What I have said about Frost can and must be said about all but the greatest writers. To many readers this will seem an outrageous judgment and to others a harsh one but it is neither. And that apart, from a few scattered pieces, represents the sum of his first-rate work. While neither as original or distinguished as the best of his lyrics, they often live in one’s mind, somewhat as a harshly monochromatic picture might. At his best Frost is a poet of elusiveness, wit and modesty he does not posture in blank verse nor does he reinforce the complacence of his audience he can even approach a hard and unmannered wisdom.įrost has also written a small number of memorable poems in another vein: dramatic monologues and dialogues set in northern New England which present realistic vignettes of social exhaustion. This Frost is problematic in his style of thought, quite unlike the twinkling Sage who in his last years became the darling of the nation. With their temperament and technique he has little in common he shares with them only a vision of disturbance. But as he contemplates the thinning landscape of his world and repeatedly finds himself before closures of outlook and experience, he ends, almost against his will, in the company of the moderns. This Frost seldom ventures upon major experiments in meter or diction, nor is he as difficult in reference and complex in structure as are the great poets of the 20th Century.

Despite a lamentable gift for public impersonations and for shrewdly consolidating his success in a country that cares little about poetry, Frost has remained faithful to what Yeats calls “the modern mind in search of its own meanings.” These lyrics mark Frost as a severe and unaccommodating writer: They are ironic, troubled, and ambiguous in many of the ways modernist poems are.

There are a dozen or fifteen of his lyrics which register a completely personal voice, both as to subject and tone, and which it would be impossible to mistake for the work of anyone else.

The best of Robert Frost, like the best of most writers, is small in quantity, narrow in scope and seldom the object of popular acclaim.

The frost poem