Bad poems never die, never really go away: The vigor of their badness preserves them. Up they float into bad-poem limbo, where their bad lines, loose and weedlike, drift and coil and tangle with one another eternally. Robert Frost, who turned 20 in 1894, uncertain of his gift, bouncing among stray gigs (actor’s manager, repairer of lights at a wool mill) in Lawrence, Massachusetts, had written a poem called “My Butterfly.” It begins like this: “Thine emulous fond flowers are dead too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …” It is what it is, a bad poem. A random-feeling extrusion of lyrical matter, like something that might come out of the tube when you pull the lever marked POETRY.
Nevertheless, for this poem, and for the first time in his career, Frost got paid—$15, by the editor of a New York weekly called The Independent. “On reading ‘My Butterfly,’ ” Adam Plunkett writes in his new Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, “the poetry editor called the rest of the staff over to listen because she had just discovered a poet.” A woman whose literary perspicacity exceeded my own, clearly. I would have left him to molder in the slush pile.
Plunkett, whose book offers close readings of the poems as well as the life, quite likes “My Butterfly.” For him, it “reads like a spell that conjures the experience of grace.” Frost himself thought enough of the poem to include it, 19 years later, in his first collection, A Boy’s Will—where it acts as a kind of remedial concentrate, strengthening the poems around it with homeopathic doses of its own badness. “To the Thawing Wind,” for example, opens with three lines of sub-Shelleyan puff: “Come with rain, O loud Southwester! / Bring the singer, bring the nester; / Give the buried flower a dream …” (Flowers again.) But the fourth line—“Make the settled snow-bank steam”—that’s Frost. You can see the steam rising, hear it hiss across those sibilants. And the next line is better still, blunter, Frostier, more concrete even as it hums with the voltage of symbol: “Find the brown beneath the white.” The growth beneath the crust of death.
Through his poetry, with his poetry, Frost thought about symbols a lot. Were things as they merely appeared, or were they representative of something else, some higher or lower order of being? Was the world made of matter saturated in spirit, or the other way around, or neither? “God’s own descent / Into flesh was meant / As a demonstration / That the supreme merit / Lay in risking spirit / In substantiation,” he declared in 1962’s “Kitty Hawk,” writing in the philosophical doggerel of his late manner.
Many of his poems turn on the problem of having a mind—of simply being conscious, observant, in our weird human way, while existence churns through us and beyond us. Of coming upon an abandoned woodpile in the middle of winter, a thing of utter dereliction, and being unable not to invest it with some kind of personality, watching it “warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay.”
Shortly after writing “My Butterfly,” Frost had a bit of a blowout with his girlfriend. He’d just dropped out of Dartmouth; she wasn’t ready to drop out of St. Lawrence. Did she even want to marry him? Plunkett suggests that he’d been “generally making a pain of himself in the role of jealous lover.” Badly upset, and in a state of screw-it-all young-man desperation, Frost packed his bag, left Lawrence (“without even a note to his mother,” tuts Jay Parini in his Robert Frost: A Life, from 1999), and headed for the Great Dismal Swamp—which sounds allegorical but is a real location, a forbidding stretch of wetland on the Virginia–North Carolina border.
Frost seems to have never been to the Great Dismal Swamp, to have had no connection to it at all. I’m speculating, but surely his only possible reason for going there was literary: the Bunyanesque name of the place (“Being the creature of literature I am,” as he would later write in “New Hampshire”). He was on his own Pilgrim’s Progress, his own symbolic quest, and he wanted to pass through his own Slough of Despond.
By train and by ship, he got himself in there—into the doom-bogs, into the fen of misery, and he did some lonely wandering. Then he came back out. He took a steamer, hooked up with a party of drunken duck hunters, hopped a freight train, got robbed by the brakeman, stayed in a hobos’ camp, made it to Baltimore, wired home for cash. It’s a great burlesque episode. Someone should write a little book, Frost in the Swamp. Plunkett rather rattles through it; Parini takes it slower, noting that a chunk of Frost’s poetic psyche was forged on this trip, down there in the great dismalia, among the mulchy ground and the dark trees: “If Frost can be said to have an archetypal poem, it is one in which the poet sets off, forlorn or despairing, into the wilderness, where he will either lose his soul or find that gnostic spark of revelation.”
