I am pleased to say that my twelfth book of poems, NO DOUBT THE NAMELESS, will appear next year from the excellent Four Way Books, my favorite of the nine different publishers that have issued my work in various genres.

I am also excited that my fourth collection of lyrical essays (as I prefer to call them, rather than using the hideous contemporary term "creative nonfiction") will be published by a new and exciting Vermont Publisher, Green Writers Press, directed by the very able Dede Cummings. It will be called WHAT'S THE STORY? SHORT TAKES ON A LIFE GROWN LONG.  The following is an excerpt.

County Home: An Iraqui Suite, 2004

                                                          

                                                        –in mem. Robert Bagley, and for the Reverend Ms. Susan Tarantino

            I. Hex on the Vampire

Months back, the preacher told me I should go and see him, because our left-wing Christian sect requires “the ministry of the people.” So here I am to pick up Robert at the county home, to speed with him in near absolute quiet to the truck stop. We arrive, and he shuffles beside me, feeble, a brad-thin arm hooked under mine, as we make our slow way through the idling 18-wheelers in the lot, then into the unsmiling company of their drivers, rough-hewn Québecois. This is the first truck stop south of the lately terror-stricken, closely guarded border.

Please God, I think, don’t let me be a vampire, whatever in my art may prompt me to be. I will force myself to be silent, letting the old guy order for himself, attending his articulations, the dark den of his mouth twisted by– no, I won’t tell you. I won’t tell anyone, at least for now, what happened to make him this way some years ago.

We eat, still unspeaking, and I don’t wipe the egg from his one and only necktie. No. The writer won’t comment on how Robert’s doing as his trousers ride up his milk-blue shins and he keeps on smiling. I’ll tell you only that he may just be doing better than you or I: he’ll take the world as it is. He’s alone, he's dirt poor, he's ancient and lame, and is nonetheless a man who, unlike me too often, seems to understand the difference between acceptance and resignation.

I’m hungry. I order the “Big Rig Platter,” steak and eggs, with bulky bread and the bottomless cup of good strong coffee. I mean to leave things at filling my healthy gut like a truck, forgetting about subject matter. He’s taught me a thing or two, this shambles, this shell, though it’s often a struggle to remember them. You see, I’m not doing good here. In the good-for-good department, Robert outpaces me, fueled by a meal of soft-scrambled eggs, crustless toast, and –it being a big day, in fact his birthday– tomato soup.

Robert’s shirt is cross-buttoned, his trousers climb those shanks, his dank and slow-grown hair is harum-scarum.

Awkwardly, I pray, Please God, don’t let some literary effort of mine reflect on those crumpled shoulders, the head that lolls and allows the white, bowed neck to present its length, as if for my teeth.

            II. Dated story

On my way in, I see the two women whom I think of –without irony, I hope– as the Sleeping Beauties, small in their nineties to the cusp almost of infinity, and always resting, always utterly quiet, thus apparently peaceful. And peace is, after all, a rare thing of beauty.

A war’s still on, and Rumsfeld’s “Saddened” By Criticism of Iraq Policy. So says this morning’s headline above the syndicated article in our small local newspaper.

When I get to Frenchy’s room, I notice his daughter has woven a handsome Boston Red Sox blanket with "For Daddy" stitched at the top. A small, crocheted stocking shows on every door in the hall. It’s just before Christmas.

Frenchy was born in 1918, which was until now the last year the Sox were World Series champions. It’ll be a good holiday, then. Fact is, he’s not saddened. Not at all. Fact is, he tells me, he’s happy as a bull with a heifer. Despite my poor ears and his spectral voice, I hear and I laugh.

One of my older neighbors recalls Frenchy’s gas station in the 1950s, which he’d bought and run for a long spell because even then Vermont’s family hill farms were in trouble. She tells me Frenchy was a very nice man.

