(book) The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost(2001) - Robert Faggen(ed.)

[esse]

(book) The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost(2001) - Robert Faggen(ed.)

(2001)

(2009)

West-Running Brook(1928) 1~13

Introduction ROBERT FAGGEN 
1  “Stay Unassuming”: the Lives of Robert Frost DONALD G. SHEEHY 
2  Frost Biography and A Witness Tree WILLIAM PRITCHARD 
3  Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
4  Frost and the Ancient Muses HELEN BACON 
5  Frost as a New England Poet LAWRENCE BUELL 
6  “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost TIMOTHY STEELE 
7  Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor JUDITH OSTER9  Frost and the Meditative Lyric BLANFORD PARKER 

8  Frost and the Meditative Lyric BLANFORD PARKER 
9  Frost’s Poetics of Control MARK RICHARDSON 
10  Frost’s Politics and the Cold War GEORGE MONTEIRO 
11  “Synonymous with Kept”: Frost and Economics GUY ROTELLA 
12 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe JOHN CUNNINGHAM 

Select bibliography 
Index

Cambridge University Press

------------

지금까지 읽은 프로스트 批評書 중 가장 무게감이 있다 싶은 두 권 중의 하나.

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost

두고 두고 볼 책들.

------------

------------

Introduction - ROBERT FAGGEN 

If there is any truth to Emerson’s aphorism “to be great is to be misunderstood,” then Robert Frost is surely one of the greatest poets. In a century in which some of the most celebrated literature seemed to follow Emerson in reverse – “to be misunderstood (or incomprehensible) is to be great” –Robert Frost’s seductively limpid lines were taken as evidence of the author’s simplicity or, worse, simplemindedness. Frost’s popularity, as well as his willingness in his later years to perform as a hoary public sage, left many among the academically sophisticated suspicious. His adherence to ancient literary traditions and his disdain of political radicalism angered those with more revolutionary temperaments. A reviewer, commenting in The New Yorker on his Collected Poems of 1930, proclaimed that his “popularity can be put down to the fact that he always expressed with imaginative sincerity, American nostalgia for a lately abandoned rural background,” and that he was a bard “always occupied with the complicated task of simply being sincere.”

Frost mischievously invited such criticism. The character of Keeper in his late poem, A Masque of Mercy, said “Some people do not want you to understand them/ I want you to understand me wrong,” a statement that resonates well with Frost’s own poetic practice. Years earlier in 1932 Frost wrote to Sidney Cox: “I have written to keep the curious out of the secret places of my mind in my verse and in my letters to such as you.” (SL, 338) These comments express a doubleness, perhaps even a contradiction in his engagement with his audience; Frost reaches out but also holds back from and subverts his readers’ expectations of sincerity and simplicity. Taking on many of the qualities of a trickster – innocent and sinister at once –Frost wrote “Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.” (SL, 344) While no collection of essays could reach to the secret places of Frost’s heart, this present volume is dedicated to the task of providing a context for and an introduction to the contradictions and tension that lie at the center of his poetry. The greatest innovator in blank verse after Milton and Browning, Frost cultivated an ingeniously sophisticated use of colloquial speech, giving new life to the ancient tradition of pastoral poetry. And few poets have encompassed the realms of religion, science, politics, and philosophy with as much such unassuming subtlety.

Poets have been attuned to the range of Frost’s achievement perhaps longer than critics and academics. Ezra Pound lauded the publication of Frost’s first two books. In the 1950s, Randall Jarrell wrote several essays about “the other Frost,” a world pervaded by hate, fear, yet one inspiring mystery and awe. W. H. Auden found a kindred spirit in Frost’s own desert and lunar landscapes and admired his brilliance in “argufying” in verse. In his parables and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges followed Frost’s ironic twists. American poets including Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver, and Galway Kinnell have found in Frost a crucial foundation. Attentive readers of John Ashbery can note his meditation on the ironies of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and “Directive” in “The System” as well as other works. Frost’s pastoral wit has been of great importance to Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. And the pleasure of his terrors was source of wonder for Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-born Nobel Laureate who first read Frost while a teenager in St. Petersburg. The attentive formalist criticism of Reuben Brower in the 1960s preceded the groundbreaking achievement of Richard Poirier’s Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1976). In the last decade, there has been a flowering of critical attention that has placed Frost in a variety of illuminating intellectual and social contexts, and many of those critics have contributed to this volume.

