Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 341- Thompson, The Later Years,268.
- An ungenerous reading of Frost’s invariable undercutting of his speakers would tie
in with his preoccupation with “the middle,” both spatially and intellectually.
Economically, he wishes to be received as a popular poet read and bought by thousands
and thousands, but he achieves this at some cost (see Lentricchia, “Lyric,” 63–88). See too
Earl J. Wilcox, “Psyching-Out the Public and His Contemporaries: The Curious Case of
Robert Frost,” McNeese Review31 (1984–6): 3–13. Wilcox argues that Frost is an example
of what Dwight MacDonald called “Masscult”: “The technicians of masscult at once
degrade the public by treating it as an object ... and at the same time flatter it and pander
to its taste and ideas by taking them as the criterion for reality.” The public, says
MacDonald, “demands a secret rebate; he must play the game—their game—...” Seen in
this context, these compromised speakers of Frost’s, who are so often inescapably Frost at
the same time that they are not Frost, may be seen as the inevitable result of such self-
abuse. - Poirier, The Work of Knowing,86.
- See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea,trans. R.B. Haldane and J.
Kemp (New York: Dolphin, 1961), 268–79, on music as, rather than a copy of Ideas, a copy
of the will itself. See too Robert P. Morgan, “Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical
Modernism,” Critical Inquiry10 (March 1984): 442–61, as he locates these ideas about
music, articulated in philosophical terms by Schopenhauer but also widely shared in the
nineteenth century, relative to painting and poetry. - See Lentricchia, “Resentments,” for evidence of this perception of lyric as too
“feminine.” - Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love,trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ.
Press, 1983), 8. - Ibid., 8.
- “A Masque of Reason,” ll. 222–5: “Society can never think things out; / It has to
see them acted out by actors, / Devoted actors at a sacrifice— / The ablest actors I can lay
my hands on.” - See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure,89–91.
- Poirier, The Work of Knowing,191–2.
- D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic(New York: Methuen, 1970), 31.
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition,trans. Brian Massumi and Geoff
Bennington (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 22. - Ibid., xii.
- See Frost on “The Lockless Door,” in Letters,468.
- See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition,40, on Wittgenstein’s use of the metaphor
of language as “an ancient city” and his application of the paradox “How many houses or
streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?” See too Frost’s “Directive.” - Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry
of Pope, 1731–1743(Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), locates Pope in a landscape of
conscious artificiality, one that Romanticism would utterly displace. Yet Frost does not
completely abandon markers of civilization: the “garden” is always at an advanced stage of
deconstruction. - See Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe,trans. James Harkness (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 21, on the double subversion of the calligram. - See Norman N. Holland, “The Brain of Robert Frost,” New Literary History15,