Frenchy is a very nice man, and not all that ill; he’s just old, is all. He jokes that when he was a boy, “That Big Dipper wa’n’t nothin’ but a little cup.” He laughs again, a sound like gentle wind among reeds on the river, as I used to hear it from blinds when the duck hunting was a lot better. I laugh again myself, even if I’m a touch wistful. I was a fitter, younger man when I hunted those ducks, so I get to thinking of time’s velocity.

As for Mr. Secretary, he claims that time is precisely the issue, not will, and in another context I’d agree, because true enough, time is a killer. But Rummy isn't talking of philosophy but of making armor plating for our soldiers’ Humvees, which his department could not, apparently, manage to provide before the U.S. invasion.

He has advised our troops that “you go to war with the army you have and not with the one you may wish you had,” no matter it seems clear as death to an ignorant man like me that he and his cronies had all the time in the world in which to plan their precious assault. Frenchy doesn’t have that kind of time; but then, as far as I know, he bears no responsibility for a single death, either.

“By God we did it!” Frenchy calls out loud, or as loud as he can, while I’m leaving. You might think he had driven in runs himself, or pitched scoreless innings, or turned double plays, and so had helped to whip the hated foes. But it’s just the ironist in me that notes such a thing, and I’ve become ironic only because so many people’s claims are –excuse me– bullshit, whereas Frenchy’s joy is real, I think, and I know I am right, and his joy is not petty, because there’s no such thing as a petty joy in the world.

           

            III. Unspent

There’s been more snow in March alone than there was all the rest of the winter, so I’m guarding against the ice that forms beneath its cover after rain or thaw swells brooks and then a freeze drops in to sheet the surface over. In time, the brooks subside, the water drops, the drum-ice turns into a trap.

Not me, goddamn you! I shout into still air. I probe with a ski-pole. That ice is thin as a dollar, I suddenly think, and having thought it, I go on to think of old Reed at the home.

Reed said last week he had unspent cash in his wallet. He showed me a bill so worn you could scarcely make out the figures on the bills. “Older’n God,” he sighed. So I took him down to the general store, because he’d been in no store for ages and had forgotten what it was like to visit one. A store! A store was all, for the love of God. And I’ve got nothing to do this Saturday afterwards but poke around with a pole and swear.

Today, the president told the public he was on a mission to change Social Security. Reform. That’s the word he used. His plan would put all retirement accounts into the hands of Wall Street’s brokers. The brokers love it. Now it’s true enough, Reed’s benefits can’t pay for any care but what he gets in his tiny room at the county home, which not that long ago was known as The Residence for the Poor, but will Wall Street help that? I have my doubts. By now the home’s name has been softened, and its staff’s damned good, as good anyhow as it can be under the circumstances. A decent staff is not the point, however.

The only stock Reed’s ever gotten over the counter is his stock of drugs, whose manufacturers are likewise fond of so-called reform. Most of the time, the pharmaceuticals keep Reed from hitting bottom with seizures. I mutter and keep right at my probing. I don’t want to sink into some neck-deep pit with a crash. Whenever I find a patch of drum-ice I just bash the living hell out of it, then hop across the brook or ditch as I still can do, praise God.

In that general store I figured I should let Reed spend his money, because, just for a change, he wanted to buy whatever he could himself. He fished up two of those pale bucks for doughnuts and tea.

I’m out here by myself for now. Not for good. For now. A person needs some dignity, I think, but I'm standing alone in woods, where that issue isn’t an issue, where only ravens and rodents hear me curse and flail, and wish out loud I could see the reformers spend one year at making bread, loaf after loaf, as Reed kept doing for forty years and more, so that his hands are forever locked in a curl, as if he were still kneading dough.

Then those who rhapsodize on an ownership society would spend one week in the home, good staff or none, where Reed sits quietly waiting for somebody to join him in front of the lone TV, on whose screen the owners keep prosing away, their discourse full of high-sounding bromides. Dignity. Responsibility. Freedom. So on. Each day for Reed is like treading that dollar-thin ice. Each day is a day is a day is a day in the home. I crash my crude weapon against the goddamned ice until the croaking and chattering wild things scatter, as if I possessed not a pole but a gun.

