PARTISAN REVIEW
In praise of Mercy, the hard explicit style, tempered by an old
man's self-indulgence, the tenderness one feels for his own bad jokes,
is singularly inappropriate; beside the moral complexity of the original
Jonah story, this cracker-barrel exegesis seems blasphemously slight. Frost
is not at home in this charade (set, unexpectedly in the City- as if he
did not quite trust his customary scene for formal wisdom), in this form,
though his effects are often dramatic, and an especial tension of his
verse arises, I think, from his rejection at the last possible moment of
the impulse to divide a whole response into personae; that tension re–
laxed, we have-bathos.
A Masque of Mercy
cannot cohere on the level of language any
more than that of thought, for it is flaccid where it means to be easy,
cute where it aims at incisiveness. Oh, it wants to
hurt,
before forgive–
ness, but it can evoke no worthier villain than James Joyce (unnamed)
"combining all language in a one-man tongue confusion." And in such
a context, what can justice or mercy mean.
I had meant to say before this that Frost is, or was (most of his
first-rate work is in the past, but even yet he can produce an occasional
lyric with the precise phrasing, the cold clarity of diction, the even–
handed mediation between object and meaning that startles us into ap–
plause), a magnificent poet, and that I am uneasy thinking so. It would
be disingenuous to assert his excellence simply, as if it posed no prob–
lems; Frost criticism, with the honorable exception of the recent incisive
remarks by Randell Jarrell, lacks essential candor.
Frost has become so inevitably a club in the hands of the near–
pharisaical: his ease in the natural landscape, his confident lien on the
nineteenth century, his apparent lucidity. "These things are possible
after all," they cry to the urban, more difficult poet, to the respecters
of failure. "Why not you?" And so there has grown up another Frost,
a "case," a reproach, a barricade-that Frost the living man has
chosen, between poems, to become. It is only fair, at the moment when
he should be inheriting wisdom with age, that the poet be displaced
by his chosen Mask, homespun, popular, obtuse.
Don't
read these last volumes! The falsifications of success can be
verified elsewhere. Leave them to the readers of the
Atlantic Monthly,
the jokers who think Frost invented New England. Sufficient unto the
day, etc.
Karl Shapiro is tempted by the possibilities of the success to which
Frost is committed. I am not one of those who despise his resolve to
"help solidify / The layman's confidence in a plainer art" as a heresy
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