Frost and Modernism

Abstract

P until fairly recently, the conventional wisdom about the relation of Robert Frost to modernism, when it was considered at all, was that for the most part there was none-that between Frost's poetry on the one hand and a virtually monolithic phenomenon composed primarily of the work of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and Williams on the other, there was and could be little commerce. But over the last several years, as the issue has begun to be addressed with greater seriousness and scrutiny (by such critics as Frank Lentricchia, Richard Poirier, William Pritchard, and others), it has become harder not only to maintain the separation between Frost and his contemporaries but to continue to regard modernism itself as a unified, homogeneous movement in literary history, as though it were an exclusive club with strict rules of membership and with no room for a poet who refused to abandon the formal and generic conventions of traditional verse. The insistence on Frost's difference from modernism, it has become clear, was based on an oversimplification of both. Whether Frost himself would have welcomed the end of his exclusion from the company of the great modern poets is, of course, another question. His friendship with Pound, Frost once noted, lasted but six weeks, his relations with Stevens were always cool and distant, and Eliot and Williams he hardly knew at all and seemed to prefer it that way. But in spite of Frost's personal attitudes and antipathies, which probably contributed to the general critical sense of his isolation from his contemporaries, one important result of this new attention to him in the context of modernism may well be a new understanding of modernism itself, of the different ways in which it was possible to be a modern poet. And such understanding may derive as