            IV. 6-9-9-1

6 is for the number of strokes that left Joe what he is: one big stroke, then five of those little ones called by letters. I forget which letters, but one is I, for incident, as I recall.

You wouldn’t think Joe’s mouth could be so black, so hollow. I like to see him smile, and at the same time don’t. You wouldn’t think a back could be so bent, either. And yet, whenever I arrive, he straightens as best he can to present himself to me.

I’ve been with him this morning for a few minutes, which, I scold myself, aren’t enough. Yet I keep on punching the code.

9 now. What else can I do, after all? He can’t walk, he can’t talk, it will have to be enough, –won’t it?– that I come to visit once a week and after only a while I return to this great metal door and punch the numbers, whose order he’s not allowed to know, though he couldn’t escape if he tried.

These short visits are all I offer Joe. He has no one else on earth. So am I a hero?  You bet I’m not. Not at all, but he does notice me there, I believe. He’s aware that I stand by him now and then to hear the Bingo numbers, say, and to help him put down his chips, gently slapping him on his back when he wins. Today he didn’t win.

So I have walked down this Pine-Sol-and-urine-reeking hall and I’m punching these other numbers on the big, cold door. Oh, here I am again at my blessed 6-9-9-1, I think, and although it can’t be right, I feel I’m free at last.

I’m still only at the second 9. I’m much younger than Joe but I’m slow with the code because my eyes don’t do well in such low light. He was a roofer down in Concord and probably known by his full name there, not just Joe. I don’t know the other name myself.

Joe and I are friends by now, to call it friendship, and you always want, of course, to help a friend or any fellow human as much as you can– except you can’t. Or maybe you can but you don’t know how. For instance, I have only held Joe’s shriveled claw and shouted at him to nod if he needed anything and pointed to his shirt, shoe, toothbrush, and so on. He didn’t nod. I didn’t ask about the T.V. or radio because he can’t quite hear them anyway, and his roommate is asleep. All he does is sleep. He won’t be watching or listening to anything. At least Joe sits there waiting.

I push this last number, the 1, which could stand for I  too, I suppose, and once I touch it –poof– I’m gone.

a quiet spell

I have been pretty much inactive on the blog front (and others) since late September. My wife and I have spent most of this month at our camp in Washington County, Maine. That was a glorious season: I was away from all the electronic communications that I, like anyone else nowadays, seem more and more to rely on. It was us and the moose and the dear and the loons and the eagles.

I am headed now to the prairies of North Dakota for a week with my brother and two other dear friends.

I feel blessed that in my retirement I can make such retreats. I am working hard at feeling un-guilty about them. At 71, it were time. Like many, I seem  always to have told myself a story that involves urgency: I have to do it --whatever "it" may be-- and do it now, or, better, yesterday.

This habit of mind persists even though my professional life is over for the most part. I do chair two organizations that mean the world to me: one is the Downeast Lakes Land Trust in the part of Maine I've been  referring to, an organization that has conserved almost 400,000 acres of woods and waters in its twelve years of existence, even as it provides sustainable forestry jobs in a part of the nation that is always more or less in recession (downeastlakes.org); the other is Central Vermont Adult Basic Education (cvabe.org), based in Barre, Vermont, and serving three northerly counties with literacy instruction, which nowadays involves computer literacy.

These obligations do take time, especially the former as we work hard to finish our latest project, acquisition of 22,000 acres that we have already protected from development, but which we want to own, so that it will be managed responsibly for timber. It also includes a fabulous domed bog of over a thousand acres.

But I don't have to punch any time clock; our children are grown and need no hands-on tending; life is simple.

