Modern American Poetry

(^168) Richard Poirier
for the later ones, the Taconic Mountains around Shaftesbury and the Green
Mountains around Ripton in central Vermont—which does not have
anything storied about it. Even Emerson complained in his “Ode Inscribed
to W.H. Channing” (and Frost repeats the complaint in his poem “New
Hampshire”) that “The God who made New Hampshire / Taunted the lofty
land with little men.” It was a landscape without poetic or sublime
associations and Frost got credit for being able even to report on a region
and a people so uninspiring.
Frost was treated mostly as the brilliant poet of the average human lot,
and that attitude continues (despite earlier recognitions from Robert Graves
and Edwin Muir, from Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and especially
Jarrell, and also from a more recent critic like James Cox) to stand in the way
of efforts to give him credit for being a great poet precisely because it was
within that human lot that he found the glories and plights of poetry itself.
It is difficult even now to get accustomed to this combination, no
matter how many precedents are brought to bear from Wordsworth or
Coleridge. Whenever there is a poem by one of these three involving
“home” and “extra-vagance,” there is provision for a place where the poet or
central figure belongs, a kind of home base, and for something beyond, on
which the figure gazes while he is out walking or while he is sitting on a
hillside. Both the viewer and the view are made to seem at least latently
mythological either by being put in a reciprocally enhancing relationship to
one another or by suggesting the degree to which human consciousness
prevents rather than assists such a relationship.
And yet it is obvious that Wordsworth and Coleridge have proved far
more accommodating than has Frost to critics who like their poems to be
about poetry. The reason, I think, is that while it is possible, as we have
already seen, to infer from Frost’s poems an interest in the drama of poetic
“making,” he is some of the time even tiresomely determined not to
surrender the human actuality of his poems to a rhetoric by which action is
transformed immediately into ritual, as in the account of the boy stealing the
boat in The Prelude.Where such enlargement of rhetoric occurs in Frost, it
redounds almost invariably to the disadvantage of the speaker; he must face
the opposition both of nature and of the decorum, however pliant, which
Frost establishes between himself and the reader. There are “over-reachers”
in Frost, like Meserve in “Snow,” but Meserve is never allowed to “sound”like
one, and the “extra-vagance” of his conduct is accepted by his neighbors with
an admiration that is both begrudging and impatient, until they can get him
safely back home. Frost sets up obstacles to his own capacities for
transcendence, and I can think of no poem in which he allows himself