As It Is

To the Amhrst Student(1935) - Robert Frost When the editors of The Amherst  Student sent greetings to Frost for his "sixtieth" (actually his sixty-first ) birthday in 193S, Frost wrote this  reply,  which  was  printed  in  that  undergraduate  paper  on  2S March, 193S. It is one of his most memorable statements on form as a philosophical  necessity.  It is very very kind of the Student to be showing sympathy with me for my age. But sixty is only a pretty good age. It is not advanced enough. The great thing is to be advanced. Now ninety would be really well along and something to be given credit for.  But speaking of ages, you will often hear it said that the age of the world we live in is particularly bad. I am impatient of such talk. We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world's history. Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this. Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one. And so on back through literature.  I say they claimed  the  honor  for their ages. They claimed it rather for themselves. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobi lized by God.  All ages of the world are bad-a great deal worse anyway than Heaven. If they weren't the world might just as well be Heaven at once and have it over with. One can safely say after from six to thirty thousand years of experience that the evident design is a situation here in which it will always be about equally hard to save your soul. Whatever progress may be taken to mean, it can't mean making the world any easier a place in which to save your soul-or if you dislike hearing your soul mentioned in open meeting, say your decency, your integrity.  Ages may vary a little. One may be a little worse than another. Bur it is nor possible to get outside the age you are in to judge it exactly. Indeed it is as dangerous to try to get outside of anything as large as an age as it would be to engorge a  donkey. Witness the many who in the attempt have suffered a dilation from which the tissues and the muscles of the mind have never been able to recover natural shape. They can't pick up anything delicate or small any more. They can't use a pen. They have to use a type-writer. And they  gape  in agony. They  can  write huge shapeless novels, huge gobs of raw sincerity bellowing with pain and that's all that they can write.  Fortunately we don't need to know how bad the age is. There is something we can always be  doing without reference to  how good or how bad the age is. There is at least so much good in the world that it admits of form and the making of form. And not only admits of it, bur calls for it. We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of form in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches it's height of form  and through us exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. I think it must stroke faith the right way. The artist, the poet, might be expected to be the most aware of such assurance, but it is really everybody's sanity to feel it and live by it. Fortunately, too, no forms are more engrossing, gratifying, comforting. staying, than those lesser ones we throw off like vortex rings of smoke, all our individual enterprise and needing nobody's coopera tion: a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem. For these we haven't to get a team together before we can play.  The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the back ground any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so? Unless we are novelists or economists we don't worry about this confusion; we look out on it  with an  instrument or  tackle it  to  reduce it. It is  partly because we are afraid it might prove too much for us and our blend of democratic-republican-socialist-communist-anarchist party. But it is more because we like it, we were born to it, born used to it and have practical reasons for wanting it there. To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing. If I were a Platonist I should have to consider it, I suppose, for how much less it is than every thing. --------------------