Or life should be. At least, that is, it should be simpler. For all that I live surrounded by some of the most beautiful country in the nation, and for all that I have access to different but equally gorgeous territory in Maine, I can lose touch even with the physical blessings I enjoy. As Wordsworth famously put it,

     Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.
     Little we see in nature that is ours.

Such alienation from the tangible world strikes me as a greater and greater blight in our technologized age. I have the firm conviction that the farther we get from our physical realities, the more radically we make the (false) distinction between our bodily and spiritual lives, the more we pay for it. We can turn vicious: e.g., we can imagine the victims of military attack are statistics, not living and breathing organisms. We can be....well, silly, as, in my opinion, are many of the academic theorists who have carried the day in our humanities departments for a long time– men and women who speak in such obliquities and abstractions (and almost exclusively to one another) that their assertions seem to bear no palpable relation to the world of those who live in very different circumstances.

Or we can get– what? I guess the word that comes to mind is creepy. My wife and I didn't see or hear much in the way of news while we were up north, but I did pick up a Bangor paper one day as I went into the village for supplies. In the so-called Family section of that weekend edition, a young woman who had just had her first child described how she was going to chronicle the little girl's early years. The first thing she did was open a Facebook account for her daughter, on which she meant to post significant developments. The other thing she established was an email for the child, to whom she meant to write a letter every two weeks for an indefinite period of time. There were other, equally cybernetic measures she meant to take, but I have mercifully forgotten them by now.

Just as we did five children, my wife and I have been savoring our little grandchildren, five of them now too, and have been spending every minute we can with them. This involves not only the (wearying) fun of frolicking, at a playground, in the woods, on the living room floor, and so on; it involves more too than snuggling close to them as we read bedtime stories and entertain their wonderful comments and questions; it also involves giving baths, wiping bottoms and chins, feeding them and cleaning up after– all those physical gestures, pleasant and otherwise, that go into close human interrelationships.

Facebook? Email? That is creepy, right?

Or am I just an antiquated and sentimental old fool?

Maybe the truth lies somewhere in between.

Out my window just now, I see a small grebe diving under the surface of our pond and re-emerging, making small ripples that run cross-grain of the wind-made wavelets. The duck's behavior seems enough, when I get right down to it, to make a day.

Two Cents on Education

After a summer lull, which brought the birth of Ruthie Mae, grandchild number 5, and the engagement of daughter Catherine to Jesse Brenneman (check out his YouTube comedy skits on "Loser Bar"), I mean to get back into the swing now. I'm afraid I'll do so rather grumpily, despite these genuine blessings.

This September, our news, and not merely in the sports outlets, has been filled with Baltimore Ravens football player Ray Rice’s brutal assault on his wife in an Atlantic City elevator. Rice was at first slapped on the wrist by league commissioner Roger Goodell: a two-day suspension. Goodell increased the penalty to indefinite suspension only on seeing –for the first time, by his questionable account, when it went public on TMZ—the video of the knockout punch.

Since Rice himself had given a full account of his hideous behavior, and since it was available in the police report, one is appalled that the commissioner needed visible evidence before taking harsher action.

I won’t rehearse the legitimate controversy over the problem of domestic abuse that all this has engendered, though that epidemic will in some cases be directly relevant to my commentary below. As for Goodell’s cover-up (for who can doubt that’s what it was?), so reminiscent of the Catholic hierarchy’s insidious response to far-reaching child molestation amongst its clergy, I’ll stop short, lest the rant that follows grow even more intemperate.

For now, let me cite Mr. Goodell’s annual compensation for his supposed leadership– 44 million dollars.

Let that figure linger in your mind, please. I hope to indicate that that salary’s exorbitancy is also related to what I have to say. But what I have to say is in fact primarily motivated by  a recent reading of Getting Schooled, the latest brilliant book from Garret Keizer of Sutton, Vermont. It chronicles a year in which Garret returned as a leave replacement to a north-country high school where he had taught for an extended time up to a decade or so before.

