William James, Henri Bergson, and the Poetics of Robert Frost

Abstract

sistant to human wishes and yielding only to the most energetic effort of the will. From this perspective, he regarded the poem as a forcefully intended act of the mind, an expression of the way the mind seeks to master the outer world: Every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements.' But Frost also recognized that there are natural processes, like generation and ripening, in which the individual will becomes absorbed in the movement of time and in the wider action of the natural world and that at such times the will can relax and trust the process to carry all to fruition. poem Mowing ends in this kind of mood. mower's labor is easy and dreamlike and blends with the drying of the hay which will go on after he is done: The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.2 At such moments the division between inner and outer is healed; the individual experiences a release of unconscious impulse and yields himself to an unbroken, almost automatic natural process. Thinking of it in these terms, the development of a poem seemed to Frost to have a life of its own, beyond the poet's will and effort: Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it.' first way of seeing the poem involves mainly the initial thrust of mind into matter,