448
PARTISAN REVIEW
rather with a solar myth, a fertility figure. They go on to expound
the subtle process of myth which is to be observed in the fact that
this vernal spirit was called
Frost,
a name which seems to contradict
his
nature and function.
In
their effort to explain this anomaly, they
take note of evidence which suggests that the early North Americans
believed that there were once two brothers, Robert Frost and Jack
Frost, of whom one, Jack, remained unregenerate and hostile to man–
kind, while the other brother became its friend. But of course the
archaeologists understand that this
is
<Ii
mere folk-explanation which
explains nothing. They say, cogently enough, that mythical figures
often embody contradictory principles, that just as Apollo was both
destroyer and preserver, so Robert Frost was at one and the same
time both ice and sun, and they point to a dark saying attributed to
him: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on
its own melting."
Thus the ultimate myth.
It
tells us much about the nature of
Robert Frost and I am glad to be able to communicate it to you.
But there
is
also the myth that
is
nearer at hand. We do not
need to wait upon the archaeologists of the future to understand that
Robert Frost exists not only in a human way but also in a mythical
way. We know him, and have known him so for many years, as noth–
ing less than a national fact. We have come to think of him as vir–
tually a symbol of America, as something not unlike an articulate,
an actually poetic, Bald Eagle. When we undertake to honor him,
we do indeed honor him as a poet, but also as a tutelary genius of
the nation and as a justification of our national soul.
This mythical existence of Robert Frost determines the nature
of our occasion and makes it momentous.
It
substantiates my state–
ment that anyone who speaks publicly about Mr. Frost tonight must
do so under the constraints of an extreme diffidence.
Yet I must be more weighed down by diffidence than many
others who might speak here. I must almost entertain a doubt of
the appropriateness of my speaking here at all. For I cannot help
knowing that the manifest America of Robert Frost's poems is not
the America that has its place in my own mind. The manifest Amer–
ica of Mr. Frost's poems is rural, and, if I may say so, it is rural in
a highly moralized way, in an aggressively moralized way.
It
thus
represents an ideal that is common to many Americans, perhaps espe–
cially to Americans of the literary kind, who thus express their dis-