It is a cliché to say that certain nonfiction reads as grippingly as the best novels, but Getting Schooled is proof of the pudding. Garret fills many of his pages with illustrative personal narratives, some funny, some heartwarming, many profoundly saddening, and all compellingly rendered. Among other things, he brings to light just how demanding it is to be a public school teacher in our time.

It is fashionable nowadays to berate teachers, especially those who belong to unions. Let me insist that only those who have never stood in front of a class full of young people, some more than merely unruly, would ever mount such a criticism. I spent one year teaching in a relatively posh private high school, at the end of which I concluded that I was not psychologically equipped to endure that sort of stress. We should treat teachers, especially those of goodwill and longstanding, as heroes, not whipping boys and girls.

People who note that the school day normally ends in mid-afternoon, and the school year makes for a three-month vacation, fail to consider a number of other factors, first of which is the sheer drain on one’s personal time. There is no water-cooler interlude if you are a teacher, no checking the email (and whatever else) from one’s cubicle, no coffee break. Even lunch requires the teacher to exercise chaperone duties at best. Further, if a teacher in my field of English, for example, assigns a single paper per week, and if he or she has fifty students (I err on the low side in a lot of cases), and if each of those papers demands no more than twenty minutes’ attention (another low ball)... well, do the math, and then multiply that week by 36. Then add the preparation and marking of tests and exams, the reading and commenting on term papers. I could go on.

Ah, those awful unions, we cry, even if in fact they are scarcely an element in American enterprise as I write. Since the Morning in America days, our percentage of organized labor has shrunk to 7%. Might I venture the notion that it’s not union workers who are being paid too much, but so many other working men and women who are getting too little?   And don’t even start to tell me they don’t work hard. Some of the hardest-working folks I know are among the most poor.

Roger Goodell need not worry over all this. Roger Goodell makes 44 million bucks a year.

It is claimed by free market hyper-enthusiasts that society will most abundantly compensate those who provide us with what we most value. There seems to be a lot of truth to this, alas. Clearly we value professional football (and the struggles of no-talent reality TV celebrities) more than we do a vast array of other “services” to our national community.

And yet education having gone south, we think teachers ought to fix our world up, even as we lament the cost.

Roger Goodell makes 44 million per annum.

I am reducing my broad and avid responses to Garret Keizer’s testimony to focus on the main thought it engendered in me. The educational issues we quarrel about –do we need smaller class sizes, better facilities, a core curriculum, standardized testing, and so on?– remain far from exclusively educational when all is said and done. They are social and political, and without for a moment suggesting that I have The Solution, let me opine that we can dream up any educational theory we want; we can pour as much money as we can gather into facilities and, yes, into the salaries of teachers, almost all of whom could make much more lucrative salaries in the private sector; we can test and test and test and test. But so long as so significant a portion of our student body, above all, of course, in our most impoverished communities, where the stress on teachers that I referred to above often involves fear of actual physical harm– so long as that portion goes home to a dysfunctional context, our remedies will amount to little. (Of course, some don’t go home at all: Vermont leads New England in its proportion of actually homeless young people)

Roger Goodell makes 44 million dollars per annum.

As Garret Keizer points out, many students experience literal trauma on the home front, with addiction and/or domestic abuse often part of the picture; many have one parent only, often herself the product of a similar background, confused, devoid of personal or professional resources; many, in today’s economy, are essentially parentless, because mom and/or dad is/are out working a whole slew of jobs just to pay rent, buy food, afford doctor’s bills, what have you?

Roger Goodell makes 44 million per annum.

One of my dear friends is an energetic, committed, and imaginative elementary school principal. His school, like most in Vermont, has been described as “failing” by our state educational monitors. But as he points out, it’s the same kids, year in and out, generation in and out, who account for the failing measure. They will go on doing so until each can somehow be assured a measure of safety and sustenance. Some high-tech company may generously offer free laptops to every student in School District X, as Getting Schooled indicates, but who will provide each with freedom from terror and want?

