By Samuel Maio (first published in The Formalist, 1990)
Robert Frost, in the preface to his Complete Poems ( 1949 ), defined a poem as "a momentary stay against confusion" and defined poetry as an artistic medium which reflects stability and permanence encompassed by the moment of the poem. In his own work, he wanted to preserve his most common poetic subjects—the fading New England country life and dialect, and rural landscapes and history—by fixing them indelibly in an immortal poetry, for Frost always retained something of the notions his mother taught him as a child: that a creative act is one inspired by God, that the impulse to write is divine, and that poetry could express dimensions of immortality. When he matured as a poet, Frost relied on Emerson's thoughts regarding the "godly artist" to corroborate his mother's teaching; later still, when asked to introduce the anthology New Poets of England and America (1957), America's foremost poet alluded to his early belief that poets enter a meditative "state of grace" while composing.
From the beginning of his writing career to the end, Frost's ambition remained clear, noble, and unchanged: to write great poetry. He was convinced that this meant working within the great tradition of English poetry: its conventions, forms, and especially its meter. Noble subjects demanded to be written in the most noble terms and forms. And though it was neither easy nor politic of Frost to commit himself to traditional prosody, he remained steadfastly dedicated to achieving poetic immortality through the practice of it. Thus his own poetry, in order to be a momentary stay against confusion, had to resist the ephemerae of fashion and the impulsive trends which defied—often in ignorance of—the traditional past, its historical movement towards the perfection of art, and its relationship to inspiration. Frost strongly believed that poetry's methods have been defined by its history and that immortal poetry must combine worthy subjects with established forms, following the course of tradition. By 1949, then, and the publication of Complete Poems, it is clear that Frost implied something more in his famous definition of poetry-for to write within the tradition is also to provide a stay against the confusion of vers libre, the "free" verse poetics popularized by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.
Frost's many remarks directed against vers libre are well known: it was a poetry not committed to the tradition, it was "like playing tennis with the net down," it read as if taken straight from uncorrected galley proofs. His reproving vers libre affirmed his dedication to prosodic orthodoxy, for in mastering the conventional forms and learning to express inventively one's personal thoughts within the tried and established framework, he felt, a poet truly becomes liberated, freed from the boundless and directionless paths of vers libre. For Frost, to place one's thoughts within the universal context of history is more liberating than mere self reflexivity. "Acquainted with the Night," for example, from his 1928 volume West-Running Brook, is as dark, personal, and tragic as any poem written by the succeeding "confessional" generation, yet Frost's poem accomplishes the moving tones, the sincerity of voice, and the apparent self-revelation while employing one of the most intricate and delicate stanza forms, the terza rima. This poem alone casts significant doubt on a central tenet of vers libre—that content must dictate form (that a personal poem must appear personally "honest," without conventional versification misshaping it)—for the speaker's anguish in "Acquainted with the Night" is heightened by the form and the brilliantly placed refrain lines. "We play the words as we find them," Frost wrote in "The Constant Symbol," which is to suggest there is no need for new words or entirely new forms—the poet can, and must, play by the rules. During an interview in 1961, Frost—nearing the end of his life—looked back on his poetics without regret; he remarked, "Every phrase, every poem, every whole speech is a dip for depth. I've been playing only to score, only to win." In Frost's mind, free verse came as an aberration of the long tradition, was spawned from the dictates of twentieth century poetic fashion, and was destined to become obscure and finally forgotten.
Frost's formal aesthetic developed because of his striving to write immortal-not evanescent-poetry, so he chose carefully his models and masters. His mother gave him Keats and Shelley as Christmas gifts when he was fifteen; "Keats became my poet," Frost once recalled—which is evident particularly in his earlier work, in his choice of both subjects and forms. His poem "After Apple Picking," published in his second book North of Boston (1914), has often been compared to Keat's ode "To Autumn." In an 1894 letter to an editor of the Independent—the New York periodical which first published the twenty-year-old Frost—he wrote, ". . .as for poems my favorites are and have been these: Keats' 'Hyperion,' Shelley's 'Prometheus,' Tennyson's 'Morte D'Arthur,' and Browning's 'Saul'—all of them about the giants." By the time he was fifty-six, Frost's ideals were Longfellow and Emerson—but especially Longfellow, whose metrical ability he revered. In a 1930 letter to Louis Untermeyer, he confided that "Longfellow was a true poet for anyone with the ears to judge poetry by ear. " He took from Longfellow his first book title, A Boy's Will, and his admiration for the nineteenth century master proved life-long; in his seventies and eighties, Frost often admonished students to read Longfellow, though he might be deemed unfashionable by their teachers.
Shortly after A Boy's Will was published (in 1913 England), Frost wrote a very important letter to John Bartlett in which he outlined his principal theory of sound and the necessity of meter for attaining sound:
To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently. I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (principle I had better say) of versification. . .1 alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense. . .if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre. Verse in which there is nothing but the beat of the metre furnished by the accents of the polysyllabic words we call doggerel. Verse is not that. Neither is it the sound of sense alone. It is resultant from those two. There are only two or three metres that are worth anything. We depend for variety on the infinite play of accents in the sound of sense.