Modern American Poetry

(^330) Katherine Kearns
disciplinarian relationship to the word rather than, like Keats, seeking to find
the exact, lightly woven “sandals ... / To fit the naked foot of poesy”: “her”
word is necessarily not Frost’s entire, manly message. Prosodically rigorous,
Frost is committed to a nearly punitive relationship with language in which
he sees himself as one who “like[s] to drag and break intonation ... across
meter.” What Keats sought to escape—the “chains” and “fetters” of rhyme
and meter—Frost insists upon. Language itself may be diffusible into an
endless “deferment of significance,” but form—meter pounding against
rhyme and line length, intonation pulsing against meter—has its own
penetrative function.^23 It may even, as Lyotard has argued, subvert memory
and thwart the backward gaze: “As meter takes precedence over accent in the
production of sound ... time ceases to be a support for memory to become an
immemorial beating that, in the absence of a notable separation between
periods, prevents their being numbered, and consigns them to oblivion.”^24
The subversion of memory is the subversion of rational thought, as it
eradicates the premises upon which conclusions are built. Held in the poem’s
hermeneutic embrace, aroused to its rhythm, one may, in fact, feel
temporarily the Nietzschean “strength to forget the past.”^25 Frost
consistently exploits the hypnotic potential of sound to countermand stated
meaning, so that what one senses is something external to what the eye sees
on the page. To “drag and break intonation ... across meter” is to postulate
some truth beyond that which is signified by the word, as it takes language
from a speaker’s mouth and breaks it metrically to release something else.
Frost’s own “lyric” voice (what we are made to feel are genuine,
nonironic revelations as opposed to rhetorical postures) is never directly
identifiable in the poetry through what is spoken,suggesting a cynicism about
the power of language alone to communicate or to reveal the essential self.
The birds, limited and ventriloquistic as they are, are merely components of
Frost’s metalyrical voice in which both emotion and control are displayed on
equal terms. It being possible to describe only a border condition, not the
state one is in but what one is moving toward or away from, any zero-order
lyricism must reside extra-linguistically. The complex contradictions within
the poetry, where the dialectic elements may be shifted into a near infinity of
relationships—text versus subtext, stated meaning versus tone, allusion
versus “theme,” virile prosody versus claimed impotence, irony versus the
straightforward, and all the permutations of these and other combinations—
may be seen in this context as a form of oscillation that reproduces this state
of disequilibrium. A tennis game that never ends, the back and forth between
pairings nonetheless necessitates a net and boundary lines: containing this
dynamically unstable condition necessitates a rigorous formalism if the