“The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—these aren’t really poems anymore. Decades of mass exposure have done something to them, inverted their aura. Now they’re more like … recipes. Or in-flight safety announcements.
Not really Frost’s fault, of course. But then again, he did love being famous. He embraced being famous. After so many years of hidden toil, scratching out a living through his 20s and 30s as a teacher and poultry farmer in Derry, New Hampshire, he adored—who wouldn’t?—his huge, unpoetic popularity when it finally arrived. And it wasn’t just the general reader, the middlebrow poetry lover—he had the respect of the bigwigs, too. Four Pulitzer Prizes (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943), a pileup of other honors and sinecures. To John F. Kennedy he was Mr. Rabbit Frawst; the president-elect invited him to read at his inauguration, where Frost fumbled over his prepared text before reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory: “The land was ours before we were the land’s …”
The interesting comparison, fame-wise, is with Dylan Thomas, who in early-’50s America went off like a rocket while Frost was steadily expanding his audience. But Thomas was fragile and buzzing and not long for this world; Frost was solidifying. He would become an institution.
And yet I found it strangely easy to avoid him. To go right around him. For a long time there was a perfectly Frost-shaped hole in my understanding of American poetry. And it wasn’t a problem, because there’s something hermetic about his legacy: Frost sits alone, sealed, seeming to touch or connect with none of the poets around him. He did live, to a greater degree than most poets, in his own atmosphere, but it’s more than that. “What does it mean?” is always the wrong question in poetry. A poem is what it does, the effect it has, not what it narrowly and explicably means. And yet with Frost somehow—equivocal, enigmatic, withholding, hide-and-seek Frost, the Frost of “Mowing” and “Birches” and “Mending Wall,” rustic-inscrutable (or affecting to be), full of dark hints, so plainspoken and so tricky—this is the question you keep helplessly asking: What’s he on about here?
Take, for instance, the famous penultimate line of 1913’s “Mowing”: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” It’s pregnant-feeling, aphoristic, winking away with compressed significance. But I don’t know what it means. Do you? Frost, the old gnome, once told an audience, “There’s one of the keys to all my life [and] thinking in one line.” Plunkett is all in; he calls this line “a creed,” adding that it “set a standard for the rest of Frost’s poetry.” But his explanations of it don’t really help me: “The creed declares that the richest aesthetic experience of imagination, the sweetest dream, is to be had by using the power of imagination to contemplate the world at hand.” Or again:
Of the creed’s manifold meaning, the double meaning most fundamental is of realist and idealist visions of knowledge, the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows or the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows, as if the facts of the world, like dreams, were knowable through imagination.
Perhaps I’m being obtuse. Or perhaps the necessity of any explanation at all has already short-circuited my intellect.
So I go back to the great poems, the undeniable, straightforwardly mysterious, no-explaining-required, knock-you-on-your-ass poems. The glittering miniatures (“Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”), the mighty midrangers (“An Old Man’s Winter Night”), the great statements (“Desert Places”), and the shaggier, madder excursions into monologue and dialogue, his special brand of agitated farmhouse talk: “A Servant to Servants,” “The Witch of Coös.” (“Mother can make a common table rear / And kick with two legs like an army mule.”)
Between A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston a year later, something happened: The Muses tapped him, lightning struck, poetry broke upon him in a big way. What had happened, actually, was that he had crossed the Atlantic—upped sticks, with his family, in 1912, and decamped to England for three years. A solid career move. In prewar London he met Yeats and Pound, and the extraordinary poet-critic T. E. Hulme. He hung around with lesser Georgians like Wilfrid Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie. He bonded profoundly with Edward Thomas. He had arrived, in other words, at just the moment when—and just the place where—poetry’s ancien régime was about to be dynamited by modernism.
