Frost, Lowell, and Northcountry Rain

I do like rain, but enough is enough. I think my hands are starting to mildew. However, I've managed to get a lot of desk work done during the deluge. Among other tasks, I've been spending time with the Frost poem we'll be featuring at this year's Frost Place conference (it's a secret; you have to attend to find out), and I've also been thinking about Robert Lowell's 1963 elegy to Frost--a beautiful essay published in the New York Review of Books shortly after Frost's death.

Lowell writes:

Frost had an insatiable yearning for crowds, circles of listeners, single listeners--and even for solitude. Can we believe him when he says he "took the road less travelled by"? He ran, I think, in no tracks except the ones he made for himself. The thinker and poet that most influenced him was Emerson. Both had something of the same highly urbane yet homemade finish and something of the same knack for verbal discovery. Both went about talking. Both leaned on and defied the colleges. A few of their poems are almost interchangeable.

Poetry is not either/or but both/and. This is a central theme of our discussions at the Frost Place, and what I love about Lowell's description is the way in which he delineates a man who is also not either/or but both/and. "Frost had an insatiable yearning for crowds, circles of listeners, single listeners--and even for solitude." Of course he did. That is how artists shift among creation, conversation, inspiration, performance. Frost and Emerson "both leaned on and defied the colleges." Of course they did. They thrived within and against the canon, the long tradition. They longed for colleagues and ran away from them.

"I used to wonder," writes Lowell, "if I knew anything about the country that wasn't in Frost."  I spoke, in yesterday's blog post, of the idea of landscape as character. Lowell touches on that thought in his essay but pushes it even further:

Frost had a hundred years' tradition he could accept without question, yet he had to teach himself everything. Excellence had left the old poetry. Like the New England countryside, it had run through its soil and had been dead a long time. Frost rebuilt both the soil and the poetry: by edging deeper and deeper into the country and its people, he found he was possessed by the old style.

For a poet, landscape can function as method and style, character and setting, inspiration and enemy, death and life. Frost "wasn't quite a farmer," nor did he "quite make a living." Yet as Lowell sees it, his "fifteen years of farming were as valuable to him as Melville's whaling or Faulkner's Mississippi."

Frost was an extraordinary poet, and I am a speck in the book of letters. But we have a likeness. As another poet who has "not quite farmed" a difficult patch of northcountry land for two decades, I recognize--deeply, painfully--the terrible bond between my work and this plot of stone and tree roots. Place has broken me down and rebuilt me. I have become "possessed by the old style."

Yet "the arts do not progress but move along by surges and sags." I was born in 1964, a year after Frost's death, and here I am, plodding up his stony forest road, ancient wheeltracks ahead of me. An invisible deer weaves a narrow ribbon of hoofprints through the mud, among the rotting tree trunks, moss and lichen dripping with runoff, a scatter of tiny white violets along the verge.

A cold rain is falling, falling. Outside my window a huge pile of stones glistens in the wet--remnants of an old cellar hole, of an older stone wall. Three hundred years ago farmers began tearing these massive stones from the earth, yet every spring more boulders surge upwards from the ledge into my garden.

"This is what I remember about Frost," writes Lowell. "There was music in his voice, in the way he made his quotations ring, in the spin of his language, in the strange intuitive waywardness of his toleration"--

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.