Roger Goodell makes 44 million dollars per annum.

We are at a curious and lamentable place with regard to education. We ask teachers not only to teach what used to be called the Three Rs and more; but we also seem to think it’s their job to socialize children, too great a number of whom have had no such guidance at home. But before any of us relatively comfortable critics start keening over the loss of so-called family values, before we start lecturing the parents of our dispossessed, let us in all humility imagine how we would cope with dire poverty, joblessness, addiction, poor mental or physical health. How well would we raise our children?

Roger Goodell makes 44 million dollars per annum.

We all need fuel, food, medicine, and other stark necessities, and for many parents, to choose one or two is to slight a number of others. But what the heck? Let’s dress the kids (in whatever we can) and send them off to those fat-cat teachers, so outlandishly compensated and perked. They have a job to do.

Do they ever.

Roger Goodell makes 44 million dollars per annum.

Let me repeat. I am no political or sociological genius. I don’t want either liberal or conservative readers to take what I say and mold it so as to lengthen their list of slogans. Indeed, our recourse to slogans plays too big a part in the mess I speak of: rather, can’t we all, simply as concerned citizens, come to recognize that everything we consider a plague on educational success is in fact a societal issue, not a narrowly educational one? Can’t we put our heads together, at least on a regional basis, in the admirable old Yankee manner, and come up with some strategies? And while we are at it, can we quit scape-goating the teachers, most of the ones I know doing their level best against odds they did nothing to create?

The football commissioner banks 44 million bucks a year.

Years ago, I was asked to participate in a publishing project at a local school. Each student would compose a story that would address some experience he or she felt important. I saw then in too many sad cases what I have been trying to address in this column. This poem came out of that experience.  You'll have to guess at the format here and there, as I am too low-tech to make it look right on the blog.

Publishing Project

It was a great idea, so sure, of course, I volunteered to type

for the local fourth graders, who wanted to “publish” a book of their stories;

I myself had been publishing stuff for years, but my early attempts

still somehow felt important, even if glory

didn’t attend them (and hasn’t elsewhere since, I moped in self-pity): Jeep

was one of my earliest magazines, and Creative Moment, and The Lamp

and the Rabbit (Say what?)

But after a while, as I sat at the keyboard, I felt trapped

in some pop culture dream, where everything had to do

with Power Rangers, Nintendo, and boom and zap and budda-budda-budda.

Where, I wondered, did imagination ever go?

Or so remained my attitude till one narrative came along, in which, rather

than reciting the struggles, lapses, and recoveries

of superheroes, the author provided an unheroic account

that rang too unhappily true. “Too true

a tear” it almost evoked, to quote the 17^th-century poet Vaughan. (Who?)

It was one of those same-old same-old stories of discovery,

although the heroine didn’t seem to know what she’d actually found.

(The fiction, clearly, was no fiction.) It involved a wedding,

at which, she said, Daddy kept shouting and laughing also dancing 
                                                                                                                                                                             and Mommy and me and Tiffny however didn’t dance with no one not once                                                                  

She spoke briefly too of the moon, but more tenderly of standing by a fence

behind the groom’s trailer, which, unlike her own (on good days)

was not kept neat,  and of how there was a pony out there

it was between a brown and a bay

(she knew horses, I guess) and acted better than where it came from

and there was so much wiskie and smoke the pony smelled better than the air

and it was a dirty rotten shame to leave him and a shame

me Mom and Tiff had to go home with Uncle Ware

which wasn’t ever that nice to us and isn’t an uncle but Mom says he’s a friend

and look!! this is supposed to be a story of one of the good days

and you can see how it ends up just like this by Tami THE END.

A Little Down Time

Often, though scarcely always, my blog posts and my regional newspaper columns share the same subject matter.

I have suspended the latter for the summer, and am likely to do more or less the same with this blog. But I'll be back come Labor Day or so.

