Emily Dickinson and Henry Adams: militancy, positiveness,
conviction,
struggle--such things have had a long and
characteristic history in New England; they very evidently
have as much life in them now as they ever had, and they
are what Robert Frost has never succeeded-has,
indeed,
never wished to succeed-in expressing.
That, of course, was not his call as a poet, and though
to say this does qualify, it does not minimize his admirable
achievement. But it perhaps accounts for the disappointment
one feels in reading these later poems collected in
A Further
Range.
A writer naturally pays a price for committing him-
self to a point of view, and the price Frost has paid for cul-
tivating a fruitless and rather complacent skepticism is ap-
parently signalized by the gradual loss of the warmth and
freshness of his early books and the relative dryness, empti-
ness, caprice, and even banality of some of the present poems.
The best of them-a dozen, perhaps-are such as no other
American poet could write. J'vlost of them are pinched and
poor in feeling and intellectually commonplace.
Not much
is added to the general fund of wisdom by the poem about
the monkeys and the burning-glass, which ends with the line:
"It's knowing what to do with things that counts." And
surely a thousand minor poets could have told us what Frost
tells us in the last stanza of "Two Tramps in Mud Time":
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
Of such oracularities the worst one can say is that they
will do no active harm: elsewhere in this volume one catches
glimpses of the potential destructiveness in a way of thinking
that might seem merely sterile. As Tityrus-in "Build Soil
-A Political Pastoral"-Frost
represents himself as ex-
plaining to his interlocutor,
Meliboeus, the potato man, that
bad as the times may be, they are by no means bad enough
to justify a poet in taking sides in political or social con-
flicts:
Life [he says] may be tragically bad, and I
Make bold to sing it so, but do I dare
Name names and tell you who by name is wic.ked?
The answer is that Frost, with the splendid inconsistency
of a systematic irrationalist,
does dare to name names, and
that like all professed non-partisans,
he betrays his real
animus when he names them. The potato man has asked him
whether he thinks socialism is the thing needed, and Tityrus-
Frost has answered that there is no such thing as "socialism
pure":
There's only democratic socialism,
1I-'10narchic
socialism-oligarchic,
The last being what they seem to have in Russia
In these lines an old-and I should say a rather violent-
bias reasserts itself. Remember the title poem of
New
Hampshire:
If well it is with Russia, then feel free
To say so or be stood against the wall
And shot. It's Pollyanna now or death.
From the poet whose ostensible refusal to take sides has re-
sulted in complete silence on the savageries of Fascism in
Italy, Germany, and elsewhere, I submit that these expres-
sions come with something less than the best grace in the
world.
On the jacket of this volume the publishers quote Mr.
Mark Van Doren as saying that Frost's place "is and always
has been singularly central." A less happy way of defining
his distinction, it seems to me, could hardly be hit upon. His
place has always been and still is on the sandy and melan-
choly fringes of our actual life, and his poetry derives its
special, its estimable cachet, as well as its limitations,
from
that very fact.
NEWTON ARVIN
The Education of John Reed
JOHN REED,
by Granville Hicks, with the assistance of
John Stuart.
The 1I1acmillan Company.
International
Publishers edition. $2.50.
John Reed emerged from the avant-guard movement in
art and literature which began in America around 1912. He
was of the generation of T. S. Eliot, Waldo Frank, Alfred
Kreymborg;
and as a Harvard graduate and as a young
popular news-correspondent
with a leaning towards poetry
his path turned frequently in the direction of the salon-
bohemian crowd, the Mabel Dodges, Van Vechtens, Drapers.
In those days an insurgent movement had begun among
the American intellectuals against the conventions of Amer-
ican morality, the dullness of the middle-class home, and the
lifelessness of commercialized literature.
It was the opening
of the era of the Little Revolt-Little
Magazines,
Little
Theatres.
"Studios". This movement, though lacking in his-
torical self-consciousness and making little effort to analyze
and define its premises, had a definite ideology, brought to
remarkable homogeneity by the conditions and personalities
instigating it and dominating its growth. By no means did
it constitute merely a literary school; it was the anarchistic
psychological shadow of an active liberal reformism, based in
turn upon the energetic and aimless well-being of the middle
class. The insurgents took a destructive position with respect
to the arid value-systems of American life, and set up against
these systems the image of the free, "creative" individual.
As John Reed put it in the program he wrote for the
Masses
in 1913: "We refuse to commit ourselves to any course of
action except this: to do with the
Masses
exactly what we
please ....
vVe have perfect faith that there exists in Amer-
ica a wide public, alert, alive, bored with the smug proces-
sion of magazine platitudes, to whom What We Please will
be as a fresh wind ....
The broad purpose of the
Masses
is
a social one: to everlastingly attack old systems, old morals,
old prejudices ... and to set up new ones in their places ... "
But what were the new systems, morals and prejudices to be?
"We will be bound by no one creed or theory of social
reform, but will express them all, providing they be radical.
...
Sensitive to all new winds that blow, never rigid in a
single view or phase of life, such is our ideal for the
Masses."
The radical element, then, both literary and social, was
pure liveliness-action or appearance colorful enough to
overcome dullness. The hideous America composed of mean-
ingless moral restraints,
church-gatherings,
business-men's
lodges, academic honors, vapid political cliches, the bour-
geois revoltes tried to .replace with a world made up of dis-
tinctive personalities each of whom was a limitless world in
himself. In conceiving the dissolution of bourgeois social
organization in all its forms, the bohemians came to regard
the world as a vast hangout or sanatorium in which certain
guests were "interesting" and the rest intruders of no conse-
quence. The interesting people were recognizable by their
uniqueness, color, originality,
Life-and primarily, by their
J
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J
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