Modern American Poetry

(^270) Edward Hirsch
our resources a little against outside influences on our literature and
particularly against those among us who would like nothing better than to
help us lose our identity.”^51 Frost’s two books in the twenties—New
Hampshire(1923) and West-Running Brook(1928)—are a consolidating of
resources, a strong affirmation of his local identity. For several years after he
returned to New Hampshire in 1915, Frost made a renewed effort to insert
himself into the tradition of New England regional literature. His most
immediate precursor in that tradition was E.A. Robinson, who in the
twenties was primarily engaged in a series of long, ultimately unsuccessful
narrative poems. New Hampshireis one of Frost’s most self-consciously
regional books. It announces his commitment to the local, to “the need of
being versed in country things,” to a state which has “one of everything as in
a showcase” (“New Hampshire”). The debilitating aspect of the regional
tradition can be seen in the way Frost assumed the pose and role of the
homiletic Yankee sage, acting not as an observer and analyst, as he had done
in the great narrative poems of North of Boston,but as a patriotic spokesman
for the region.
Against these editorializing tendencies one may pose such dark, playful,
and compelling lyrics of the twenties as “Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow,”
“Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “To E.T.,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening,” “To Earthward,” and “Not to Keep” (from New Hampshire) and
“Spring Pools,” “The Freedom of the Moon,” and “Acquainted with the
Night” (from West-Running Brook),as well as the major dramatic dialogues
“The Witch of Coos” and “West-Running Brook.” These poems enact
genuine dilemmas and contraries, confrontations with nothingness, playful
differences in perspective, dark tensions, conflicts, and interactions between
the inner self and the outer world. They seem spoken by a person in a scene
or setting, and they register the colloquial nuances of a speaking voice played
off against the rhythms of a traditional metric. As Frost said in the preface to
his one-act play, A Way Out(1929), “Everything written is as good as it is
dramatic.”^52
One of the central subjects of Frost’s lyrics in the twenties is the
longing for absorption or escape from the self against the desire to maintain
the boundaries and integrity of that self. The full burden of loneliness is
expressed in “Acquainted with the Night,” in which the speaker, who walks
away from home and town and is not called back by any one, is surrounded
by an isolating darkness. Frost’s acquaintance with the desolations of night
and the gloom of consciousness closely parallels Stevens’s understanding of
the “mind of winter,” the termless terms of nature, in “The Snow Man.” The
desire to escape consciousness and find peace in oblivion is at the center of