Debate over Frost’s biography has tended to dominate discussion of his work. Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography presented an image of Frost as a great poet but a megalomaniac who was particularly cruel to his wife, Elinor, and to his children. Critical reviews of Thompson seized on the opportunity to sully Frost’s reputation as America’s national poet and alleged expositor of Yankee virtue. The personal animus and unverifiable anecdote that informs Thompson’s biography received a strong corrective in William Pritchard’s Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984), a work that, among its other achievements, helped refocus attention on the dissonances and complexities of the poetry. Pritchard’s contribution to this volume examines Frost’s A Witness Tree not only in terms of Thompson but also the more recent attempt by Jeffrey Meyers to read the great poetry of this book in lurid terms of Frost’s personal life; he asks what we may gain and lose by biographical readings. Frost did have a strong hand in shaping the story of his life. Donald Sheehy, who has written some of the most exacting essays on Frost biography, explores how Frost’s accounts of his own life affect both biographers and critics. Was Frost a working-class youth who struggled against poverty in his early years? What attitude did he take toward laborers in the Lawrence, Massachusetts mill, and how can his experience be read in terms of a poem such as “A Lone Striker”? How attached was he to the farm life of New England? Frost eventually abandoned farming, in which he was neither terribly interested nor successful, and moved the family to England where he engaged Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats and published his first two books, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston – at the age of forty.

“Hugger-mugger farming” may not have been Frost’s greatest love, but he knew it, and, more important, he knew many who lived that vanishing existence. But Frost also knew botany, astronomy, natural science, and thousands of lines of poetry, modern and ancient. Frost himself lived the existence of a farmer-poet, a tradition that extends back to the Roman poets Virgil and Horace, and his landscapes and depictions of country things are as much informed by the mythology of pastoral literature – from Virgil through Milton, Wordsworth, and Thoreau. “For Once, Then, Something,” and “Spring Pools” owe their richness in part to Frost’s engagement with the shifting representations of Narcissus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Thoreau’s Walden. Pastoral literature has always been a mode of examining questions of political and social hierarchy, a form associated with simplicity but masking complexity. Frost’s profound dialogue with the tradition of classical and Biblical pastoral literature is the subject of my own essay; his devotion to ancient Greek and Roman conceptions of poetry and poetic inspiration – Horace, Virgil, Ovid, Euripides – is the subject of Helen Bacon’s “Frost and the ancient muses.” Only a classicist of Bacon’s immense learning could perceive the subtlety of Frost’s use of the ancients. Though Frost’s poetry invites longing for a lost Eden or Arcadia, his vision constantly resists the temptations of nostalgia while refusing to make grandiose claims about the difficulties of modernity. In fact, Frost’s lover’s quarrel with the spirit and substance of modern science distinguishes his vision of nature and man’s place in it from almost all other modern poets.

Frost was hardly dismissive of his New England predecessors; he praised Edwin Arlington Robinson for his practice of “the old-fashioned way to be new.” Frost’s own newness is subtle, rarely seeking after shocking effect. The possibilities of ordinary language and public discourse fascinated him as he developed a suspicion and even contempt for the pretensions of religious and philosophical obscurity. The inexhaustible complexity of surfaces, the psychological interplay of individuals in dialogue, fascinated him as much as the brooding intimations of inaccessible depths. Lawrence Buell has shown the extent to which Frost conceived of himself in relation to a local tradition of New England poetry and its rhetoric that includes Dickinson and Emerson as well as Longfellow.

