Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis.
Most likely no different American poet has suffered extra misunderstanding by the hands of his readers, admirers and detractors alike, than Robert Frost. The vary and number of misreadings of each the person and his poetry are legion: he was merely a nature poet, youngster of the Romantics; a intelligent versifier with little depth; a genial nation wit; an ethical monster; a cranky, iconoclastic reactionary in opposition to modernity, and so forth. The issue of understanding this advanced man and poet was vastly compounded by the publication of Lawrance Thompson’s three quantity biography, approved by Frost himself, which portrayed a lot of the poet’s life, his thought and his poetry in a obviously simplistic and infrequently destructive mild.
In his monumental examine, Robert Frost: The Poet as Thinker, Peter J. Stanlis gives essentially the most complete and penetrating evaluation to this point of the mental foundations of Frost’s common philosophy and his apply as a poet. The results of greater than fifty years of shut examine of and private friendship with Frost, Stanlis’ ebook units out to right the various misperceptions of Frost by elucidating the event of the poet’s private and poetic responses to the rapidly-changing present of concepts within the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Stanlis demonstrates, Frost was an immensely discovered, largely autodidactic thinker who absorbed the prevailing concepts of his time and customary his personal unbiased thought within the face of turbulent cultural modifications. To explicate his difficult topic, Stanlis situates every side of Frost’s beliefs inside its bigger historic context after which examines it in relation to Frost’s development as man and poet. His attendant aim is to refute the reductive view created by Thompson and different critics, and to point out Frost as a real thinker, a “seeker of knowledge.”
Frost was an unsystematic thinker, however he emphatically affirmed the bedrock of his views of man, God, nature, and historical past when he mentioned: “I’m a dualist” (4). Dualism for Frost meant that each one actuality is comprised of matter and thoughts, or as he most well-liked, matter and spirit; versus a monism that sees actuality comprised of 1 aspect, religious or materials. In distinction to Platonism’s pure idealism on the one hand, and easy materialism on the opposite, Frost believed with Aristotle that matter and spirit had been equally actual and that each one actuality consisted of “issues in pairs ordained to eternal opposition” (3).
Dualism fashioned the premise of Frost’s artwork as nicely. In an necessary “Prelude” to his examine, Stanlis reveals the hyperlink between Frost’s dualism and his growing aesthetic creed. At age twenty-one Frost found that he wished to jot down “speaking poems” that dramatized the opposition of voices, personalities, and concepts in an open-ended dialectic irresolvable into any neat monism. Such poetry may present “a clarification of life” in all its duality, however solely a “momentary keep in opposition to confusion” (my emphasis). Poems rooted in human dialog, together with the “sound of sense” beneath the precise phrases, may seize all of the contentious forces at play, critically and humorously, in expertise. In one other essential early discovery, Frost discovered that poetry was neither a subjective autobiographical response to life nor an empirical report of occasions, however somewhat a automobile for philosophical knowledge, a technique to “understand truths by way of symbols and the entire vary of metaphorical language past literal-minded beliefs” (14). Frost’s perception that metaphor and image are the guts of each poetry and a philosophical imaginative and prescient corresponded completely together with his dualism, in addition to his purpose to jot down poems that “say spirit by way of matter and matter by way of spirit” (6).
Having laid this philosophical and aesthetical basis, Stanlis proceeds to look at how Frost’s thoughts and artwork had been formed in response to main mental developments in science, politics, faith, social and academic concept, and artwork over the course of his profession. Foremost among the many developments in science was the battle over Darwin’s concept of pure choice and the evolution of species. Towards Thompson’s simplistic view, Stanlis reveals the nuanced grasp of Darwin’s thought Frost developed throughout and after his Harvard years by his studying of Darwin, Asa Grey, Sir Charles Lyell, William James, Alfred Weber, Thomas Henry Huxley, and others. Frost accepted Darwin’s common concept of evolution, however as a dualist he emphasised extra the artistic energy of thoughts and can within the evolutionary course of, the “passionate choice” exerted by the human spirit (53). Noting that Darwin didn’t exclude the concept of a creator, Frost quipped: “You say God made man of mud, and I feel God made man of ready mud” (30). On the identical time, Frost maintained that “there was a distinction in variety, not merely in diploma, between man and different animals” (37). He ultimately got here to see Darwin’s concept as an “epic metaphor” for all times’s complexity, range, and human battle—the “trial by existence.” Understanding Darwin’s complexity, Frost strongly opposed Thomas Henry Huxley and different scientists who lowered Darwin’s concept to a materialist monism that sadly grew to become the dominant viewpoint in twentieth-century science. Frost objected particularly to the Huxleyites’ utility of their monistic views to social concept, their heralding of science as the only real technique of inevitable progress. As a dualist with a eager sense of human evil and thriller, Frost condemned their equation of evolution with progress as a naïve utopian fantasy.
