Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 335Frost seems to approach, in this disjunction between form and content,
what Clement Greenberg defines as modernism: “The essence of modernism
lies ... in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the
discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to entrench it more
firmly in its area of competence.’’^31 By objectifying it, Frost “criticizes” the
lyric voice, a very core of poetry, while in doing so he reinforces what he
perceives to be poetry’s area of competence, its formal control of language,
as a means of conveying a more genuine poetic truth. Greenberg would have
us consider a Monet water lily: at one level it does indeed look like a water
lily, but critics point to Monet’s preoccupation with the “possibilities of
reflection, light, color, brushwork, texture, pictorial structure, and format” as
leading to the “apparent dissociation of colour and brushwork from object.”
What is said of Monet could almost be said of Frost: “Nature, prodded by an
eye obsessed with the most naive kind of exactness, responded in the end
with textures of color that could be managed on canvas only by involving the
autonomous laws of the medium—which is to say that Nature became the
springboard for an almost abstract art.”^32 Frost asserts that the assimilation
of rational meaning into sentence sounds that may reverse or alter the
apparent sense (“it may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the
words”)^33 is crucial to his poetic intent. The sentence sound is itself an entity
from which words may be suspended, the entirety becoming a version of
truth independent of the particular word or phrase. He calls the sound of
sense “the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound—pure form. One
who concerns himself with it more than the subject is the artist” (Letters
79–81). His speakers, while detailed with what might be called “the most
naive kind of exactness,” are not drawn for their intrinsic value, for what they
themselves have to say. They become instead like the lilies, the medium
through which formal elements may be elaborated; their “lyric” selves are of
less value finally than the possibilities of “reflection, light, color, ... texture,
pictorial structure, and format” they afford.
Lyotard defines modernism thus: “I shall call modern the art which
devotes its ‘little technical expertise’ ... as Diderot used to say, to present the
fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something
which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible.”^34
Naming Frost’s ambivalence about language “modernism” is one way of
articulating his preoccupation with the unsaid or the unsayable, of giving,
perhaps arbitrarily, a context and form to the shadow shape residing between
the “speaker” and the self. It has the value, however, of suggesting, at least
analogously, the distancing effects of Frost’s use of dissonances within the
poetry; there is an essential abstraction, a breaking of the self into planes—