Robert Frost and The Poetics of Loyalty

Abstract

Robert Frost and The Poetics of Loyalty Sam Gee (bio) Compare two poetic fantasies of escape: Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Good-Bye" and Robert Frost's "Into My Own." Both poems imagine leaving the workaday world behind to get in touch with the heart of reality. Emerson says "Good-Bye, proud world! I'm going home," and retires to "A secret nook in a pleasant land / Whose groves the frolic fairies planned." Frost describes deep, dark woods that he wishes "stretched away unto the edge of doom," and the voice of his poem announces in a tone as confident as Emerson's that "I should not be withheld but that some day / Into their vastness I should steal away." Emerson's poem spurns the society from which he fled, saying goodbye to "Flattery's fawning face," "Grandeur with his wise grimace," "those who go, and those who come," and the "sophist schools and learned clan." Rising above all of the pettiness of his apparently venal civilization, Emerson finds his holy object: "For what are they all, in their high conceit, / When man in the bush with God may meet?" In "Into My Own," Frost also finds God, so to speak. But there is a marked difference in approach between Frost and Emerson. Frost does not find God, or truth, by rejecting the ties that bind. Rather, he imagines his loved ones "who should miss me here / … And long to know if still I held them dear" coming to find him in the woods. And when they do, the voice of the poem proclaims, "They would not find me changed from him they knew—/Only more sure of all I thought was true." Like Emerson, Frost fantasizes about escaping from mundane reality. But Frost's is a troubled conscience—he knows that there is a solitude that is selfishness. Frost loves the truth of the woods, [End Page 328] which is beyond the truth (and illusions) of the town. But he knows that he cannot stay there. He has no interest in meeting God if to stare in the face of divinity would alienate him from the responsibilities and loves of the everyday world. ________ Frost was a great admirer of Emerson—he called the Concord Sage's "Uriel" "the best Western poem yet" and recalled in a letter that "some twenty-two lines in 'Monadnoc'… meant almost more to me than anything else on the art of writing when I was a youngster." Many of Frost's poems bear the mark of engagement with Emerson, and the affinities between the two poets go well beyond their shared New England soil. And yet, in a lecture entitled "On Emerson," in which Frost most fully details his affection for Emerson, he also makes clear what he takes to be his forebear's key weaknesses. Chief among Frost's problems is that he is "not quite satisfied with the easy way Emerson takes disloyalty." He continues, "He didn't know or ignored his own Blackstone. It is one thing for the deserter and another for the deserted. Loyalty is that for the lack of which your gang will shoot you without benefit of trial by jury. And serves you right. Be as treacherous as you must be for your ideals, but don't expect to be kissed good-bye by the idol you go back on." This is fairly vitriolic language for Frost, which leaves the reader of "On Emerson" with a question—why is "disloyalty" such a concern for Frost? And just what does he mean by Emerson's "disloyalty"? The contrast between "Good-Bye" and "Into My Own," with which this essay opens, is instructive in this connection, but incomplete. To bring out further what Frost might have meant by Emerson's "disloyalty," I will examine another famous Emerson poem, "Give All to Love," together with remarks from two of Emerson's early essays, "Friendship" and "Circles." Through all of these writings, Emerson puts forward a worldview that prizes individual growth, experimentation, and spiritual striving above commitments to human love or social responsibilities. To understand Frost's objection to Emerson, I will [End Page 329] consider three of Frost's own...