Meanwhile, I reproduce a small portion of a piece I'm doing for The Georgia Review on The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I (edd. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Faggen, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 2014).

I say nothing original or bright by stressing that a certain degree of accessibility lay at the heart of Robert Frost’s literary intentions. In a 1913 letter (p.154) to his former student and lifelong friend John Bartlett, he writes:

...(T)here is a kind of success called “of esteem,” and it butters no parsnips.  It means success with a critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader... I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds.

No matter it be impossible of total attainment (even if Frost came about as close as possible), that strikes me as a sympathetic ideal, and objections to it –as in our day to the witty and often moving poetry, say, of Billy Collins, who has the gall to be (gasp) popular too– are premised on the claim that it necessarily entails a dumbing-down of the poetic act.

However, if there is one thing made clear by this superb volume, it’s how wrong-headed are those who ever imagined Frost a simplistic thinker or one lacking in cultural sophistication. Committed as they must be to inclusiveness, the editors necessarily present any number of relatively unimportant letters, ones Frost himself viewed in that light, mere epistolary small talk with friends; but even in such communication, one astonishing thing among scores is the depth and breadth of the poet’s learning. Many of these letters contain literary allusions, ranging across the genres and from the Greek and Roman classics to Frost’s own contemporaries.

Consider this passage from a May 1915 letter to Yale professor of drama Walter Pritchard Eaton (p.328), whose Barn Doors and Byways, he ventures, could have been a work of poetry, not prose:

           

I think poetry itself is to blame. It seems to want to exclude too much... Far be it from me though to regret that all the poetry isn’t in verse. I’m sure I’m glad of all the unversified poetry of Walden– and not merely nature-descriptive, but narrative as in the chapter on the play with the loon, and character-descriptive as in the beautiful passage about the French Canadian woodchopper. That last along with some things in Turgenieff must have had a good deal to the making of me.

The references here, like many of Frost’s Shakespearean references, may be familiar enough, but a great number of others are so out of the way that I –no college dropout like the poet but one who stuck it our through that Ph.D. and who taught in literature departments for four decades– frequently needed the editors’ guidance to know that a literary reference had been made in the first place.  We find Frost –and my list is quite random– at various points recalling the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a W.B. Yeats play,  Rhadamanthus (son of Zeus and Europa), Algernon Swinburne, John Milton, Thomas Gray, Theodore Dreiser, Charles Lamb, a Scottish folk song, Rathindranth Tagore. I could go on at far greater length, but you get the idea.

Nor are all the letters’ allusions strictly literary. Look for Frost’s nods here and there, again for random example, at Jakob Boehme, Swedenborg, the Lawrence Textile Strike, Sir William Osler, The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, a learned article on the 1918 influenza epidemic, Abraham Lincoln, Liliokuani, last queen of Hawaii.

Enough. The man’s curiosity and reading were almost stupefyingly vast.

Frost, of course, wore his erudition lightly, and his coyness about it was deliberate. The sense of life as lived by common men and women crucial to him, whatever store of autodidactic sophistication he had came in service of that sense. This seems in many respects all but exactly opposite from the approaches of his noteworthy contemporaries,  Williams excepted, who plainly vaunted their cultural sophistication. Common people’s lives, if they were rendered at all, would come in service of cultural sophistication, and often came by way of ironic juxtaposition to superior lives, including the poets’ own. Consider the pub scene in The Waste Land, say, or Pound’s telling judgment that “the man in the street is there because he doesn’t deserve to be let in.”

I would argue, however, that such a posture may actually have limited the intellectual and emotional range of many other Moderns. Once one disentangles Pound’s verse, for instance, its underlying thoughts and feelings tend either to be rather uninteresting or, worse, repugnant– or, worst of all, both at once. As for Eliot, a great author to be sure, his mind is more expansive than Pound’s, but the social and spiritual conclusions he reaches, even in his masterpiece Four Quartets, will be bizarre, even unpalatable, to many.

