Modern American Poetry

(^174) Richard Poirier
dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil
landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man
beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.
Frost’s whole theory of “sentence sounds” is implicitly a way of taking
an exception to transcendental vision and to the Sublime as an alternative to
the discovery of barrenness: “I cultivate ... the hearing imagination rather
than the seeing imagination though I should not want to be without the
latter” (Thompson, Letters,p. 130). Barrenness, poverty, the mind of winter
are posited as conditions of life and of poverty by both Frost and Stevens. But
while in Stevens these exist in a tradition that passed from Emerson through
Santayana, with a dialectic weighted toward sublimity and supreme fiction,
in Frost, following a tradition that passed from Emerson through William
James, these same conditions are held within a quite different dialectical
tension. “Home” exerts such a simultaneous restraint on and incentive to
“extra-vagance” that anyone who feels it must become pugnacious in the
expressed need for ventilation, for some degree of imaginative license. Hence
the sharply more individuated and personalized tone of Frost’s poems. In
that respect, “The Wood-Pile” is perhaps more quiescent than “Desert
Places,” in that it does not, or cannot, go on to some final combative
assertion of a confronted self, the sort of thing we hear in
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
The self-assertion here is implicit in the slangy schoolyard tone of
“They cannot scare me” as it applies itself to something akin to Eliot’s
“vacant interstellar spaces.” It is typical of Frost that he would bring, without
any signaling, a fashionable-sounding phraseology of self-diminishment into
combination with that kind of vernacular voice which draws its strength from
a sense of rootedness, no matter how unfertile the soil. “Home” is the place
where one might hear a phrase like “they cannot scare me”; the anxious
tension that goes into that sound is what induced Frost to change the second
line of this passage from its original form in the first printing (The American
Mercury,April, 1934), where it read “Between stars—on stars void of human
races.” Frost settled on a sound altogether more vernacular and idiomatic
and which got rid of the literarily portentous word “void.”
Voice is the most important, distinguishing, and conspicuously