PARTISAN REVIEW
351
about half of Frost's poems. The only reason he gives is "greater textual
clarity," but this doesn't at all describe his pointless, destructive practice.
"The woods are lovely, dark, and deep" (Lathem's version) is not clearer
than "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" (Frost's). In "To Earth–
ward," by adding a single comma, he actually manages to reverse the
meaning of a whole stanza. His publishers, in a rather nervous note, assert
that the volume has been "scrupulously edited for textual accuracy." On
the contrary, what they intend to be the "standard" one-volume edition
of Frost's complete poetry has a grotesquely corrupt text.
Creating "textual clarity" by emending punctuation, at least in a
modern author, is just wrongheaded. Frost says (in a book Lathem
helped edit), "The heart sinks when robbed of the chance to see for
itself what a poem is all about." But Lathem also doesn't understand
the ways punctuation works in poetry. Basically, I
think,
a poet punc–
tuates not simply for "meaning," or some notion of grammatic-al "correct–
ness," but for rhythm and dramatic accent. Confronted with Lathem's
"regularizing" of Frost's punctuation, one realizes how genuinely strange
and adventuresome Frost often is.
Take the beginning of "Mending Wall." This is the original:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps ,even two can pass abr.east.
Frost wants a slight pause at the end of the second line (one greater
than the inevitable pause at the end of a line), and an even greater one
at the end of the third. The semicolon after "sun" isn't "normal" punc–
tuation, but it isn't bewildering; one simply experiences a slight shock
that "and makes gaps" has the same subject as the earlier "spills." The
speaker doesn't seem to have the whole sentence planned before he begins.
The punctuation emphasizes the thrust and hesitations of the voice. This
is Lathem's version:
Something there
is
that doesn't love a wall,
That s,ends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The hesitations are gone; the speaker is saying something he has entirely
worked out beforehand. He is declaiming. The variety, the
life
are gone.
Lathem has treated the passage as if it were prose, and undramatic
prose at that.
Awesome and incomprehensible as it seems, he has done this to
