Soundings for Home 175insistent feature of Frost’s poetry and of his writing about poetry. There is
scarcely a single poem which does not ask the reader to imagine a human
character equivalent to the movement of voice, and there is no other poet in
English of whom this is so emphatically the case. Behind the theory of
“voice” and “sentence sounds” that he presented wholly as a literary choice,
behind his related insistence that poetry was as good as it was “dramatic,”
there is a psychological and moral imperative. It can be most simply
described as a revulsion against the idea of human transparency. Under any
and all circumstances he would resist becoming a “transparent eyeball.” It
would mean getting lost. This was never an agreeable prospect for him,
despite little hints to the contrary in “Directive,” and there are therefore no
poems by him of visionary afflatus. There are, however, close to terrifying
poems about wandering off, losing the self, or belonging nowhere. That is
the plight of the men in the poems we have been considering and of the man
in “Acquainted with the Night” who has “out-walked the furthest city light.”
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,But not to call me back or say good-by....The deprived figure in “Desert Places” is faced with another threat of the
same kind: of disappearing without any record of his having been there or
any protest at his going. He is confronted with “a blanker whiteness of
benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express.” We hear their
voices in a kind of wilderness. The situation in which these Frosty figures
find themselves does have an equivalence in Stevens where the observer in
“The Snow Man” “listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds /
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” But the very suppleness
of syntactical maneuverings in these lines, and in much of Stevens’ poetry,
with its intricate patterns of repetition and echoing, is meant to dissuade any
reader from finding evidences in the voice of an imaginable speaker. Both
poets propose a similar plight, but in one it is of life and in the other of the
poetic imagination.
Stevens and Frost part company at the point where Stevens exercises
his belief, with Santayana, that the power of the imagination can create
realities in a poem that can exist in defiance of the evoked realities of a “fact.”
Truth was not required, as it was for Frost and the William James of
Pragmatism, to “grow up inside of” finite experiences; rather, it was