CULTURAL EPISODE
451
Now in
poi~t
of fact Robert Frost is
not
a liar. I would not
hesitate to say that he was
if
I thought he was. But no, he is not.
In
certain of his poems-I shall mention one or two in a moment-he
makes it perfectly plain what he is doing; and
if
we are not aware
of what he is doing in other of his poems, where he is not quite so
plain, that is not his fault but our own.
It
is not from him that the
tale needs to be saved.
I conceive that Robert Frost is doing in his poems what Law–
rence says the great writers of the classic American tradition did.
That enterprise of theirs was of an ultimate radicalism. It consisted,
Lawrence says, of two things: a disintegration and sloughing off of
the old consciousness, by which Lawrence means the old European
consciousness, and the forming of a new consciousness underneath.
So radical a work, I need scarcely say, is not carried out by re–
assurance, nor by the affirmation of old virtues and pieties.
It
is
carried out by the representation of the terrible actualities of life in
a new way. I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet. Call him,
if
it makes things any easier, a tragic poet, but it might be useful
every now and then to come out from under the shelter of that li–
terary word. The universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe.
Read the poem called "Design" and see
if
you sleep the better for
it. Read "Neither Out Far nor
In
Deep," which often seems to me
the most perfect poem of our time, and see if you are warmed by
anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived.
But the
people,
it will be objected, the
people
who inhabit this
possibly terrifying universe ! About them there is nothing that can
terrify; surely the people in Mr. Frost's poems can only reassure us
by their integrity and solidity. Perhaps so. But I cannot make the
disjunction. It may well be that ultimately they reassure us in some
sense, but first they terrify us, or should. We must not be misled about
them by the curious tenderness with which they are represented, a
tenderness which extends to a recognition of the tenderness which
they themselves can often give. But when ever have people been so
isolated, so lightning-blasted, so tried down and calcined by life,
so reduced, each in his own way, to some last irreducible core of be–
ing. Talk of the disintegration and sloughing off of the old conscious–
ness! The people of Robert Frost's poems have done that with a
vengeance. Lawrence says that what the Americans refused to ac–
cept was "the post-Renaissance humanism of Europe," "the old Euro-
