Modern American Poetry

(^178) Richard Poirier
meeting, in Florida during the spring of 1935, Stevens had apparently
complained that Frost simply wrote too much. “ ‘You have written on
subjects that were assigned,’ is what he meant,” Frost remarked in March
1935 in a talk at the University of Miami (Florida) in apparent allusion to
Stevens. Frost’s answer, if he gave one, can be guessed from what he says a
year later, 12 March 1936, in a letter to L.W. Payne, Jr.:
Oh I mustnt forget I wanted to correct you in a matter.
Somewhere I found you saying lately that my formula of twenty-
five years ago—Common in experience and uncommon in
writing—meant that the subject should be common in experience
but that it should be written up in an uncommon style. I believe
that may be Munson’s mistake. [Frost is referring to a book by
Gorham B. Munson: Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good
Sense(New York, 1927).] You’re not to blame for it. The subject
should be common in experience and uncommon in books is a
better way to put it. It should have happened to everyone but it
should have occurred to no one before as material. That’s quite
different. I was silent as to the need of giving old themes a new
setting of words. I am silent still (Thompson, Letters,pp. 426–27).
What is “common in experience”? Obviously it could be said that one
common experience is “impoverishment,” as in a run-down house, and that
another is the attempt at solace, as in painting the house. And it could also
be said that these “experiences” can be found as frequently in Stevens as in
Frost. But the difference is that in Stevens they are not “common”; it can be
said without disparagement that they are instead literary and theoretical;
they are states of poetic rather than of social consciousness; they call for
actions of mind rather than actions of bodies. The leaves which fall in Frost’s
“The Leaf-Treader” are not the Shelleyan leaves of Stevens’ “Domination of
Black,” and the response to them, as a threat of death, is in Frost not a
swirling rhetoric of cosmic incantatory fear but rather a pep talk to the
speaker’s knee: “But it was no reason I had to go because they had to go. /
Now up, my knee, to keep on top of another year of snow.” Similarly, the
“dirty house” in Stevens’ “A Postcard from the Volcano” gets at the end
“smeared with the gold of the opulent sun,” while the “old old house” in
Frost’s “The Investment” is “renewed with paint” because the man and wife
want to “get some color and music out of life.”
So “common” is the experience in Frost that the phrasing of that last
line is purposefully clichéd. Or rather it is not so much clichéd as an allusion