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PARTISAN REVIEW
probable that there is no one here to-night who has not admired Mr.
Frost's poetry for a longer time than I have.
This will begin to explain why I am so especially diffident stand–
ing in this place. I have yet more to confess. I have to say that my
Frost-my
Frost:
what airs we give ourselves when once we believe
that we have come into possession of a poet !-I have to say that my
Frost is not the Frost I seem to perceive existing in the minds of so
many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who confounds the char–
acteristically modern practice of poetry by his notable democratic
simplicity of utterance: on the contrary. He is not the Frost who con–
troverts the bitter modern astonishment at the nature of human life:
the opposite is so. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirma–
tion of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling:
anythi~g
but. I will not go so far as to say that my Frost is not essentially an
American poet at all: I believe that h'e is quite as American as every–
one thinks he is, but not in the way that everyone thinks he is.
In the matter of the Americanism of American literature one of
my chief guides is that very remarkable critic, D. H. Lawrence. Here
are the opening sentences of Lawrence's great outrageous book about
classic American literature. "We like to think of the old fashioned
American classics as children's books. Just childishness on our part.
The old American art speech contains an alien quality which belongs
to the American continent and to nowhere else." And this unique
alien quality, Lawrence goes on to say, the world has missed. "It
is hard to hear a new voice," he says, "as hard as to listen to an
unknown language.... Why? Out of fear. The world fears a new
experience more than it fears anything. It can pigeonhole any idea.
But it can't pigeonhole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The
world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they
dodge their own very selves." I should like to pick up a few more of
Lawrence's sentences, feeling the freer to do so because they have an
affinity to Mr. Frost's prose manner and substance: "An artist is
usually a damned liar, but
his
art,
if
it be art, will tell you the truth
of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth.
Truth lives from day to day.... The old American artists were hope–
less liars.... Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper func–
tion of the critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.
. . . Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you
expect, which
is
partly your fault for expecting it."
