially the mask, tend to idealize the human. His early attempt to draw the numinous and mysterious into his symbols becomes an attempt to transform what is crudely human into something numinously heroic or ceremonious, sanctified and mysterious.
The poetry is always heard, not overheard. It is a poetry of all but social evasion. There is little intimacy about Yeats. Richard Ellmann, his best reader, writes that his “mastery seems almost excessive” at times, bordering on “overmastery.” This is not the huge competence of Auden, at play in the toy shop of poetic form, but mastery, the possession of a unique rhetoric for use on a real but limited range of themes. It is a mastery so complete that it can occlude the genuinely problematic, ride over the potholes of nonsense without even sensing them. Late in life he recognizes the evasiveness of his symbols, the tendency of his verse to turn away or inward, and in the concentrated intensity of the late poems he tries to remedy this. But he has an imperfect sense of generality; he is willing to plump out a truism as truth. As his mastery increases, his art becomes less truthful. But his main concern is not—until the later poems, and even there in an attenuated spirit—truth, but the house of myth and legend, where he can become a principal tenant, where it is his voice we hear casting the spell, and where real men are reduced—or, in his mind, enlarged—to masks, figures and types useful to myth, regardless of the human reality they had. If he assumes a mask, so must they. “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” falsifies by masking the real characters of Lionel Johnson, John Synge and George Pollexfen. He does not epitomize: he caricatures. Real persons, events and occasions are trimmed to serve his rhetorical purposes. Yet the poems speak with the authority of a truth teller. The disparity between the quality of statement and the quality of witness weakens our trust in the poet, a fact that for some readers devalues the poems.
While Hardy’s sense of the individual’s isolation is based on memory (accidents of biography make us utterly distinct), Yeats’s sense of isolation derives from his self-consciousness. Aware of his otherness, he knows that others project different roles on him. He accepts the projections and assumes masks, building several myths around himself. The poems continually refer back to the poet. In “The Indian to his Love” Yeats writes, “A parrot sways upon a tree / Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.” The only experiences powerful enough to deliver us from self-consciousness are sexual love and the apprehension of death.
In the early collections Crossways (1889) and The Rose (1893), the poems are of mood rather than feeling. He later referred to their “unmanliness.” The rose was a useful symbol. Crucified, it suffered with the sufferer. It hung upon the cross of time. It carried its traditional symbolic meanings from religion, but in Yeats’s early poems came to stand for Ireland and Maud Gonne as well: “Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!” How like Valéry’s later cadence, in “Le Cimitière Marine,” “Vrai ciel, beau ciel, regardez mois, qui change!” But to what a different end the symbolism works: for Valéry the passion is intense and exploratory, a bodied longing; for Yeats it is nostalgic, rueful, courtliness without hope of consummation. Yet it bears a large weight of association for the poet. The rose is never real. Gertrude Stein might have said of his early verse, “A rose isn’t a rose isn’t a rose.”
These poems are peculiarly unimpassioned in their passionate, tricked-out romantic sentiment, deliciously affecting but ineffectual. Yet there is an impression of almost classical control:
Rose of all Roses, Rose of all the world!
The tall thought-woven sails, that flap unfurled
Above the tide of hours...
“The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is popular in part because in it a romantic theme is treated in a fully romantic idiom.
The sense of control results from Yeats’s insistent use of intransitive verbs, participles, and “to be” constructions, especially in the shorter lyrics; and from his partiality to the genitive construction, “the—of—,” rather than the simple possessive. Such habits of language extend and loosen the rhythms. The intransitive verbs are a pseudo-“classical” element, stilling the romantic noun and adjective content. The rhythms flow, while the images and symbols suffer from a strange inertia. In “The Pity of Love” and “The Sorrow of Love” he holds back the transitive verbs to good effect, deploying them at the climax. But generally the intransitive verbs, so at odds with the rhythm, suggest passivity and dream.
In the Seven Woods (1904), Yeats’s worst collection, marks a transition. The poems are coldly made. In “The Ragged Wood” one noun, for instance, carries a burden of adjectives and one prepositional phrase: “that sliding silver-shoed / Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky...” This is the excess that seduced the young Owen’s ear, an excess picked up like a virus from Swinburne. It was six years before Yeats published his next collection, years spent writing plays, working for the Abbey, and reconsidering his diction. The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910) shows him grown more lean and supple, having learned something from composing poetic dialogue for the stage and hearing actors making sense and nonsense of his verse. But still the poetry is statuesque, static through intellectualized emotion, verbally intransitive. Emotion prompts the questions, intellect shapes them and their implicit or explicit replies. Yeats had still to learn his own lesson: “The more unconscious the creation the more powerful.”
