167Frost’s poetry of “home” is a dramatization of the human costs and human
benefits of decorum. As a reader becomes more intimate with the poems,
however, it is hard to resist what seem like solicitations to think of social or
psychological or domestic decorums as somehow synonymous with poetic
ones. How much “extravagance” is possible within decorum; how much can
be mediated by it; what extremities are induced by the constraints or failures
of mediation; and what, in case of failure, are the prospects beyond decorum
or mediation except nothingness or madness? These are issues central to
English poetry, especially since 1800, and to the great Americans, Whitman
and Stevens. One of the reasons Frost has not been taken as seriously as
Stevens is in part explained by the fact that though he can be found working
within some of the same dialectical oppositions, he chose resolutely, even
defiantly, to work also within the circumstantially or topically familiar, as if
from a list of the hundred most famous poetic and novelistic situations. So
insistently ordinary, so particularized is the domestic drama of his work that
it appears to be written againstthat kind of poetry which is an interpretation
of itself and of its potentialities. Of some importance, too, when it comes to
the understandably Anglophilic bias of literary critics, is the fact that Frost
chose a landscape—for the early poems it is the intervales of the White
Mountains and the countryside around Derry in southern New Hampshire;
RICHARD POIRIERSoundings for Home
FromRobert Frost: The Work of Knowing. © 1977 by Oxford University Press, Inc.