`The Mind Skating Circles Round Itself'

After his performance at Jack Kennedy’s inauguration, Robert Frost became the first grownup poet I read voluntarily. I was eight and watched the show on television in Miss Shaker’s third-grade class. My parents were New Deal Democrats, strong for Kennedy, so literary/political endorsements went both ways. Soon I had a copy of the Collected Poems, the green-covered edition from Holt, Rinehart & Winston, but the infatuation was short-lived. I lost interest and never recovered it. Frost’s poems lacked the daring and spiritual depth of the poet whose work took their place in my heart by the time I was in junior high school – T.S. Eliot. That relationship, though sometimes rocky, has endured.

I read Frost long and devotedly enough to commit some of his lines to memory. I don’t denigrate his work, but I seldom return to it for pleasure or sustenance. Nor have I read his recently published Notebooks and Collected Prose. In general, I’d rather read Randall Jarrell on Frost than Frost himself. Today, I most enjoy his wit. A volume titled Robert Frost on Writing, published by Rutgers University Press in 1973, caught my eye on the library shelf and a quick browse turned into a pleasingly unexpected reconciliation of sorts. Frost made me laugh a couple of times. He can be refreshingly cranky, with no wish to please anyone. He’s a Yankee comedian like Thoreau, another austere New Englander (though born in San Francisco). In 1935, Frost wrote a preface to E.A. Robinson’s King Jasper, shortly after Robinson’s death. He admired the late poet and considered him a friend, and in the preface he addresses the subject of style:

“The style is the man. Rather say the style is the way the man takes himself; and to be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness….One ordeal of Mark Twain was the constant fear that his occluded seriousness would be overlooked. That betrayed him into his two or three books of out-and-out seriousness.”

If only Frost had not betrayed himself into “out-and-out seriousness,” particularly in the later poems. I enjoyed this from a March 10, 1924, letter to the once-ubiquitous anthologist Louis Untermeyer:

“A novelist seems to be the only kind of writer who can make a name without a style: which is only one more reason for not bothering with the novel. I am not satisfied to let it go with the aphorism that the style is the man. The man’s ideas would be some element then of his style. So would his deeds. But I would narrow the definition. His deeds are his deeds; his ideas are his ideas. His style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds. Mind you if he is down-spirited it will be all he can do to have the ideas without the carriage. The style is out of his superfluity. It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward.”

Later in the same letter Frost writes:

“At bottom the world isn’t a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he’s there with his questions: to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument. Humor is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot.”