Responsibilities (1914) was published two years after Pound had sought Yeats out as a master and taken him in hand. Pound’s influence may be felt in the Chinese dedicatory couplet, but more in a new tautness, the way ideas are realized not by moralizing, but in the symbols themselves. There is a new containment, a different kind of authority in the public tone he adopts in some of the poems. When he attacks bourgeois philistinism and chastises the misled humbler classes, he experiments with the severe satire of the bardic poets. He contrasts Renaissance patrons and audiences with the boorish, penny-pinching public servants, the unresponsive public. The jingling of the till now exceeds in sweetness the plucking of the poet’s harp. In “September 1913” he laments, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, / It’s with O’Leary in the grave.” It hardly matters that such an Ireland never existed: for Yeats it did. The Irish heroes and martyrs perished to make way for a pusillanimous bourgeois order:
What need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone?
“Come to sense”: a loaded phrase. Such calculating “sense,” without mystery, a world away from the Augustan tradition he admired, is to Yeats base sterility. Scornfully he adds, “For men were born to pray and save.” In a later poem, “The Seven Sages,” he defined the Whiggery he detested:
...What is Whiggery?
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard’s eye.
Responsibilities is full of beggars, hermits, outcasts, people whose gifts are rejected and whose sacrifices are vain. Men should be responsible to the heroes and patriots, true to the constituency whose sacrifice cleared a space for Ireland. The new vigor of the verse is reflected in precision and concreteness of imagery, in the more real-seeming passions, and in the active verb forms. “The Mountain Tomb” is full of active verbs—a poem in motion, purger of the “unmanly” passive voice. Anger and disillusion shake the dreamer awake.
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) is Yeats’s first great modern collection, a book that is of a piece and touches his world at every point. The wild swans sail on the lake in Lady Gregory’s estate. They’re natural, beautiful, powerful; most important, they return, they have a noble freedom and a noble permanence. “That crowd, that barbarous crowd” are the antagonists. “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory” reveals Yeats’s subtle sense of poetic organization. He sets out to recall “the friends that cannot sup with us”: first, Lionel Johnson, a recluse too learned for this world; then Synge, recluse too, dedicated not to scholarship but to social observation; last among the ghosts, George Pollexfen, a horseman and withdrawn observer of the stars. Major Gregory, an active man and an artist, embodies the virtues found singly in the other ghosts. “Soldier, scholar, horseman, he”: a Renaissance man. The poem works to its climax by progression through great men to the Great Man, the occasion of the poem. The effect is broad-brush: the various ghosts are simplified, the word “all” as a vague, gesturing stroke occurs more than fourteen times.
Yeats is fascinated by the possibility of modern heroism, in an age in which the causes one might wish to fight and die for are hopelessly vitiated. “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” calls up a pilot (Major Gregory again) motivated by no social or religious commitments, but by “a lonely impulse of delight”—a sufficient motive for heroic action in a spiritually impoverished world.
In The Wild Swans at Coole the poet begins to age rapidly. The mythologized autobiography is potent—an “I” myth replaces the “we” myth of earlier poems. Yeats begins to explore and enlarge unique, individual experience. “To a Young Beauty” is a trifle arrogant, “The Scholars,” excessively scornful. But he can be scornful of himself—or the self he presents to us—as well. In “Lines Written in Dejection” he laments the passing of magic, the lunar vision, and accepts the “embittered,” “timid” sun. He craves—or says he craves—simple rustic readers, “the wise simple man.” In “The Fisherman” this reader resembles an idealized version of his own youth:
...“Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.”
He reworked his poems tirelessly. Sometimes he began from a prose draft and turned it into verse. The care that went to the writing of “The Fisherman” is invisible, an art that conceals art, for the poem speaks and is only slightly marred by rhetorical inflation. Humor and ribaldry more readily enter the poems, and do so more convincingly.
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) includes, as well as the famous poems “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming” and “A Prayer for my Daughter,” “Solomon and the Witch,” one of his most persuasive expressions of the theme of self-consciousness and its dispelling (for good or ill) in love:
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there...
The “real image” becomes his quarry. Throughout this book, in the anthologized poems especially, Yeats handles verbs with cunning. “The Second Coming,” raw and visionary with political and religious overtones, like the Byzantium poems that followed, cannot be pinned down to one occasion and will not yield to paraphrase. The poems, without settling into the merely literary, are autonomous and self-contained, shaped in what Edward Thomas calls “a language not to be betrayed.”
