In a post last spring I wrote about "the other Frost"--Randall Jarrell's phrase for the author of great and terrifying poems on disintegration and despair, as opposed to the dispenser of homespun country wisdom (good fences make good neighbors!) who has it seems won the title Most Beloved Poet. Now I see that in The New York Review of December 4 Christopher Benfey begins an article (subscription required) on Frost with an anecdote drawn from the poet's 85th birthday party at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1959. Lionel Trilling had been engaged as a speaker, and he took dead aim at the Frost Jarrell could not kill:
Trilling claimed that the Frost he admired expressed "the terrible actualities of life," and was different from "the Frost who reassures us by his affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling." According to Trilling, the sunbathers looking out to sea in Frost's apparently anodyne "Neither Out Far Nor in Deep"--
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?--were in fact confronting the empty immensity of the universe.
That says what I was trying to say, though "the terrible actualities of life" and "the empty immensity of the universe" are no match for the poems themselves. Here, then, and here, are a couple more of my favorites. I know them by heart, which gives me something to mutter to myself while mowing the lawn.
Trilling, in Benfey's account, left the party early, afraid he might have caused some hard feelings. But he soon received a reassuring letter in which Frost, implicitly acknowledging the chasm between his public persona and the poet known to Trilling, said that he (Frost) "should like nothing better than to do a thing like that myself--to depart from the Rotarian norm in a Rotarian situation."
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