The change was under way in his own poetry. In his creaky, earthy Robert Frost style, he was ushering in something just as shock-of-the-new as anything the modernists would produce. The drunkard on the bed in “A Hundred Collars”: “Naked above the waist, / He sat there creased and shining in the light, / Fumbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt.” It has the too-real physical exactitude of the later war poets, of Wilfred Owen or Robert Graves—but the war hadn’t happened yet. The working title for North of Boston was Farm Servants and Other People, and in its spooked, unreliable rural scenes, Frost had only one true peer at the time, the English poet Charlotte Mew. Her “The Farmer’s Bride” was published in The Nation in 1912: “When us was wed she turned afraid / Of love and me and all things human; / Like the shut of a winter’s day. / Her smile went out.”
North of Boston was Frost coming into his birthright as a poet. No more strained lyricisms, fewer flowers. “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight”: Now that—from “After Apple-Picking”—that’s a creed, that’s a motto for a poet. The confessional throb of the line seems to place it right between Wordsworth’s “I cannot paint what then I was” and Robert Lowell’s “My mind’s not right.” Listen, indeed, to the 1951 recording of Frost reading “After Apple-Picking” and you’ll realize how close you are in this 1914 poem to Lowell’s “Skunk Hour” 44 years later, how you’re shivering on the same visionary frequency and hearing the same chanted, haunted cadence. Both poems take place in the hallucination chamber of a New England autumn. Frost’s narrator is being dragged into a death-doze by the scent of freshly picked apples, caught between his body and his dreaming mind, his instep still sore from all the hours spent up a ladder even as he goes into a trance: “Magnified apples appear and disappear”—the plumpness in that double-p sound, hypnotically renewed—“Stem end and blossom end, / And every fleck of russet showing clear.” It’s like a YouTube ad for apples, endlessly rolling, evilly glistening apples, a sumptuous close-up for which the technology did not yet exist.
Frost was a complicated fellow, not always using his powers for good. By the end of Love and Need, you’re glad to escape his company. He certainly had his trials—the death of his wife, the suicide of his son—but somehow more depressing is Plunkett’s portrait of the strange and stifling coterie around him in the latter years, the grand-old-man years, when he was playing one would-be biographer against another and maintaining a kind of zombie love triangle with his manager-secretary and her unfortunate husband, all while reaping large amounts of the especially bland worldly acclaim you get when you’re already acclaimed.
The work, all the way through, was crazily uneven. A Witness Tree (for which, naturally, he won another Pulitzer, in 1943) contains the sonnet “The Silken Tent,” which Plunkett regards as a masterpiece and I regard as a card-carrying bad poem. From the first line, “She is as in a field a silken tent,” that slithery is/as/in—we feel the ickiness of the whole creepily extended woman-as-tent conceit. But turn a few pages and you find “The Most of It,” which begins like this:
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Here we are: modernity. The current condition. This is the trapped subject, the voice crying out in the wilderness, seeking a response from the Everything but getting only the scornful bounce-back of itself.
But then we shift. The cliff across the lake, it turns out, is not a metaphor, or not just a metaphor. It’s an actual (if phantasmagoric) place. It’s like the Great Dismal Swamp: It exists and it super-exists. And now something, or some thing—an “embodiment” (brilliant, terrifying word)—noisily enters the water on the far side of the lake. Splash, and here it comes, paddling toward us—the universe’s reply. And the embodiment, the apprehended sound, that report of something unseen and solid crashing into the lake, now takes a form: “As a great buck it powerfully appeared, / Pushing the crumpled water up ahead.”
So Frostian: right between reality (“crumpled”) and otherness. The word antlers is not in the poem, but somehow you see them, the great rearing trees of bone. This buck is a monster—wordless energy, wordless strength—and with its snorting and triumphantly chaotic arrival on the shore, it brings the Message, which is no Message, from the far side. The meaning is there is no meaning. It “landed pouring like a waterfall, / And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, / And forced the underbrush—and that was all.”
This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “When Robert Frost Was Bad.”
The post When Robert Frost Was Bad appeared first on The Atlantic.