“Sailing to Byzantium” appears in The Tower (1928). Here, an old man rejects, as he is rejected by, the sensuous world of youth, ephemerality and the natural cycle. He travels, in quest of the “Monuments of unageing intellect,” to Byzantium—where art arrests change but in so doing transforms it into something other. There he wills himself to be transformed, freed of human passions and the body, that “dying animal.” He wills himself to be absorbed “into the artifice of eternity.” A powerful intellectual passion animates the poem, as powerful as the sexual passion of the later poems of desire and lust. “The Tower” itself is one of Yeats’s finest long poems, exploring further the theme of age. His self-mythologizing has a bardic aspect: the mad poet’s task is to drive others mad. In this collection Yeats settles finally for a less tentative statement of the artist’s predicament. “Ancestral Homes” and the first section of “Meditations in Time of Civil War” recall the stately homes commissioned by bitter, angry men, built to express sweetness, harmony, civilizing qualities. What if the house lacks the power of its sweetness? What if art is, in the end, intransitive or passive, in a time of civil war itself affected by events, but without effect on them? These questions burn at the center of his political poems, troubling him more than the events that give rise to them.
Sato’s sword is placed beside the pen and paper. The overriding perception is that hate is more powerful than love because it leads to action. “Among School Children” examines the fate of hope, faith and love with a terrifying, intimate pessimism. It also suggests, in the famous closing lines, that form and content, action and actor, are ideally inseparable: “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” The perceived ideal can rise out of an accurate presentation of the real.
Three collections were published after The Tower: The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), including “Words for Music Perhaps” and “A Woman Young and Old”; A Full Moon in March (1935); and Last Poems (1936–39). Death and love are the dominant themes. The celebrated “Crazy Jane” sequence, with the wit, pathos and passion of Yeats’s later years, and “Byzantium,” the culmination of the sequence of poems that began in The Tower and of his hermetic idiom, are a large part of the achievement of the later books. His declining years were marked by a continuing development, an acceleration and intensification that took hold of his rhetoric and filled it out with authentic matter: fear, doubt, longing for new beginnings. In search of an authentic theme he rejects (as he has been deserted by) the “masterful images.” His magnificent poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” proposes a new odyssey, more taxing than any he has undertaken hitherto; and if the challenge, which grows out of a self-recognition more authentic and harrowing than any that has come before, occurs too late, the fact that it occurs at all, throwing in question the whole of his life’s work, is as heroic an act of integrity as Pound’s in the last fragmentary Cantos, when he concedes, “It’s a botch,” and “I cannot make it cohere,” his “errors and wrecks” lying about him. But Yeats is not talking of his formal experiments; rather, of his moral quest. He acknowledges his evasions, the price of his “overmastery.” His decision to begin again is the more powerful coming from one for whom there have been so many beginnings. This one is different in kind from the others—not a new turning on the lavish old roads, but a determination to strip away the masks, to find the naked “I.” Far from being a denial of the heroic ideal, this is the most heroic act of all:
...Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
In 1909 Edward Thomas reviewed Yeats’s Collected Works. He had reviewed Yeats before, deploying the terms he used for Swinburne, Doughty and Davies. Now he reaches a conclusion that is just, whether we take it positively or not: “The heavy voluptuous splendour of much of his work has yet a ghostliness as of the palace made magically of leaves. Even his heroes and beautiful women are aware of this... He never leaves us, any more than Crashaw, content with the glory alone. It calls our attention to a spirit behind and beyond, heaping high lovely, invisible things that it may show the greater beauty that can survive their crumbling into dust.” Thomas assigns the “palace of leaves” to this spirit, or what T. E. Hulme might later, less generously, have called “the circumambient gas.” Thomas, that most devoted reader and serious poet, did not read Yeats’s later work. He was killed in April 1917 by the blast of a shell before Arras. It was the year that Yeats, dreaming of heroes, was negotiating the purchase of his “castle,” two years before The Wild Swans of Coole was published.
When Thomas died, the American poet Robert Frost wrote to Helen Thomas, his widow, “Who was ever so completely himself right up to the verge of destruction, so sure of his thought, so sure of his word?” If this was true of Thomas, then both Frost and Helen were in part responsible.
Thomas’s life, though desperately busy, was not full of incident. The three crucial events in his life gain significance in retrospect. First was his meeting with Helen Noble in 1894. This led to virtual marriage when he was still an Oxford undergraduate. She provided him, sometimes a little insistently, with an emotional and practical mainstay, but also—rather earlier than either of them intended—a family. Having published his first book while at Oxford, he decided to become a writer. He followed his vocation for twenty-two years, preparing hundreds of book reviews, compiling anthologies and editions, and writing over thirty prose books on subjects ranging from the countryside to tourist guides, from literary criticism to stories, biographies, autobiographies and an autobiographical novel.
