A Pocket Book Of Robert Frost's Poems – Robert Frost [Edited by Louis Untermeyer], 1961 ★★★

Pondering Seasons and Reasons

Once upon a time, Robert Frost seemed the most important poet in the world, America’s answer to Shakespeare, standing over us Mount Rushmore-like with his thick shock of snowy white hair, his quotations decorating every classroom door at my Connecticut boarding school.

Then I grew up, and just like that, Frost’s stature seemed to dip. Like the Eagles or Judy Blume, his outsized success became the very reason not to take him seriously. Since I’m not a poetry lover, I have no idea how prevailing a view this might be; I just sense his stock is not what it was.

He writes about weather too much, particularly the brisker sort of New England winters and autumns. His verses often rhyme. There’s a very plain-spoken quality to his poesy, and his focus is usually rustic.

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them,

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that.

-         “Birches”

He’s not very prescriptive, either, presenting a world-view that is careworn if hopeful:

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those

Not in position to look too close.

-         “A Passing Glimpse”

But Frost really was once a giant. In 1961, he offered from memory a poem of his at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, and seemed imbued with his own kind of majesty in that televised, widely-watched moment. Later that same year, an updated edition of a popular collection of his poetry was published, which the back cover announced “will bring you numberless hours of pleasure and joy.”

One of many illustrations by John O'Hara Cosgrave II included in the Pocket Book anthology of Frost, this running alongside an unusual dialogue poem titled "The Witch Of Coös."

For me, however, it brought only dust as it sat for decades unregarded on my bookshelf. I memorized his “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” in middle school, and knew of his other greatest hits like “Mending Wall” and “The Road Not Taken,” but I missed the boat in terms of digesting his larger greatness.

A chance to catch up with Frost came with finding this book on my back shelf, which brings together about a hundred Frost poems along with illustrations and running commentary from editor Louis Untermeyer, who produced earlier editions under the title Come In. In keeping with that earlier title, the mission here is introducing Frost to the casual reader, and building a case for his greatness.

Untermeyer writes:

His verse has a growing intimacy; it radiates an honest neighborliness in which wit and wisdom are joined. He knows humanity without its “company manners;” he has studied it in stony pastures and academies of art and science.

The resulting collection impresses, but does it engage? I often found myself bored reading it. Admittedly, much of this is my own fault; I don’t read poems as a rule and have a low threshold for sentiment, naked or dressed. But Frost has a sameness to him that annoys.

Robert Frost in 1913, the same year he published his first book of poems, A Boy's Will. In his commentary for A Pocket Book, Louis Untermeyer points out that Frost was no boy at this time, but a 38-year-old Harvard drop-out who made up for lost time with the outsized success of his debut. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Boy%27s_Will.

Perhaps the poems selected overrepresent this, but I found myself glazing over after the tenth visit to this meadow or that hill. Frost’s heart seems entirely centered on the country; it is there he takes his rest and ponders the human condition:

“Our life runs down in sending up the clock.

The brook runs down in sending up our life.

The sun runs down in sending up the brook.

And there is something sending up the sun.”

-         “West-Running Brook”

The seasons are central to Frost, but only two of them register. One, not surprisingly, is winter, which connects both with his last name and the title of his most famous poem, “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening.” The other is autumn, more central to Frost’s notice of the clock of the world always winding down somewhere, reflected in the gentle decay of trees and flowers around him:

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

-         “October”

Frost’s focus on nature is not adulatory, but it is persistent. When people show up, they are often background figures, like the mysterious man with the scythe who spares the title entity for meadow butterflies the narrator contemplates in “A Tuft Of Flowers.”

While many think of a New England autumn infused with vibrant color, Frost's verse emphasizes the gray. "Not yesterday I learned to know/The love of bare November days" he writes in "My November Guest." Image from https://www.forbes.com/sites/julietremaine/2019/08/17/new-england-in-september-2019-what-to-see-and-do-besides-fall-foliage/#6260c2d49953.

Perhaps to counter this impression, Untermeyer includes several longer poems of Frost that amount to dialogues in versified form. I didn’t think much of them as verse or even narratives; they meander a great deal and hone so closely to transcripts of rustic plain speech as to make them feel like poems only in the way they are typeset.

They do show Frost as a man of depth, and set up some of his other work to better effect. For example, “The Housekeeper” stretches on and on as a neighbor takes in the story of a woman who left her common-law husband, as told by the woman’s mother. Untermeyer assures us this is all quite droll and affecting, but the result was pure prattle to me.

Yet right after that poem comes another, also about a woman leaving her man, “The Hill Wife.” It is a real poem this time, with ordered verses and even a rhyme scheme. This time, the story is told from the perspective of the man left behind; and ends with quiet power:

Sudden and swift and light as that

          The ties gave,

And he learned of finalities

          Besides the grave.

Untermeyer doesn’t address Frost’s personal life, perhaps because the poet was not only still alive but had feelings Untermeyer felt bound to respect. Frost’s was a sad and lonely life. His often-ill wife Elinor died in 1938, while four of his six children predeceased him.

Frost's poetry lives on for the 21st century, in even more pocket form than Untermeyer might have imagined. Here is a free printable of one of Frost's more famous poems created for "Poem In Your Pocket Day." Image from https://humilityanddoxology.com/poem-in-your-pocket-day-free-printables/.

Not surprisingly then, depression is everywhere in Frost’s poems, tugging at his sleeve and ours. It is an adjustment to make if you are like me, familiar with Frost from his big three poems, which present a more bemused, even cheerful figure:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

-         “Mending Wall”

I found Untermeyer a pedantic bore in the other book of his I read, The Best Humor Annual 1952, where his selections were lousy and his explanations tedious. But as a scholarly person with a clear enthusiasm for Frost, Untermeyer does well here. He’s long-winded, and sometimes muddies up a particular selection by suggesting in advance a left-field interpretation, but Untermeyer had been dashing off these Frost compilations since the 1930s and knew what he was doing.

One thing Untermeyer doesn’t do is arrange the poems chronologically. This is unfortunate as it would help track Frost’s development as well as his thinking; it also might help validate or correct a common perception that Frost was a poet with a long career but a much shorter, early peak.

What is great about the book is the chance to see how Frost was championed when his star was at its apex. Like Norman Rockwell, he represented a certain kind of America that people imagined represented their land and culture well, if with a welcome and fond sardonicism.

Untermeyer often calls attention to Frost’s lack of pretense, his willingness to tell a thing in a simple way, and leave much of the truth-finding to the reader. He notes that Frost approaches his art with a kind of shrug, and how “To The Thawing Wind” “is practically the only poem in which Frost refers to himself as a poet.”

Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. JFK covers his face as Frost speaks. Unable to read a poem composed for the occasion because of the sun's glare, Frost recited another, "A Gift Outright," from memory. Image from https://www.biography.com/news/john-f-kennedy-inauguration-robert-frost-poem. 

Frost’s open-endedness makes him an easy read, but read too many poems of his in a row and you may find the going as tedious as I.

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;

I had not learned to let go with the hands,

As still I have not learned to with the heart,

And have no wish to with the heart – nor need,

That I can see.

-         “Wild Grapes”

A moving sentiment, if not especially revelatory or deep. It’s not that Frost traffics in the commonplace, just that his poems often feel as earthbound as his horizons.

When he does soar, the results can inspire, though like a kite, with always some string attached. More often, Frost is a pleasing read, though in smaller doses. He was a true American original, who reached a broad audience, had his time to shine, and left behind him a nostalgic afterglow that may not have been all that authentic but lingers still.