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| Watercolor Painting of Robert Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire |
Probably the most notable American poet of the 20th century is
Robert Frost. He had such a large impact on American art and language that public buildings such as libraries and schools bear his name today. The middle school I attended in my youth was named Robert Frost Middle School. I payed no mind to him in those days, his was just another institutional name to me. In 1988 I read an excerpt of a poem of his in a book called "An Incomplete Education" by Judy Jones and William Wilson, which was written for people like me who had no liberal arts university education but had come to a point in life where I recognized that I was basically educationally bankrupt. The book was written in the style of a cook book with snapshots of important people and events that had taken place over the past three or four thousand years written about like recipes highlighting the most important features of the subject. Of course Frost was included in the book and this was my first acquaintance with his work.
Here is the excerpt of the poem I read:
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| Young Robert Frost |
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
When I read those last four lines I stopped dead...I had known the exact emotional
response that Frost was speaking about but I had never thought of the words to
express it, neither had I ever heard anyone express this thought and emotion before. With a hand full of words he captured an emotion that was buried deep inside me but had never had the language to dig it out, to bring it to the surface and to confront it. That day I was hooked. I spent the next weeks looking for and buying every book I could find by or about Robert Frost. After about 6 months of reading I had been schooled in philosophy sociology, psychology, aesthetics, art, literature, religion and language through his poems, letters, and biographies.
If you've never had the experience of reading highly-charged compressed language before, I strongly encourage you to read some. Here are a few poets that are very gifted in this art:
Sharon Olds Gwendolyn Brooks
Sylvia Plath
Dylan Thomas
Philip Roth Randall Jarrell
James Dickey Robinson Jeffers
Donald Hall E.A. Robinson
Robert Hass Maxine Kumin
Stanley Kunitz Philip Levine