Robert Frost was the second crucial event, first the poems and then the man. In 1914 Thomas reviewed North of Boston no fewer than three times, saying in the first review, “This is one of the most revolutionary books of modern times, but one of the quietest and least aggressive. It speaks, and it is poetry.” That was the quality he admired most in Frost, the proximity of the language of verse not to the constructions of prose but to the dynamic of speech. Frost, for his part, liked Thomas’s nature writing and during their “year of friendship” pointed out prose passages that he felt Thomas might attempt in verse. From Frost he derived the confidence to compose poems. In August 1914 he wrote to his intimate friend Eleanor Farjeon, “I may as well write poetry. Did anyone ever begin at thirty-six in the shade?” Reading poetry had been his passion and vocation; now he set about writing the fewer than 150 poems that constitute his oeuvre.
War was the third event. In 1915 he enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles, was made a map-reading instructor and was promoted the next year to second lieutenant. Army service freed him from financial worry and the labor of freelancing. It gave him a formal, disciplined existence away from Helen’s devoted demands, away from the responsibility of a growing family, where he could write his poems. Helen saw his enlisting as a kind of surrender, but for the poet in him it was an act of emancipation.
Philip Edward Thomas was born in 1878 in Lambeth, London, the eldest of six sons. His parents were of Welsh extraction and he felt affection for Wales, though his distinctive landscape is the south of England, especially Wiltshire, Kent and Hampshire. He attended St. Paul’s School, Hammersmith, and went to Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1897, when he was nineteen, The Woodland Life, his first prose book, was published. Already he and Helen were living together; they were married in 1899. Their three children were born in 1900, 1902 and 1910. They lived in Kent and then in Hampshire. Between 1910 and 1912, driven by financial necessity, Thomas wrote no fewer than twelve of his prose books. He suffered a mental breakdown in 1911 and contemplated suicide.
The prose of Edward Thomas, written under pressure and at speed, generally for money, is often dismissed by critics or considered only in its direct relation to the poems. But in his quiet, unprogrammatic way, he was one of the most percipient literary critics of his time, the rare kind who reads his contemporaries and appraises them with assurance and gravity. He was among the first reviewers to appreciate Frost; he also recognized Ezra Pound’s achievement in Personae, which he reviewed in 1909, though his pompous friend Gordon Bottomley talked him out of that enthusiasm. Throughout his mature prose there are passages of criticism and descriptive writing which merit attention.
When Thomas began writing prose, his style was haunted by the ghost of Walter Pater. It is poised, poetical, coldly conceived, more an architecture of language than an expressive instrument, remote from the natural voice. As more demands were made on his time, he wrote more briskly and fluently. In a letter to Eleanor Farjeon he said he was “trying to get rid of the last rags of rhetoric and formality which left my prose so often with a dead rhythm.” Prose and verse rhythms are early concerns of his criticism.
Ironically, after his passion for Pater had passed, he was commissioned to write a book about him. It proved to be one of his best critical studies. He takes Pater to task in these terms: “Unless a man write with his whole nature concentrated upon his subject he is unlikely to take hold of another man.” Swinburne had been another of his favorites. Again, when his love for Swinburne was over, he was asked to write a book about him. Of Swinburne’s vocabulary he says: “The words have no rich inheritance from old usage of speech or poetry, even when they are poetic or archaic or Biblical. They have little variety of tone. The blank verse changes and does everything but speak.” He reacted against the one-dimensional, unresonant quality of Swinburne’s vocabulary, subsumed under the flood of monotonous rhythm, as he had against the studied, arch, deadening artifice of Pater.
An attitude, indeed a coherent critical approach to poetry, can be deduced from his criticism and reviews. He draws a distinction between reality and realism: the style that attempts “reality” imitates the proportions and rhythms of nature, while the “realist” style concentrates on reproducing detail. He prefers the former and in his poetry practices it. But he is pragmatic in his approach to new work, as to unfamiliar form, assessing it on its own terms first, and his taste encompasses Charles Doughty as well as Frost.
In a review he wrote, “The worst of the poetry being written today is that it is too deliberately and not inevitably English.” In his Pater book he extends this argument. “Only when a word has become necessary to him can a man use it safely; if he try to impress words by force on a sudden occasion, they will either perish of his violence or betray him.” And in an obituary review of Rupert Brooke, the point is taken further. “He did not attain the ‘Shelleyan altitude’ where words have a various radiance rather than meaning.” Such succinct observations are worth more than a dozen essays of exegesis. They were crucial to Thomas’s own eventual poetic development. His two poems entitled “Words” extend the ideas. In poetry, Thomas seeks a diction that is at one with the poet’s normal, daily use, that does not deploy poeticisms or words that the author forces into service. In effect, the “Shelleyan altitude” he speaks of means that the best poetry is unparaphrasable, self-justifying and self-contained. The words exist, beyond their denotative relationships, in a more richly and truly connotative structure. He clarifies the point finely in another review. “The important thing is not that a thing should be small, but that it should be intense and capable of unconsciously symbolic significance” (my italics).
