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PARTISAN REVIEW
pean spontaneity," "the flowing easy humor of Europe" and that
seems to me a good way to describe the people who inhabit Robert
Frost's America.
In
the interests of what great other thing these
people have made this rejection we cannot know for certain. But we
can guess that it was in the interest of truth, of some truth of the self.
This is what they all affirm by their humor (which is so
not
"the
easy flowing humor of Europe"), by their irony, by their separate–
ness and isolateness. They affirm
this
of themselves: that they are
what they are, that this is their truth, and that if the truth be bare,
as truth often is, it is far better than a lie. For me the process by
which they arrive at that truth is always terrifying. The manifest
America of Mr. Frost's poems may be pastoral; the actual America
is tragic.
And what new consciousness is forming underneath? That I do
not know, possibly because I have not been long enough habituated
to the voice that makes the relatively new experience I am having.
I am still preoccupied with the terrifying process of the disintegration
and sloughing off of the old consciousness.
Mr. Frost:
I hope that you will not think it graceless of me that on your
birthday I have undertaken to say that a great many of your admirers
have not understood clearly what you have been doing in your life
in poetry. I know that you will not say which of us is in the right
of the matter. You will behave like the Secret whose conduct you
have described:
We dance around in a ring and suppose.
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
And I hope that you will not think it graceless of me that on your
birthday I have made you out to be a poet who terrifies. When I
began to speak I called your birthday Sophoclean and that word
has, I think, controlled everything I have said about you. Like you,
Sophocles lived to a great age, writing well; and like you, Sophocles
was the poet his people loved most. Surely they loved him in some
part because he praised their common country. But I think that they
loved him chidly because he made plain to them the terrible thmgs
of human life: they felt, perhaps, that only a poet who could make
plain the terrible things could possibly give them comfort.
