Poet's life
ELIZABETH JENNINGS
Robert Frost died in 1963 at a great age. His life had never really been a public one and he spent most of it in his native New England, interrupted, when he was a young man, by a visit to this country. In his last years, he was honoured by President Kennedy but, respected always, he had never been a public man. Nor was Frost a modernist; he was unaffected by the great literary modernist movement both in this country and in the States. Yet, enclosed and private as he was, he never shunned or - despised other people. People were as impor- tant in his work as nature was: in this, he was not Wordsworthian.
Frost was not one of those poets whose poetic lives are divided into sharp changes of form or subject-matter. His growth was one of accumulation rather than of differentia- tion. As a young man, he knew perfectly well the- sort of poet he wished to be. His life is a journey towards the fulfilment of this wish. Yet there was no mystique of the soil in Frost's poetry. He kept his eye firmly on the object and wrote of what he saw.
None the less, Frost is a bit of an anomaly— a nature poet receiving presidential honours, a retired man willing to talk of himself and his views. This book, which records many of Frost's conversations and interviews„ shows him to be as agreeable as Eliot, as idiosyncratic as Pound. Above all, he felt sure of himself and sure, within the limits of modesty, of his great poetic gifts.
Edward Connery Lathem's Interviews with Robert Frost covers the whole of the poet's life by giving numerous accounts of what Frost said at various times to various persons. It is a pity that there is no index of the inter- viewers, because this makes the book more difficult to read than it need have been. The last public interview Frost gave gives us some idea of the man's attitude to his whole life: `Money and fame don't impress me much. Above all what impresses me is human kind- ness and warm relationships with good friends. I guess I don't take life very seriously. It's hard to get into this world and hard to get out of it. And what's in between doesn't make much sense. If that sounds pessimistic, let it stand. .
The interviewers in this book include many journalists and it also contains conferences in which people such as Sir Julian Huxley also appear. Some questions asked are absurd, others very much to the point. To them all, Frost found something to say and remained courteous as well as succinct. For me the most interesting questions are those which touch on the craft of his verse. Thus, the conversation between Frost, the critic Cleanth Brooks, and the poet Robert Penn Warren, is absorbing. So, when Breaks remarked that 'Yeats said that he started a poem with a little tune in his head,' Frost replied, 'Yeats said a good many things and I've talked with him about that. He said that he hated nothing more than having his poems set to music. It stole the show. It wasn't the tune he heard in his ear. . .
I suppose that finally this book is of im- portance because it takes us a little way into a great poet's mind. Robert Frost lived as much as possible in obscurity, but at certain times
- he was not reluctant to come out into public life and face its questions and demands. But he was never troubled by the changes and vagaries of literary taste: he never felt that he had to conform to schools or movements. Paradoxically, for this reason he has never gone out of fashion; integrity makes its own rules.
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