Natural rhythms are extensions of natural vocabulary. Thomas wrote to a friend about Frost’s “absolute fidelity to the postures which the voice assumes in the most expressive intimate speech.” How much truer this is of his own verse than of Frost’s in the early books that Thomas lived to read. His instinctive grasp of form is best expressed in his analysis of Richard Jefferies’s essay structure: “Even if it were all nightmare, the very truthfulness of the agitated voice, rising and falling in honest contemplation of common sorrows, would preserve it, since it is rarely given to the best of men to speak the truth. Its shape is the shape of an emotional mood, and it ends because the emotion ends. It is music, and above, or independent of, logic.” So in the poems it is a truth instinctively apprehended, not intellectually grasped, that we look for.
If we contrast Frost’s with Thomas’s approach to what is similar subject matter, the nature of Thomas’s originality becomes clear. Unlike Thomas’s English country people, Frost’s rural characters have prejudices but no traditions—they seem without roots in their landscape. Thomas’s are extensions of a landscape with a history; they possess a native wisdom and humanity we usually look for in vain in the more competitive, untrusting characters of Frost’s poems. Formally, Thomas’s poems are more subtle than Frost’s early work. Frost used archaisms, and the iambic regularity contributes to the sometimes monotonous movement of his poems. Thomas wrote lines of variable length, many of them neither metrically nor syllabically regular but purely stressed in rhythm. He seldom chose a prescriptive form: the pressure of content, the experience or occasion, determined line lengths, pauses, rhythm and extent. Even his sonnets are irregular. Thomas is most subtle in his line endings. A poem’s rhythm and syntax may seem to indicate a direction of development which, at the beginning of a new line, unexpectedly alters: syntax and line ending are counterpointed. We do not linger over a literary effect; we are surprised deeper into the experience. Take the lines ending in “might” and “beautiful” in this passage from “October”:
The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
The reversal of sense, especially in the words I have italicized but also earlier in the poem, and the tension of rhythm straining our expectation in one direction, while syntax deftly goes in another, creates a unique resonance.
The “I” of Thomas’s poems we must usually take to be the poet himself. If he adopts a persona (he occasionally uses “the child” as speaker) he places the persona’s words in quotation marks. Frequently the “I” is not presented at all, the poem exists with the speaker implicit only in the rhythm. He refuses to deflect his voice through a mask. The theme of solitude is conveyed in an authentic speaking voice—authentic because undecorated. His solitude is cleaner than Walter de la Mare’s: the older poet always has a burden of poetic language and antecedent choking his voice. In “Melancholy” Thomas writes, “... if I feared the solitude / Far more I feared all company.” In “That Girl’s Clear Eyes,” the isolation of the individual in the sealed, unbreachable world of personal experience, which he can never fully share, is expressed, not as in Hardy, as a reductive isolation, but as a solitude brimming with a vain desire to share:
...Every one of us
This morning at our tasks left nothing said,
In spite of many words. We were sealed thus,
Like tombs.
The poems are located in Thomas’s experience, which, if more generous than Hardy’s, is no less solitary.
His most powerful effects are achieved when he contrasts a clearly visualized external world and a tenuously apprehended inner world. His evocations of nature have the vividness not of an internal but of an external landscape. Thomas often locates a poem in a season, in a specific place. The experience is anchored in time and on the map. His daughter Myfanwy recollects actual walks with her father that then became poems. He is concerned with names and naming and, in poems such as “Adelstrop” and “Old Man”—which explore the distance between the name and the thing named—the inadequacy of words to what they name. External and internal worlds coexist, the name (however inappropriate) and the thing named, and both in their coexistence and in the distance between them the resonance of the poems is achieved. “A gate banged in the fence and banged in my head,” one poem says. The experiences elicit and confirm one another.
Thomas’s favorite time setting is a period of transition: twilight, the point of change between seasons, or the present rendered vivid as the point between past and future, one felt as history, the other as potential. The poems mark transitions between emotions as well—the almost dark and almost light, the almost lost and almost found. “Interval” specifically evokes the point of transition:
Gone the wild day:
A wilder night
Coming makes way
For brief twilight.
“The Thrush” is more subjective:
And April I love for what
It was born of, and November
For what it will die in,
What they are and what they are not...
This is winter, viewed from either end.