Any discussion of Frost has to be attentive to his ideas about prosody and his emphasis on “the sound of sense.” In a letter to a friend, Frost said “I give you a new definition of a sentence as a sound upon which words are strung.” (SL, 110) Frost believed not in making new speech tones but in capturing the essential and eternal tones of voice and playing them against the strictness of the pentameter line. Frost realized what Wordsworth had proposed, “to adopt the very language of men.” But he created some of the most stunning effects in “strict” and “loose” iambic lines. Timothy Steele has been studying Frost’s prosodic practice for years, and his essay reveals how to hear Frost’s lines as an essential aspect of reading them. Frost himself insisted not on “reading” a poem but on “saying” it, keeping open the potential vectors of meaning. Depending on how you take the tone of a phrase or sentence, the meaning of the poem shifts and beguiles keeping its freshness while still maintaining the tension and pleasure created by the expectations of meter. Though, as Steele shows, Frost’s idea of capturing the “sound of sense” is both elusive and difficult. Though we have been blessed with many recordings of Frost reading his work, his public presence always presented the risk of reducing Frost’s stunning multivocality to a single tone. The voice that begins a Frost poem is not necessarily the one that ends it, and a reader has to be alert to ever-shifting tones of his verse.

As extensively as Frost thought about voice, he also thought about the nature of metaphor. Frost argued that thought was dependent upon figurative language, not as mere decoration but as the basis of conceptualization. He was also aware of how much metaphors – evolution –for example, had come to dominate aspects of our culture and do much of our thinking for us. Judith Oster maps Frost’s thinking about metaphor including poems that address the question of metaphor directly – “Maple,” “Birches,” “Revelation,” and “The Silken Tent.”

Frost saw poetry as a way of psychological survival in a chaotic universe. His poetry represents a continual dialogue between control and chaos, and he saw poetry as creating “a momentary stay against confusion,” a something facing the nothing. The poetic act for Frost provides order and form set somewhat heroically against chaos, “a figure of the will braving alien entanglements.” As he wrote in a letter to The Amherst Student: “The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that this should be so?”(CPPP, 740). Schopenhauer, Darwin, and James helped form and inform some of Frost’s cosmology and psychology. Man attempts control in a universe that ignores him but the challenge provides some small recompense. But if there is in his poetic craft a rage for order, there is also a devilish love of chaos and subversion of the kind of control that borders on madness and tyranny. The essays of Mark Richardson and Blanford Parker explore the ways Frost’s poems satisfy and confound our desire for order, purpose, and design. Frost took pleasure in chaos and waste, threats that inspired and limited the creation of order and meaning. No other twentieth-century poet gave so much force to the dialogue and tension of men and women. He and his fiancée Elinor were co-valedictorians at their high school commencement; his poetry often appears a continuation of her talk: “Dialogue as the Life Force.” Such great blank verse narratives as “Home Burial,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “In the Home Stretch,” and the monologues “A Servant to Servants” and “Wild Grapes” present us with a new range of possibility for lyric poetry. Our propensity for taking sides becomes confounded by Frost’s subtle and shifting representation of gender. Frost’s women can no more readily be characterized than men. Frost found beauty in the unresolved conflict of equally worthy principles.

Equally misunderstood are Frost’s politics, and his allegiances were complex and often seemingly contradictory. When Frost wrote that in life and poetry “strongly spent is synonymous with kept,” he played on economic metaphors that seemed associated with “the trial by marketplace” but with irreverence toward its importance. Justice and mercy, freedom and equality, design and chaos remain unresolved tensions in his political, religious, and poetic thought. Frost loved the possibilities of individuality and freedom but recognized equally the limitations of environment; he regarded enforced egalitarianism with contempt but looked suspiciously and often with fear at excesses of the self-obsessed. The essays of Mark Richardson, Guy Rotella, and George Monteiro reveal the tension in Frost’s responses to democracy, capitalism, the New Deal, and the Cold War – a passion for conflict and risk combined with a terrifying sense of limitation and ultimate annihilation. This tension can be seen in well-known lyrics such as “The Road Not Taken” but also in the stunning dramatic narratives, “The Ax-Helve,” “The Self-Seeker,” “The Housekeeper,” and “The Black Cottage.”

