Modern American Poetry

(^324) Katherine Kearns
himself, who sees even his apprehension of Christ as infiltrated by an
inescapable eroticism:
You know Plato virtually says himself two thousand years before
Freud that the love of the invisible, philosophy is a sublimation of
ta... e◊ro◊tiKa, sex love the mans love not only of fair girls but also
of fair boys. The metaphor with him is always drawn from sex. Is
it ever a single moment with Christ? Great play has been made
with the ladies, not all of them sinless, he had around him.... It’s
reached a point with me where I’ve got to have it out with myself
whether I can think of Christ but as another manifestation of
Dionysus, wine in his beard and the love leer in his eye. Is he even
a little Pagan? Isn’t he pretty nearly all Puritan for better or
worse? (Letters313–14)
Even the most resolute effort of will, Frost seems to imply, cannot divest the
metaphor-making process—“another manifestation of”x—of its eroticism.
Whether or not this letter is meant, as Thompson asserts, to be one of Frost’s
many “provocations that bordered on insolence,” its question appears to be
quite genuine.
By this love—reality equation and by definition of lyric as a mode that
expresses the genuine emotion of the speaker, any man who discovers his
most fundamental lyric self will find desire and its concomitant states:
empowerment and impotence, invigoration and enervation, the entire
dialectic of appetite that mimics (or embodies) the inexhaustible tautologies
of sadomasochism. The echoes one sends out come back virtually engorged
with one’s own virile power—this isthe most of it, the most of what lyric
poetry will inevitably reveal. A cry allegedly constructed, implies “The Most
of It,” to get “not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love,
original response,” the echo is embodied in the glorious beast that swims
back toward the source: “As a great buck it powerfully appeared, / Pushing
the crumpled water up ahead, / And landed pouring like a waterfall.”
Whether or not it is “true” that reality is sex, it is true that it has come for
many to seem so and that Frost is not immune: his reality inevitably displays
itself in sexual terms, with “love” at the center of it all—love as poetry, love
as farming, love as love; poetry in the wild space, metaphor in the brothel,
poetry and love like ice searing on the stove. To speak lyrically is to declare
oneself sexually: the great buck “with horny tread” will have appeared,
“forced the underbrush,” and disappeared: such is the “copy speech” from
Frost’s lips. Yet to speak with candor of desire without the distancing devices