Books: The Intolerable Touch

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COMPLETE POEMS OF ROBERT FROST [642 pp.)—Holf ($6).

Since Robert Frost is only 74 and sound as a hickory ax handle, this book is not likely to be his last. It does, however, contain his lifework up to the present, including several poems not printed in book form. And though this is not the sense intended, the title is correct about the poems: almost every one of them is complete as a work of art. Moreover, Frost is a complete poet, one of the few who ever stuck it out as such in a tough country for poets. Frost's reputation has been secure for 35 years; he is America's most popular living poet of the first rank; but only lately, and to the keenest readers, has he begun to seem as subtle, as haunting and hurting a poet as in truth he is.

The New England in which this slow man got his seasoning was the land of what Henry James called "the classic abandoned farm of the rude forefather who had lost patience with his fate." In 1906, Frost had been farming for six years outside Deny, N.H., and had begun to teach school. He showed his verse to his wife, who liked it but never praised it. Frost kept this up until 1912, when he was 37; only then did he have enough money to buy passage to England for his family. As a poet he had no name whatever.

Robert Frost was 38 before he ever sat down with another poet to talk about poetry. That was in London; the poet was Ezra Pound; the poetry was Edwin Arlington Robinson's "Miniver Cheevy." "I remember," Frost said many years later, "the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over the fourth 'thought' in

Miniver thought, and thought, and

thought, And thought about it.

Three 'thoughts' would have been 'adequate,' as the critical praise word then was. There would have been nothing to complain of if it had been left at three. The fourth made the intolerable touch of poetry. With the fourth, the fun began." Few others but Frost would have seen and described the quality of true poetry as "intolerable" and "fun" at the same time.

For the Ages. Frost's first two books, A Boy's Witt and North of Boston, came out in England first; published soon after in the U.S., they had made him famous before his return in 1915. They were masterly first books; the poet's own obscurity had delayed them until he was almost 40, his early experience digested, his resolutions tempered, his vanity under control, his craft long practiced and well in hand. He had wrought and sweated to make himself intelligible, and had done it well enough by that time to know that the results would last. I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In dramatic monologues and dialogues Frost never improved on these early works. One of them, "The Generations of Men," is as sad and lovely an American romance as anything of Hawthorne's; two others, "A Servant to Servants" and "Home Burial," are as torturing records of the life of men with women as New England could provide. Frost went back to farming near Franconia, N.H., and in 1924 won his first Pulitzer Prize with New Hampshire. After that the sturdy, deliberate man with the tousled head and bright blue eyes became a public figure.