The Resentments of Robert Frost

Abstract

BY I9I9 Louis Untermeyer-Robert Frost's most assiduously ID cultivated (if unwitting) literary operative-could declare in the opening sentence to the first edition of his soon-to-be influential anthology, Modern American Poetry, that 'America's poetic renascence was more than just a bandied and selfcongratulatory phrase of advanced literary culture: it is a fact. 1 And on the basis of that fact or wish (it hardly matters which) Untermeyer and Harcourt Brace made what turned out to be a lucrative wager on the poetry market through seven editions of the anthology, the latter of which entered the university curriculum and stayed there through the 1940S and 5os, bearing to more than one generation of faculty and students the news of the poetry of modernism and at the same time establishing well into the 6os a list of modernist musts: Frost foremost, together with strong representations of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hart Crane, and a long list of more briefly represented-and now mostly forgotten-poets. What Untermeyer had succeeded in presenting in his later editions, against his own literary and social values, was a stylistic texture of modern American poetry so mixed as to defy the force of canonical directive. If the poetry of modernism could include Frost, Stevens, Pound, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes, then maybe the phenomenon of modernism embraced a diversity of intentions too heterogeneous to satisfy the tidy needs of historical definition. But the first edition of Untermeyer's book offered no such collage-like portrait of the emerging scene of modern American poetry: No Eliot, Stevens, or Williams, only a token of Pound and the avant-gardists. Untermeyer's anthology of I9I9 was in fact heavily studded with names that had appeared a few years