As Stanlis reveals, Frost’s dualism additionally formed his response to the idea of artistic evolution. Whereas drawn to Bergson’s élan very important as an antidote to the strict materialists’ view of evolution, Frost agreed with Santayana’s criticism that Bergson’s philosophy was too idealistic, optimistic, and undisciplined. As well as, Bergson’s romantic emphasis on spontaneous emotion and self-expression in artwork ran counter to Frost’s perception in motive, {that a} “poem is a thought-felt factor.” Rejecting Huxley, Spenser, and Bergson as materials and religious monists, Frost discovered a kindred mental spirit in A. O. Lovejoy. After Lovejoy’s necessary work within the historical past of concepts, The Nice Chain of Being, was printed in 1936, Frost’s buddy Reginald Prepare dinner mentioned the ebook with Frost after which delivered the important thing perception that “the route by way of the poetry of Robert Frost leads […] away from the Nice Chain of Being to an train of choices in an ‘open-ended universe’” (109). For Stanlis, Prepare dinner’s assertion supplies the important thing to Frost’s “important philosophical and scientific views” and his artwork. In The Nice Chain of Being and The Revolt Towards Dualism (1930), Lovejoy traced the battle between materials/religious monisms and “pure dualism” from Descartes to Einstein. With depth and precision, Stanlis summarizes Lovejoy’s advanced improvement of the historical past of concepts and “the nice chain” from the Enlightenment to the 20th century to be able to argue that Lovejoy’s work “supplied Frost together with his authentic historic perspective on the advanced mental modifications that decided man’s view of nature and the bodily universe throughout the previous three centuries” (120). Like Lovejoy, Frost refused to separate thoughts from matter, and rejected each rationalism and romantic primitivism; as a substitute, he credited the facility of evil in human affairs, and acknowledged the relativity of all human information.
Albert Einstein proved to be one other kindred spirit to Frost. Stanlis analyzes the battle between the speculation of relativity and the dominant scientific monisms of the age, on the identical time underscoring Einstein’s theism and his conventional moral beliefs. Stanlis argues that Einstein’s important philosophy, like that of Frost, was dualistic. Frost himself known as Einstein “a thinker amongst nice scientists,” accepted Einstein’s view of an “open-ended universe,” and particularly praised Einstein’s insistence on the significance of “instinct and deductive thought,” in addition to reminiscence and reflection, in science. Such views dovetailed with Frost’s view of poetic creativity. Instinct meant “metaphorical” considering, which Frost affirmed because the important ingredient in all artistic thought. Einstein’s concept of relativity, like Darwin’s concept of evolution, represented for Frost one other “epic metaphor” of the artistic human spirit.
Concerning his personal spiritual perception, Frost claimed to be “an orthodox Outdated Testomony, authentic Christian.” In a letter to G. R. Elliott (April 22, 1947) Frost mentioned that “his method to the New Testomony is somewhat by way of Jerewsalem (sic) than by way of Rome or Canterbury” (104). Although deeply versed within the Bible in addition to the writings of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, and different spiritual thinkers, Frost was no systematic theologian. He merely discovered the “Outdated Testomony” most appropriate together with his dualistic philosophy. His one reference to the Christian Incarnation, Stanlis factors out, seems within the poem “Kitty Hawk,” and whereas his poetic aim to “say spirit by way of matter and matter by way of spirit” ostensibly affirms an incarnational aesthetic, Frost didn’t dwell upon how Jesus’ Incarnation radically remodeled standard notions of dualism, of human consciousness, of the historic course of (together with evolution and relativity), and certainly, of the Hebraic biblical custom itself. He appeared content material in his dualism to see the Incarnation as one other poetic metaphor: “As an indication/ that the supreme advantage/ Lay in risking spirit/ In substantiation.” As Stanlis acknowledges, in his philosophy Frost was “extra a humanist than a theologian” (173).
