The Poet & the Public Man

SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST edited by Lawrance Thompson. 645 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $10.

Having attained the seventh age of the public person, grand old manhood, Robert Frost spent a large part of his last two decades receiving the accolades of national affection. But there is a perverse quality of dismissal about a nation's affection, as if the recipient were being asked while still alive to mount a bronze horse, assume a statuary stare, and to refrain from doing anything that would require the recutting of the inscription on his pedestal.

Frost encouraged the display, partly because of a lifelong hunger for public regard, and partly, it is reasonable to suppose, with privacy aforethought. The more the honors are heaped, the less chance of too-personal prying into the man at the heap's bottom. "I have written," he once confided to his friend John Bartlett, "to keep the overcurious out of the secret places of my mind, both in my verse and in my letters."

Money & Flattery. Until an adequate biography of Frost is published--Editor Lawrance Thompson's is due next year--the best indication of where Frost's secret places may lie is offered in his letters. This collection begins with a puppy-love note, written in 1887, when he was twelve, and ends with dinner invitations from Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. It would not be fair to say that what lies between shows the shape of his life. There are only occasional hints, for instance, to suggest the depth and quality of his relationship with his wife Elinor, presumably because the two were not separated often enough to exchange many letters.

A great many of the letters from Frost's youth and middle years asked-- politely and entertainingly, but with insistence--for money, or flattered editors so that money could be asked for in the future. He coached friendly critics, and was shameless in calling attention to the notices they produced. An unfriendly and unjust reading of his correspondence could have it that Frost spent the first two-thirds of his life hawking his product and the last third complacently enjoying the proceeds.

Omens & Leprechauns. Frost was, of course, an enormously complex man, and the frequent hints he dropped show that he knew it. "You are not going to make the mistake that [Ezra] Pound makes," he warned a publisher, "of assuming that my simplicity is that of the untutored child. I am not undesigning."

His correspondence seldom strayed far from his own predicament, but it was rarely tedious and frequently charming. A meeting with Yeats produced a conflict between Frost's sharp literary sense ("the man of the last 20 years in English poetry") and his common sense. Yeats thought rural matters quaint and believed in leprechauns, and Frost had just spent nine years rooting stones out of his New Hampshire pasture without any converse with the spirit world. There is a wonderful raspberry at Carl Sandburg ("His mandolin pleased some people, his poetry a very few and his infantile talk none. He is probably the most artificial and studied ruffian the world has had"). And in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, an astonishing admission in 1938: "Two years ago I wanted to be a Senator."

Combing Wave. The letters offer no single exposition of Frost's theories of writing, but remarks scattered about the volume show something of his approach. He cuts off a good-humored parody of free verse with a perfectly serious joke: "But I desist for want of knowing where to cut my lines unhokuspokusly." He wrote to John Cournos, an unsuccessful novelist: "There are the very regular, pre-established accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get these two into strained relation. I like to drag and break the intonation across the metre as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle. That's all but it's not mere figure of speech."

Finally, a letter to Amherst's student newspaper shows something of his personal toughness. It must be quoted with care, because it has a gallantry that is just the thing for chiseling beneath a statue. Thanking the newspaper for 60th-birthday greetings, he strays from the subject of age to that of ages and says that he is impatient with the notion "that this age is one of the worst in the world's history. Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this. Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one ... It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God."

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