Frost and Wallace Stevens were together on a train to Florida.

The two poets were nervous with each other. Stevens however was more in the vacationer’s mood. He made witty remarks, and finally said, “The trouble with your poetry, Frost, is that it has subjects.”

This begins to get at UD‘s problem with Frost. Many of his poems have a sort of didactic, subject-driven intentionality about them. Seamus Heaney talks about “the knowingness that mars [certain] poems by Frost.” Rather than gradually reveal the writer’s consciousness, and, in so doing, suggest the living, ongoing, tentative complexity of what one person thinks about the world, these poems simply, flatly, state the facts of existence. Their slightly over-engineered rhymes don’t help matters.

Robert Lowell notes what those subjects are: “[I]solation, extinction, and the learning of human limitation. These three themes combine, I think, in a single main theme, that of a man moving through the formless, the lawless and the free, of moving into snow, air, ocean, waste, despair, death, and madness. When the limits are reached, and sometimes almost passed, the man returns.”

Or not. In a poem like Desert Places, the experience of nothingness is all there is, without much movement, and therefore with no real return:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

The first rather panicky lines make us expect a serious reckoning with nothingness; we await the emotional effect of this blank world on the poet. But for me at least the rest of the poem reads like poetry rather than utterance, especially the awkwardly redundant “no expression, nothing to express.” It feels like a strategic poet manipulating words, rather than a consciousness responding to things.

Which is why the final lines are for UD at once wonderful and bogus. I mean, they’re perfect; the perfect ending to a poem about nihilism, depression, morbidness, all those subjects. But it’s too neat for me. I don’t, on some very important level, believe Frost. Not a drop of blood seems spilled.

Compare this similar poem by Auden. I mean, similar in that he’s trying also to evoke inner emptiness.

Brussels in Winter

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

*******************************

Why is this a much better poem, IMHO?

Hold on. I need to take a break.