To approach the truth of a thing, Thomas sometimes strengthens a simile in order to transfer our attention from the thing described to what it is compared with. The effect is Wordsworthian—“The cataracts sound their trumpets from the steep.” The trumpet image is stronger than the image of the cataract and displaces it. Thomas does this with powerfully evocative effect: “The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow / As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.” In another poem he conjures “all the clouds like sheep / On the mountains of sleep.” Thomas takes metaphor back to the landscape: it ceases to be a conceit, finding its place in a larger structure. The nuances of such strong comparisons are always controlled to make us aware of what he calls “unconsciously symbolic significance.”
Thomas, like a cameraman, adopts various spatial perspectives to express a whole experience. We see things from two or three vantages. In “The Watcher,” a man in a hotel looks out at a horse and carter by a ford. He is in turn watched by “stuffed fish, vermin, and king-fishers” in a glass case within. He stands, sealed off by glass both from the living world and a nature artificially preserved. In “Thaw,” perspective provides the central tension. The poem is set between seasons:
Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.
The rooks’ and our own perspectives are contrasted. They “speculate”—both look and prognosticate. The word assumes its fullest sense, including etymology. It stands out as an item of diction because it is Latinate and polysyllabic, because it is drawn from a register quite different from the descriptive, largely monosyllabic register of the rest of the poem. The elm-tops become, to the rooks, a seeding meadow; since the tops of the elms are first to renew, the rooks are seeing spring, while those below, still in winter, can only draw an inference from the birds. Thomas will reverse perspective to emphasize an emotion: “a poor man of any sort, down to a king,” he writes, or in another poem, “The clay first broke my heart, and then my back; / And the back heals not.”
Few of Thomas’s poems are without birds; several have the names of birds as their titles. It is birds’ voices (“A pure thrush word”) and flight that most attract him. Another recurrent image is rain and storms, which wash clean and alleviate tension, sometimes suggesting tears. Though Thomas wrote only a handful of war poems, images obliquely suggesting war and conflict are frequent and integrated into a personal rather than a public utterance. His most characteristic image is of roads, paths, lanes. He praised Hardy for his sense of roads and their poignant significance, how they connect people even when they are apart. He declares: “This is an imaginative fact.”
Roads go on
While we forget and are
Forgotten as a star
That shoots and is gone.
“If” and “as if” in Thomas’s poems suggest a world of similarities parallel to the real world: it may be an inner world, or the past, or some possible future. It is never a fantastic or fabulous world, and if at times it seems a refinement, it is not an escape. Seeming parallels observed being. The world of seeming is conveyed also by a deft use of negatives. Thomas describes or states what is not the case, and thus conveys what could be or what has been, as well as what is. A complex use of explicit and implicit negatives occurs in “Old Man.” Musing on the flower—clematis vitalba—called “old man” and “lad’s-love” (and also “traveler’s joy”), out of the jungle of memory and of sensuous recollection he discovers:
I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and I hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember:
No garden appears, no path, no hoar-green bush
Of Lad’s-Love, or Old Man, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end.
While Hardy is obsessed with what the mind remembers, how memory and the past impinge on the present, Thomas is troubled by what is forgotten, or half remembered. “I can remember much forgetfulness,” Hart Crane says—each thing forgotten is a loss, since the missing experience could enrich, or interpret and resolve, the present:
All lost, as is a childless woman’s child
And its child’s children, in the undefiled
Abyss of what will never be again.
“The past is the only dead thing that smells sweet,” he writes. He recalls not what he has forgotten, only that he has.
Perhaps the most original aspect of his art, after the rhythms, which are so supple and subtly unmetered, is his control of diction, especially verb tenses. His mind can engage an experience whole; the tenses draw together various times scales:
Just hope has gone for ever. Perhaps
I may love other hills yet more
Than this: the future and the maps
Hide something I was waiting for.
When, in the first seven lines of “The Glory,” he wishes to convey complete peace, he withholds the main verb until the eighth line, giving an impression of the bustling stability of nature. In “The Green Roads” he devises a couplet stanza where the first line of each couplet ends with the word “forest,” and the second has an internal rhyme and is end-stopped. The form grows out of a repetitive syntax and the effect is, like the paths themselves, suspended, without apparent origin or destination.
We would need to look to the best of George Herbert’s poetry to find in English a more direct voice, resistant to paraphrase; or poems made of words so totally second nature to the speaker. The lucid, self-contained quality of Thomas’s language and vision, unliterary, uncontrived, are exemplified in the conclusion of “I Never Saw that Land Before”:
I neither expected anything
Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid.