Frost looms as a giant figure in American literature. Most know or remember him for a few remarkable short lyrics, probably “Fire and Ice,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The essays in this volume discuss broad formal and thematic questions in Frost’s work but also attempt to call attention to its great range –from dramatic monologues and narrative dramas to meditative lyrics. Though Frost seems an inescapable presence, his poetry represents a great achievement in negative capability. John Cunningham’s concluding essay shows the extent of that negativity as human absence becomes, paradoxically, a presence in Frost’s poems. Frost disappears in the multivocal dramas of his poetry and reemerges transformed in threatening and strange persistence of otherness. We have Frost’s letters, his terse and brilliant prose essays, and notebooks on which to draw for insight. But it is Frost’s poetry that constantly challenges readers with contradictions, ambiguity, and uncertainty. The contributors hope these essays will take readers forward and farther into the dark of some of the most compelling poetry ever written.

The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost(Introduction) - Robert Faggen.pdf

73.69KB

-------------

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 

I. Works by Frost

The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963. 
Prose Jottings of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Hyde Cox. Lunenburg, VT: Northeast Kingdom Publishers, 1982. 
Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays. Ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1995. 
Selected Letters of Robert Frost. Ed. Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

II. Interviews with Frost

Cook, Reginald L. Robert Frost: A Living Voice. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. 
Francis, Robert. Frost: A Time to Talk: Conversations and Indiscretions. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. 
Lathem, Edward Connery, ed. Interviews with Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. 
Mertins, Louis. Robert Frost: Life and Talks-Walking. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. 
Smythe, Daniel. Robert Frost Speaks. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1966.

III. Biographies and memoirs

Anderson, Margaret Bartlett. Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963. 
Burnshaw, Stanley. Robert Frost Himself. New York: G. Braziller, 1986. 
Cox, Sidney. A Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost. Introduction by Robert Frost. New York: New York University Press, 1957. 
Francis, Lesley Lee. The Frost Family’s Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994. 
Gould, Jean. Robert Frost: The Aim Was Song. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1964. 
Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. 
Muir, Helen. Frost in Florida: A Memoir. Miami: Valiant Press, 1995. 
Munson, Gorham B. Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense. New York: George H. Doran, 1927. 
Newdick, Robert. Newdick’s Season of Frost: An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost. Ed. William A. Sutton. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976. 
Pritchard, William, H. Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. 
Reeve, E. D. Robert Frost in Russia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1964. 
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960. 
Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. 
Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970. 
Thompson, Lawrance, and R. H. Winnick. Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. 
Walsh, John Evangelist. Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

IV. Criticism

Bagby, George. Robert Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. 
Barron, Jonathan and Earl Wilcox, eds. Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. 
The Robert Frost Review. Published annually by The Robert Frost Society. 
Barry, Elaine, ed. Robert Frost on Writing. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973. 
Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott. Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. 
Brower, Reuben. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. 
Budd, Louis and Edwin Cady, eds. On Frost: The Best of American Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. 
Cook, Reginald L. The Dimensions of Robert Frost. New York: Rinehart, 1958. 
Cox, James M., ed. Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962. 
Cramer, Jeffrey S. Robert Frost Among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996. 
Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 
Frost, Robert. Centennial Essays. Compiled by the Committee on the Frost Centennial of the University of Southern Mississippi. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1974–78. 
Gerber, Philip L., ed. Critical Essays on Robert Frost. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 
Jarrell, Randall. No Other Book: Selected Essays. Ed. Brad Leithauser. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Paperback edn., HarperCollins, 1999. 
Jost, Walter. “Civility and Madness in Robert Frost’s ‘Snow’,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 39 (Spring, 1997), 27–64. 
“Ordinary Language Brought to Grief: Robert Frost’s ‘Home Burial,’” in Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein. Ed. Walter Jost and Kenneth Dauber. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001. 
Kearns, Katherine. Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 
Kemp, John C. Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. 
Kilcup, Karen L. Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998. 
Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Durham: Duke University Press, 1975. 
Lynen, John F. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1960. 
Mauro, Jason. “Frost and James: The Gaps I Mean.” South Carolina Review. 28 (1998), 2, p. 12. 
Monteiro, George. Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. 
Nitchie, George W. Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Durham: Duke University Press, 1960. 
Oster, Judith. Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. 
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. 
Richardson, Mark ed. The Ordeal of Robert Frost. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. 
Rotella, Guy. Reading and Writing Nature. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991. 
Sabin, Margery. “The Fate of the Frost Speaker.” Raritan 2 (Fall 1982), 128–39. 
Sheehy, Donald G. “The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost.” American Literature, October, 1986, 393–409. 
“(Re) Figuring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938–1942.” New England Quarterly, June 1990, 179–231. 
Tharpe, Jac, ed. Frost: Centennial Essays, vols. I & II. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1976. 
Thompson, Lawrance. Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost. New York: Russell & Russell, 1942. 
Thornton, Richard. Recognition of Robert Frost: Twenty-fifth Anniversary. New York: Henry Holt, 1937. 
Wagner, Linda W., ed. Robert Frost: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin and Company, 1977. 
Wilcox, Earl, ed. His “Incalculable Influence on Others”: Essays on Robert Frost in Our Time. Victoria: English Literary Studies, 1994.