I’d rather read Wallace Stevens than either of these others, and I admire him sincerely, but even in his noble work, there are times, after I’ve read him at too great length, when I begin to suspect the presence of what he himself, in “Esthétique du Mal,” calls a “lunatic of one idea in a world of ideas.” We learn in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” that “our selves” in poetry must “take the place of empty heaven and its hymns,” and that capital-I Imagination is our most precious mode of doing so. The theme is iterated throughout his opus; it varies slightly, if at all, and even if it be well and good, in my library sessions I don’t find many who are attending to Stevens’s imperative.

Frost’s perceptions, on the other hand, are all but always too slyly rendered to fit any categorical thinking. I think he is the Moderns’ best exemplar of what Keats called negative capability, the capacity to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Almost inevitably, Frost will display at least two, and sometimes quite a few more impulses, some in apparent contradiction with one another, in the same poem. “The Road Not Taken” is routinely reduced to a plug for Emersonian self-reliance, but the poet makes clear that, however valid that reading may be from one perspective, there is an equally strong possibility that his choice of road was mere whimsy.

So long as the poem is read, too, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” will invite profoundly different construals. On considering the stunning sonnet “Design,” for one more example, are we to imagine it worse that there is a malign scheme at work in the world’s operations or that there is no design at all? And these are but the two most obvious questions raised by that lyric.

One could go on in this vein all but indefinitely when contemplating Frost’s oeuvre.

Then there is the plain and simple fact that Frost as the man behind the poems got his hands dirty, so to speak. (So, of course, did Dr. Williams, a figure whose life, in full disclosure, I tend to value far above his literary output.) This is another factor accounting for his largely avoiding the sort of condescension from Olympus so easily associable with Pound and certainly with Eliot when it comes to the lives of your average Jack and Jill.

Which leads us, at least obliquely, to the vexed issue of Frost’s own human and social qualities.  So often has this issue been hashed and rehashed that I mean not to dwell on it other than briefly. I find it important to ponder those qualities in short compass only as they reveal themselves in this splendid volume.

It is noteworthy that in a very long letter of March 22, 1915 to the African-American poet W.S. Braithwaite (pp. 264 ff.), Frost recognizes in himself that potential for the exploitative, hyper-ambitious, callous, and even misanthropic behavior with which Lawrance Thompson and R.H. Winnick so notoriously and effectively taxed him in their three-volume biography back four decades. But by my reading, the letter just cited could with equal warrant be seen to expose a man’s intention to suppress such impulses– which doubtless exist, at all events, in every human heart.

Frost’s comments to Braithwaite, seen by the Thompsonians as mere self-promotion, in fact offer a valuable retrospect on what went into A Boy’s Will and an insight into the nature of North of Boston. They are worth lengthy quotation. A Boy’s Will, the poet writes,

is an expression of my life for the ten years from eighteen on when I thought I greatly preferred stocks and stones to people. The poems were written as I lived the life quite at the mercy of myself and not always happy. The arrangement in a book came much later when I could look back on the past with something like understanding.

            ...I suppose the fact is that my conscious interest in people was at first no more than a technical interest in their speech– in what I used to call their sentence sounds– the sound of sense... I began to hang on them very young.

            ...I say all this biographically to lead up to Book II (North of Boston). There came a day about ten years ago when I made the discovery that though sequestered I wasn’t living without reference to other people. Right on top of that I made the discovery in doing The Death of the Hired Man that I was interested in neighbors for more than merely their tones of speech– and always had been.

           

To me, these are the words of a man who has grown up, and who has the wit to recognize that development and so largely to put away childish things. They scarcely strike me at any rate as the words of an unbridled egotist. And as we move through The Early Letters, they witness to the breadth and sincerity of Frost’s friendships, some casual, some, like the ones with Sidney Cox, Louis Untermeyer, John Bartlett and above all Edward Thomas, as close to a soul-mate as the poet ever had, as deep perhaps as a person could know.