Robert Frost's "The Census-Taker" and the Problem of Wilderness

Abstract

In many of Robert Frost's best poems the spirit of place that is New England is a diminishing thing, represented by a landscape in which the capacity for human renewal has apparently faded, leaving mad farm wives, eccentric telescopists, and most poignantly the ruins of hill farms abandoned their owners die off or simply gave up trying to coax the recalcitrant and exhausted land into profit. Census-Taker is characteristic, but it is archaeologically specific, and in the elegiac dignity of its blank verse it partially redeems a spiritually and humanly impoverished semi-wilderness landscape through the historical sensitivity of the speaker and his morally attractive desire for life to go on living. It is also, Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, as explicit a with nothingness anything in modern American poetry.' The relative wilderness of much of New England's hill country, its abandoned farmland and logging tracts, the mutability of landscape and its shifting relationship to the idea of home, and the fact of wilderness a potentially heavy-handed and dehumanizing metaphor of the darker side of the human character occupy Frost from his earliest poems to the end of his career. No summary can convey the complexity of his exploration of these problems, nor the dignity-almost Miltonic, at times-of his elegant verse and the ingenuity with which it embodies and fulfills the poet's ambitious and skeptical vision. But even a brief glance at some of Frost's other important wilderness poems points to the ambiguities of that vision and suggests why any reading of Census-Taker is tentative at best. The confrontation with nothingness, which usually in Frost's poetry stirs at