The Intolerable Touch

COMPLETE POEMS OF ROBERT FROST [642 pp.)--Holf ($6).

Since Robert Frost is only 74 and sound as a hickory ax handle, this book is not likely to be his last. It does, however, contain his lifework up to the present, including several poems not printed in book form. And though this is not the sense intended, the title is correct about the poems: almost every one of them is complete as a work of art. Moreover, Frost is a complete poet, one of the few who ever stuck it out as such in a tough country for poets. Frost's reputation has been secure for 35 years; he is America's most popular living poet of the first rank; but only lately, and to the keenest readers, has he begun to seem as subtle, as haunting and hurting a poet as in truth he is.

The New England in which this slow man got his seasoning was the land of what Henry James called "the classic abandoned farm of the rude forefather who had lost patience with his fate." In 1906, Frost had been farming for six years outside Deny, N.H., and had begun to teach school. He showed his verse to his wife, who liked it but never praised it. Frost kept this up until 1912, when he was 37; only then did he have enough money to buy passage to England for his family. As a poet he had no name whatever.

Robert Frost was 38 before he ever sat down with another poet to talk about poetry. That was in London; the poet was Ezra Pound; the poetry was Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy." "I remember," Frost said many years later, "the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over the fourth 'thought' in

Miniver thought, and thought, and

thought, And thought about it.

Three 'thoughts' would have been 'adequate,' as the critical praise word then was. There would have been nothing to complain of if it had been left at three. The fourth made the intolerable touch of poetry. With the fourth, the fun began." Few others but Frost would have seen and described the quality of true poetry as "intolerable" and "fun" at the same time.

For the Ages. Frost's first two books, A Boy's Witt and North of Boston, came out in England first; published soon after in the U.S., they had made him famous before his return in 1915. They were masterly first books; the poet's own obscurity had delayed them until he was almost 40, his early experience digested, his resolutions tempered, his vanity under control, his craft long practiced and well in hand. He had wrought and sweated to make himself intelligible, and had done it well enough by that time to know that the results would last. I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In dramatic monologues and dialogues Frost never improved on these early works. One of them, "The Generations of Men," is as sad and lovely an American romance as anything of Hawthorne's; two others, "A Servant to Servants" and "Home Burial," are as torturing records of the life of men with women as New England could provide. Frost went back to farming near Franconia, N.H., and in 1924 won his first Pulitzer Prize with New Hampshire. After that the sturdy, deliberate man with the tousled head and bright blue eyes became a public figure.

The cause of Poet Frost is the cause of Emerson, Thoreau, and all the spiritual freeholders who fought for life against the slamming and banging, the smoke and slums and sham, the fragmentation of experience in an urbanized and industrialized republic. The essence of what all his work affirms and pleads for is the value of wholeness--the union of lives in marriage, the union of form and substance in art; beauty in ordinary things, spirit in matter, the past in the present; the dead remembered, nature cherished. All this got across to the hearts of the harried people who read Frost and loved him as a sensitive fighter for what any heart desires:

But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight; Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future's sakes.

Vain & Smug? New England, Frost's home country and his chosen scene, was a lens through which he brought the world to focus in his best work. During the '30s, the tremendous pull of social distress and reforming talk loosened his roots a little. The immediate result was a number of didactic poems in which dislike for New Dealing glibness led him into a conservative glibness of his own, likened, by the unkind, to that of Calvin Coolidge. Even sympathetic critics suspected that Frost's work was done. Some people found him vain and smug. Wrote Critic Louise Bogan of his Collected Poems (1939):

"His good sense has kept him from running any of his tendencies into the ground. That same good sense, on the other hand, has kept him from developing, in any broad way, beyond his first work . . . One reads . . . waiting for a crack of upheaval, with some roughness of unforeseen growth thereafter." The fact was that an upheaval had by that time taken place.

Myth & Maple Sirup. The poems in A Witness Tree, in 1942, were the work of a more profound and at times a triumphant Frost. He had lost his wife in 1938; love, grief and faith have never sung more perfectly, or more discreetly, together than in "I Could Give All to Time," "The Wind and the Rain," and other poems affected by that loss. He had worked his way out of whatever limits of time & space New England had imposed on him, and could write with austere and touching grandeur about the American experience from a vantage point beyond it:

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.

Frost was, at last, going back in time to the richly and fearfully storied past; he had taken the way that only the greatest modern men of letters--Joyce, Mann,, Eliot--have been able to take without being engulfed, into the mystery of the long ago that becomes myth. Though he took his humor and toughness with him, his Grail-poem, "Directive" (1947), has a sorrowful magic like nothing he had written before. If this was the old man's intolerable touch of poetry, A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) carried on his vein of fun.

Last week Robert Frost was on his farm near Ripton, Vt., where this spring, with his partner, Stafford Dragon, he manufactured 60 gallons of fine maple sirup. He had also, in the course of the school year, visited and lectured at 20 colleges; but his Homer Noble farm (named for a former owner) is where he spends the longest stretch of the year. He passes his time there, reading history and biography, sometimes working around the rugged mountain farm. When he gets to the Homer Noble farm the arrival is, in a geographical way, something like the one he wrote about not long ago in another sense:

I could give all to Time except--except

What I myself have held. But why declare

The things forbidden that while the Customs slept

I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,

And what I would not part with I have kept.

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