Writing to Helen after Edward Thomas was killed, Robert Frost said, “I want to see him to tell him something. I want to tell him, what I think he liked to hear from me, that he was a poet.” It was a friendship that, later in life, Frost tended to play down. Thomas had been a friendly critic who helped to establish Frost, and he was grateful; and no doubt he quite liked Thomas’s verse, though Frost felt it was too irregular, too obedient to the voice, and in subject matter too narrow, too narrowly English, too insistently dark, like the dark talk of the letters Thomas wrote to Frost from France. Thomas’s poems were not collected until after his death, and it was not until well after the Second World War that they became popular.
Like Thomas, Frost got started rather late as a poet. In 1912 he sailed to England with his wife and four children, without a book to his credit, and with a list of frustrations and disappointments behind him. In 1915 he sailed back, an established poet. But his early unsuccess colored his sense of himself and his achievement. He was left with besetting doubts.
Born in 1874 in San Francisco, his father was a New Englander, his mother a Scot. At the age of eleven, on his father’s death, he was taken to New England. He went to Dartmouth College but hated the academic world and took a job in a mill. He started his undergraduate course again in 1897, at Harvard. In 1899 he left, tried shoemaking, editing a local paper, then farming. At thirty-six he traveled to England, taking a house in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, where he met Thomas.
An English publisher took his first book, A Boy’s Will, in 1913. It is a very English-seeming book, full of archaisms, recognizably poetic forms (it opens with a couplet-sonnet and includes several sonnets) and themes, an unexceptionable Georgian sensibility. What Thomas recognized here was an absence of rhetoric, a plainness, and (wonderful phrase) “a calm eagerness of emotion” which raised the plainness to unique harmonies. This is the language men might use in speaking to men, without eccentricity, occasionally crystallizing in an aphorism. “ ‘Men work together,’ I told him from my heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ ” He has read Hardy, but his poems are more regular than his. He has read Arnold, but his spirit is less philosophical. He has read de la Mare, but his verse is more real than his. The poem that immediately catches in the reader’s memory is the peculiar sonnet “Mowing”:
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself...
Taken out of context, the third line could belong to a poem by Thomas; in context the meter takes hold of and transforms it into the dominant music. In Thomas rural activity is always part of a rural culture; the activities in Frost’s poems are isolated. Whether it is mending a wall, sharpening saws, swinging birches, the activity is singular. When he mows, the action is sufficient in itself, the hay is almost irrelevant. What matters is the body inside action.
In North of Boston Frost has found his own way. The book begins with “Mending Wall,” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” with its homely aphoristic ending, “Good fences make good neighbours.” The second poem is the long eclogue “The Death of the Hired Man,” voices mulling over a rural event.
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave this time.”
“Home,” he mocked gently.
“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
There is a hypnotic veracity about the poem, the way it moves, spinning about words like “home,” “pride,” “night,” “us” and “him,” inclusion and exclusion. The spell is broken by the dramatic closing line. This poem and the other eclogues, including “Home Burial,” are powerfully original, their formal precursors (perhaps not influences) to be found in the poems of Crabbe and in Wordsworth’s “Michael,” their thematic cousins in the ironies of Hardy the novelist as well as the poet. It is a verse that puts much of the Georgian enterprise in the shade: a pastoral that is wholly human, and human in all its tragic diversity of life, love and death.
In his third book, Mountain Interval (1916), several of his famous poems appear, lyric this time as well as eclogue: “The Road Not Taken,” the sonnet “The Oven Bird,” the incomparable “Birches,” and “Out, Out.” The poems avoid the literary. They are wry and wise, not folksy but full of aphorisms. Quiet events and terrible events take place in the daily lives and seasonal cycles of rural New Hampshire. There is loneliness in every poem, and Frost himself lived in fear of madness, his circumstances curiously similar to those of Yvor Winters, whose formalistic wisdom is wrung from the deepest personal anguish. Frost’s biography is a contradictory story, the generous man and the selfish, the jealous and the loving. The craggy old man, windswept, reading a poem at the inauguration of President Kennedy, the nation’s favorite poet, and the man who lived the real life and wrote the letters as well as the poems, hardly seem to coincide. The poem he read at the inauguration, however, tells us who he is as a poet, which is what matters. It was called “The Gift Outright”:
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
The poem “lectures,” it speaks of “us” and “ours.” It speaks of a nation and the relationship between colonists and a land, citizens and the land. In this poem most clearly, but in many of the eclogues, many of the lyrics, too, the poet is speaking and speaking for. Frost, in his grasp of his vocation, is the purest of the heirs of Walt Whitman. He has lost the glow of optimism that marks Whitman, he lives in a declining century, but he retains unalloyed his patriotism and his sense of commonwealth. Whitman had personal secrets, and so did Frost, who fostered a public image of himself as the sage, goodhearted farmer-poet. He was more than that, brighter and darker in his heart. The Frost icon was painstakingly demolished in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography, a veritable dump truck full of paydirt. After the outrage at Thompson’s “treachery” it is true that the poet was reconsidered and demoted. Slowly his reputation has been rebuilt.