-----------------------

- “Some people do not want you to understand them/ I want you to understand me wrong,”

- “I have written to keep the curious out of the secret places of my mind in my verse and in my letters to such as you.”

- “Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark.

- “to be great is to be misunderstood,”

- If there is any truth to Emerson’s aphorism “to be great is to be misunderstood,” then Robert Frost is surely one of the greatest poets.

- A reviewer, commenting in The New Yorker on his Collected Poems of 1930, proclaimed that his “popularity can be put down to the fact that he always expressed with imaginative sincerity, American nostalgia for a lately abandoned rural background,” and that he was a bard “always occupied with the complicated task of simply being sincere.”

- His adherence to ancient literary traditions and his disdain of political radicalism angered those with more revolutionary temperaments.

- Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing

- Pastoral literature has always been a mode of examining questions of political and social hierarchy, a form associated with simplicity but masking complexity.

- Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984)

- “I give you a new definition of a sentence as a sound upon which words are strung.”

- “to adopt the very language of men.”

- Depending on how you take the tone of a phrase or sentence, the meaning of the poem

- But he created some of the most stunning effects in “strict” and “loose” iambic lines.

- Helen Bacon’s “Frost and the ancient muses.”

“the sound of sense.”

- Frost’s lover’s quarrel with the spirit and substance of modern science

- “the old-fashioned way to be new.”

- Frost disappears in the multivocal dramas of his poetry and reemerges transformed in threatening and strange persistence of otherness. We have Frost’s letters, his terse and brilliant prose essays, and notebooks on which to draw for insight.

- Frost took pleasure in chaos and waste, threats that inspired and limited the creation of order

- “The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration.

- shifts and beguiles keeping its freshness while still maintaining the tension and pleasure created by the expectations of meter.

- As extensively as Frost thought about voice, he also thought about the nature of metaphor.

- he poetic act for Frost provides order and form set somewhat heroically against chaos, “a figure of the will braving alien entanglements.”

- Frost saw poetry as a way of psychological survival in a chaotic universe.

- His poetry represents a continual dialogue between control and chaos, and he saw poetry as creating “a momentary stay against confusion,” a something facing the nothing.

- Justice and mercy, freedom and equality, design and chaos remain unresolved tensions in his political, religious, and poetic thought. Frost loved the possibilities of individuality and freedom but recognized equally the limitations of environment; he regarded enforced egalitarianism with contempt but looked suspiciously and often with fear at excesses of the self-obsessed.

- “strongly spent is synonymous with kept,”

- Frost found beauty in the unresolved conflict of equally worthy principles.

- Our propensity for taking sides becomes confounded by Frost’s subtle and shifting representation of gender. Frost’s women can no more readily be characterized than men.