Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter

Abstract

Robert Frost and the Drama of Encounter Baron Wormser (bio) Among the numerous startling perceptions that those Englishmen and women who "settled" New England must have experienced was that they were in a wilderness that was utterly new to them. This intuition became knowledge during the endless skirmishes and forays that went with the taking of the land and that produced dread, terror, and curiosity. This awareness, one that is reflected in the name of the region—an England that is new and hence not at all another England—was the seedbed of the drama of what has come to be called America. The name implied the conflict between what should be here—pious white folk—and what was here—heathen Indians, wolves, fierce winters, skunks, poison ivy, and other deadly elements. It suggested confidence and hope, but it signified the siren of the new also—that which was not known and could not be measured. No wonder the settlers shook with anxiety and trepidation before their God even as they praised His mercies. Given the locale they found themselves in, He had better be merciful. The search for a mercy that might dwell in the very landscape distinguishes a broad range of American poetry in diverse modes: declarative, lyrical, didactic, anecdotal, vatic, imagist, epiphanic, elegiac, and narrative—for starters. More than one such poem has sought to meld the political sublime, the vision of a just democratic society, with the poetic sublime, the vision of a world that accepts the poetic imagination as a good in itself. Realizing this vision is a search that has distinguished poets as different as Poe and Stevens, Hart Crane and Donald Justice (and painters from Thomas Cole to Mark Rothko) and speaks to the American belief in a destiny, be it political or aesthetic, that can face down any conflict. The longing for a natural (yet God-given) comity is one that seeks the resolution of whatever dwarfs and waylays the merely human—that broad highway of misdemeanor and achievement that, as Henry James delighted in noting, older, more settled, less visionary and implicitly wiser societies, possessed of "a complex [End Page 76] social machinery," have taken for granted. The aggregate of all those individuals pursuing happiness is a vast yearning feeling—a voice that is great within us, to allude to the title of Hayden Carruth's anthology of American poetry. At its extreme the apprehension of the democratic sublime can turn an individual such as Walt Whitman into a multitudinous aggregate. Or so he proposed. The dramatic mode does not leap to the fore of any such consideration. It is even easy to forget there is such a mode. The story of America is supposed to be one of inevitable harmony—progress and religion working hand in destined hand. Poetry, particularly in the form of the personal lyric, testifies to the individual's unassailable, self-proclaiming worth, and is a complement to this vision, however hard it may be to make its metaphorical self heard above the commercial din. Yet there is a strain of American poetry that is stoutly dramatic and revels in what can't be resolved, what assails and doesn't back off. Its chief proponents are Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Though one may find risible the vision of these two people sitting in the same room together, much less talking to each other, I think they would have understood one another quite well. Each of them spoke for the integrity of conflict and against the lies that so frequently underlay resolution. In choosing drama, each spoke for a mode that was perfect for facing up to whatever the poet found in his or her way, however quizzical or slantwise that facing up might be. Each recognized that, as a method, drama derived sustenance from the intractability of other people and creatures, and did not seek to avoid history. Each poet accordingly had little use for suavity (the legerdemain of Wallace Stevens that Frost so disliked), preferring instead the often wasteful ardor of encounter, incomprehension, and confrontation. Each sometimes delighted in mockery, a form of verbal sparring. (Both had tart tongues.) As dramatists these poets were glad...