[New-Poetry] a terrifying Frost

[JforJames at aol.com]

Subterranean Frost
Books 
BY ADAM KIRSCH
February 12, 2007
URL:  _http://www.nysun.com/article/48424_ 
(http://www.nysun.com/article/48424) 


In  March 1959, at a dinner celebrating the 85th birthday of Robert Frost, 
the  critic Lionel Trilling managed to accomplish something that few 
toast-masters in  history have ever done: In his brief remarks, he permanently changed 
the way  people think about his subject. Frost, Trilling said, had long been 
considered a  folksy, unobjectionable poet, "an articulate Bald Eagle." In an age 
when writers  such as Eliot and Stevens seemed like perverse highbrows, the 
common reader  could feel vindicated in his bafflement by turning to schoolbook 
favorites such  as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not 
Taken," with their  traditional meter and New England dialect.
 
Frost's popular Yankee image, which he assiduously cultivated through  
readings, lectures, and even some of his poems, helped him to win the immense  
popularity that he enjoyed in his lifetime: four Pulitzer Prizes, a spot on the  
dais at the Kennedy Inaugural. Yet Trilling recognized that the aged poet would  
not be helped in his passage to posterity by this Norman Rockwell carapace,  
which could only seem more fake and dated with the years. That is why Trilling 
 insisted on calling Frost, to his face, "a terrifying poet." Really, he had 
less  in common with Longfellow than with Sophocles, "who made plain ... the 
terrible  things of human life."
 
 
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