Whatever his failings as a man, as a poet he was “made out of democracy,” and one of his popular lectures, which I heard as a schoolboy in Pennsylvania, was called “The Panhandle of Poetry” and was meant to help those of us who didn’t like verse to get a purchase on it. He presented himself as a facilitator: Could we find a way into poetry through “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”? We could, we did.
But the verse we found our way into was not quite as we imagined it would be. It is easy at one level, but once you are inside, the world it makes is full of sinister shadows, unredeemed, unforgiving. There are voices talking, the poet transcribing, trying to be faithful to what he hears and at the same time faithful to his art. To remain faithful to the voices, he has to give them space and range, he has to honor their diction; to remain faithful to his art he must select, perfect, finding rather than imposing order. Aware of things and creatures, with their divergent wills, the poet in the end affirms nothing apart from the fact that nothing can be affirmed. Meaning remains latent. “The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” When Frost says “delight,” he means the delight of sound, and of recognizable context, not the delight of affirmation or jollity. When he says “wisdom” he means not moral lesson but human insight. Wisdom understands what is, it does not judge, it does not generalize. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting”—a wonderful image for the making of the poem and for the reading of it. The good poem takes the poet over, uses the poet to get itself written, surprise by surprise. The good poem is inexhaustible. “Read it a hundred times: it will for ever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance.”
Frost’s pessimism is harsher than Hardy’s. The later poems settle into the blackest moods and, in Randall Jarrell’s words, make “pessimism seem a hopeful evasion.” Though there is no coherent metaphysical structure sustaining Frost’s human vision, there is a sense of evil so ingrained that it is our condition. The poet resigns himself to it. Calm, without heightening of language, without rhetorical exaggeration, he tells it as he believes it to be: the lives, the night skies, the winter weather. The natural language and the self-effacement of the speaker are what make the poems cut so deep, seem so inevitable in their movement. They are uttered by a voice, but not by a defined subjectivity. They have the appearance of objective statement, as though they simply occurred in the language, where we find them.
Frost loved books about isolation: Walden, Robinson Crusoe, essays and fictions in which men live and survive alone, sufficient in themselves. This is a self-centeredness, but the self that he centers on is not a psychology, not a bourgeois “I” but a self that believes it stands for every man—every American man. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz visited Frost in his Vermont cabin—a long walk uphill. “With his white shirt open—is there anything cleaner than a clean white shirt?—his blue eyes innocent, ironic, his philosopher’s head and his farmer’s hands, he looked like an ancient sage, the kind who prefers to observe the world from his retreat. But there was nothing ascetic in his looks, rather a manly sobriety.” He had withdrawn “not to renounce the world but to see it more clearly.” He told Paz that he had written his first poem at the age of fifteen. It was about la noche triste, the night Hernán Cortez fled from the Aztec capital laden with gold: human conquest, greed, defeat.
The Montezumas are no more,
Gone is their regal throne,
And freemen live, and rule, and die,
Where they have ruled alone.
“In each verse,” Frost said to him, “a decision awaits us, and we can’t choose to close our eyes and let instinct work on its own. Poetic instinct consists of an alert tension.” In this sense poetry is “the experience of liberty. The poet risks himself, chances all on the poem’s all with each verse he writes.” Most important, if the poet is to remain free, he must not abandon himself to style. Once a language has been found, the poet must continually fight against it.
Paz visited Frost when the poet was seventy. He lived another nineteen years. He kept reading poetry, his favorite form of understanding, as he said, and the best way of thinking. In an interview he remarked, “Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.” Readers who imagine Frost is an emotional writer misunderstand his pessimism and his wisdom. They have not heard in him, more clearly than they do in William Carlos Williams or Pound or the Projectivists, Whitman’s wise child.
In his last book, published in 1962, the year before he died, he includes “The Gift Outright,” originally published in the 1940s; it had a new pertinence in the age Kennedy’s election seemed to promise. He also included new poems that, coming from one so near extinction, joked perilously with metaphysics. In “Away!” he chooses to die:
Don’t think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Out of the Park.
Forget the myth.
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.
Unless I am wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
“I’m—bound—away!”
And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.
It is hard to detach the poem from the memory of his slow, dismissive voice. He did not laugh at his jokes, yet through his work runs a dark and not unwholesome humor, not to be confused with wit. It is an aspect of his stoicism and a proof of his conditional solidarity.