The Economic Impulse in Robert Frost

Abstract

his essay Parables of Vocation: Frost and Pound in the Villages of (Gin grich's?) America, Mark Richardson sees in some of Robert Frost's poems a para ble of his struggle with acceptance by an audience Richardson, and probably Frost as well, designates as utilitarian, more concerned for practical issues than with the poetic ones such an audience actively disparages. Con trasting Frost with Ezra Pound and his in-your-face-philistines! poetry, Richard son characterizes some of Frost's poetry as a negotiation between his solitary vocation as a poet and the values of capitalist, patriarchal America: sought a way—in his poetry, his poetics, and his vocation—to balance and to symbolize two different tendencies: the tendency toward conformity on the one hand and toward extravagance and difference on the other.1 Frank Lentricchia's larger, prior argument, from which Richardson derives his, Lentricchia wonders aloud at the extent to which Frost could have it both ways. He contrasts extensively Pound's handling of the issues concerning American soci ety's reception of poetry at the beginning of the century with Frost's in a study of the complexity of Frost's place among the modernist poets. As he does so, he details the subject, motives, processes, and effects of Frost's cultivation of an audience saddled with an anti-poetry bias: In 1913, Pound and his friends were imagining revolt against what another writer about thirty-five years later would call 1984. 1913, Frost was imagining turning the social system Pound hated to economic and liter ary advantage.2 That Pound might have thought Frost's negotiating with the culture in such a way was aesthetically dangerous is implicit in Pound's expatriat ing himself from culture when it dawns on him that aesthetic and economic production were insidiously related,3 American culture treats poems as com modities a la Palgrave's best-selling Golden Treasury. Frost's negotiation with the cul ture could put his poetry at risk, economics potentially co-opting aesthetics. Richardson sees Frost conducting this negotiation in the recurring imagery of going out and coming back, the sally into the solitary imagination and the return to the community. I suggest Frost has another way of negotiating this tension, both more literal and more symbolic. It is perhaps most explicit in his