Nonetheless, in A Masque of Cause (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) Frost got down to discover man’s relationship to God. Within the former, he created a satirical, witty model of the E-book of Job, casting Job because the prototypical trendy rationalist responsible of pleasure in assuming human motive’s energy to penetrate thriller and for accusing God of injustice towards him. Frost’s God rebukes Job with humor to show the essential position each evil (i.e. Devil) and religion play in taking man’s true measure and defining the relation between God and man by way of divine, not human, justice. As Stanlis reveals, Frost’s argument is aimed primarily on the hubristic rationalists, monists, and optimists of his personal day. In A Masque of Mercy, Frost modernized the story of Jonah to look at the justice mercy paradox from a New Testomony perspective. In a debate primarily between Jonah, St. Paul, and a contemporary “pagan-religious” character known as “My Brother’s Keeper,” Jonah argues that God’s mercy to Nineveh violates strict justice. St. Paul argues as a substitute that “Christ got here to introduce a break with logic”; whereas Keeper insists that divine mercy is “a frame-up to insure the failure/ Of all of us.” Jonah lastly admits that he lacked the braveness and religion to consider within the thriller of God’s omnipotence. By way of St. Paul, Frost voices his personal humanistic lesson: “We’ve got to remain afraid deep in our souls/ Our sacrifice –the perfect we’ve got to supply…Be discovered acceptable in Heaven’s sight.” As Stanlis concludes, “To Frost, God at all times stays an invisible actuality of the perfect religious perfection towards which man aspires, with braveness and daring and a completely free dedication, and with the softer virtues of affection, religion, and humility” (193).
Frost’s dualism additionally decided his political and social philosophy. For him, the central situation was the strain between the person and society. He extolled the New England virtues of self-reliance, private freedom, and braveness—the energy of character he believed finest cultivated in a rural setting. On the identical time, he affirmed the necessity for social duty and loyalty to area and nation, to counterbalance the “scot-free” impulses in man. Fiercely patriotic, he felt American democracy to be the perfect political system devised, and condemned Marxism and fascism as monistic programs that destroyed particular person freedom and duty. Perception in dualism and the “trial by existence” led Frost to sentence any social or political program that promoted what he noticed as a collectivist, monistic social order that weakened particular person self-reliance. Thus he opposed Roosevelt’s New Deal, the League of Nations, and the United Nations as illusory makes an attempt to homogenize women and men in ways in which undermine the private battle with the dualities of fine/evil, motive/impulse, freedom/ social obligation. Frost’s important conservatism remained unchanged in his later years, regardless of accelerating globalism, the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and the specter of nuclear annihilation. Conservative precept additionally formed Frost’s philosophy of schooling, once more rooted in dualism. His good essay “Schooling by Poetry” affirmed metaphorical considering because the centerpiece of studying, developed by way of a disciplined mastery of the three R’s, plus custom and customized. He a lot admired Newman’s “Thought of a College,” deplored the trendy system of “progressive schooling” in any respect ranges promoted by John Dewey and his minions, which Frost considered one other pseudo-scientific monism and utopian delusion.
Stanlis’ examine is a masterpiece of impeccable scholarship and can seemingly stand because the definitive evaluation of Frost the thinker poet. To do full justice to the poet’s complexity, Stanlis instructions a variety of information of the Western philosophical custom, in addition to political, scientific, social, and literary concept. It’s written with a drive of logic, readability, and persuasiveness that places to relaxation all of the over-simplified important and fashionable misconceptions of Frost. It’s supported all through with detailed references to particular poems through which Frost’s dualism is clearly manifested. In all, Stanlis’ ebook is a groundbreaking and indispensable contribution to our information of this nice American poet, and a life’s work brilliantly consummated.
Books talked about on this essay could also be present in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. Reprinted with the gracious permission of the Modern Age.
