Frost Unraveled

There's a helluva lot more to Robert Frost than I imagined. Until about three minutes ago, I hadn't realized that I had only the dimmest biographical notion of this icon, and, worse yet, the most vulgar appreciation for his work. Happily, Christopher Benfrey at The New Republic dispelled my ignorance in a hurry. A sampling from the center of his recent review of The Notebooks of Robert Frost:

A similar opposition of sayings lies at the emotional heart of Frost's wonderful poem "The Death of the Hired Man," first published in this magazine in 1915, in which a man and wife gently debate the merits of providing shelter for an old man who was an unreliable worker in his prime and is useless now. "Warren," the wife says, "he has come home to die:/You needn't be afraid he'll leave you this time." Competing definitions of home follow. First the husband:

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."
And then the wife:

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven't to deserve."
A whole intellectual, political, and emotional terrain is covered in that simple opposition: justice versus mercy; welfare versus charity; male (in Frost's mind, at least) versus female. In the notebooks, Frost writes that the "most beautiful thing in the world is conflicting interests where both are good." Frost wanted his reader to hesitate between the two definitions of home, and not be too quick to adopt the woman's as superior. As he told an audience at Haverford College in 1937, "The thing about that, the danger, is that you shall make the man too hard. That spoils it."

If you care to learn a bundle more about this fascinating poet, check out this review of the recently published notebooks.