Robert Frost (Bloom's Modern Critical Views)

332 Pages·2003·2.61 MB·English

Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
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Bloom’s Modern Critical Views
ROBERT FROST
Edited and with an introduction by
Harold Bloom
Sterling Professor of the Humanities
Yale University
©2003 by Chelsea House Publishers, a subsidiary of
Haights Cross Communications.
Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the written permission of the publisher.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Robert Frost / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom.
p. cm. -- (Bloom’s modern critical views)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN: 0-7910-7443-9
1. Frost, Robert, 1874-1963--Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom,
Harold. II. Series.
PS3511.R94Z9159 2003
811'.52--dc21
2003000807
Chelsea House Publishers
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Contributing Editor: Jesse Zuba
Cover designed by Terry Mallon
Cover: © E.O. Hoppé/CORBIS
Layout by EJB Publishing Services
Contents
Editor’s Note vii
Introduction 1
Harold Bloom
Choices 9
Richard Poirier
Wordsworth, Frost, Stevens and Poetic Vocation 29
David Bromwich
The Counter-Intelligence of Robert Frost 45
Herbert Marks
Echoing Eden: Frost and Origins 67
Charles Berger
The Need of Being Versed: Robert Frost
and the Limits of Rhetoric 87
Shira Wolosky
The Promethean Frost 109
George F. Bagby
Robert Frost and the Motives of Poetry 139
Mark Richardson
The Serpent’s Tale 161
Katherine Kearns
Above the Brim 201
Seamus Heaney
vi CONTENTS
The Fact Is the Sweetest Dream: Darwin,
Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge 219
Robert Faggen
The Sense of Sound and the Silent Text 271
Tyler Hoffman
Chronology 295
Contributors 299
Bibliography 303
Acknowledgments 307
Index 309
Editor’s Note
My Introduction explores some elements of Emerson’s influence upon Frost,
particularly their shared gnosis of “the American Religion.”
Richard Poirier traces Frost’s early choices that led to his distinctive
voice, while David Bromwich contrasts Wordsworth to Frost and to Wallace
Stevens as the creator of figures radically other: beggars, vagrants, lost
children, grieving women.
Herbert Marks studies displacement and loss in Frost, after which
Charles Berger analyzes Frost’s fictions of origins.
Shira Wolosky shows how Frost renders rhetorical limitations into
creative acts, while George F. Bagby emphasizes the Promethean element in
Frost.
Personality, deprecated by the school of T.S. Eliot, is brought forward
by Mark Richardson as a prime Frostian motive for metaphor, after which
Katherine Kearns pungently explores the nihilism of Frost’s sexuality.
The Irish laureate Seamus Heaney celebrates Frost as a poet who could
go naked, free of protective ironies, while Robert Faggen gives us a more
“philosophical” Frost, responding to Darwin and the Pragmatists.
In a final essay, Tyler Hoffman takes on the difficult task of relating
Frost’s poetic formalism to the politics of his poetry.
vii

Introduction
I
Frost—at his frequent best—rivals Wallace Stevens as the great American
poet of this century. He does not much resemble Stevens, ultimately for
reasons that have little to do with the “essential gaudiness” of much early
Stevens, or even with the austere clairvoyance of the later Stevens, poet of
“The Auroras of Autumn” and “The Rock.” Both of those aspects of Stevens
rise from a powerful, barely repressed influence-relationship to Whitman, a
poet who scarcely affected Frost. Indeed, Frost’s uniqueness among modern
American poets of real eminence partly stems from his independence of
Whitman. Eliot, Stevens, Pound, Hart Crane, W.C. Williams, Roethke—all
have complex links to Whitman, covert in Eliot and in Stevens. Frost (in this
like Whitman himself) is the son of Emerson, of the harsher Emerson that
we begin only now to recover. Any deep reader of Frost understands why the
poet of “Two Tramps in Mud Time” and “Directive” seriously judged
Emerson’s “Uriel” to be “the greatest Western poem yet.” “Uriel’s voice of
cherub scorn,” once referred to by Frost as “Emersonian scorn,” is the
essential mode of irony favored throughout Frost’s poetry.
“Uriel” is Emerson’s own irreverent allegory of the controversy set off
by his “Divinity School Address.” There are certainly passages in the poem
that seem to have been written by Frost and not by Emerson:
The young deities discussed
Laws of form, and metre just,
Orb, quintessence, and sunbeams,
What subsisteth, and what seems.
One, with low tones that decide,
And doubt and reverend use defied,
1