Frost has established himself securely in the position which Mark Twain created in the closing years of the last century—the position of American literary man as public entertainer. Frost brings to his rôle the grave face, the regional turn of phrase, the pithy generalization, and the salty experience which Twain before him brought to his listeners. He is the homespun farmer who assures his audiences that he was made in America before the advent of the assembly line, and he presides over his following with what is at once casual ease and lonely austerity.

Because the popularity surrounding Frost the public figure and hovering about his poetry has become the halo under which admirers enshrine his work, to many serious critics bent on assessing the value of the poetry this halo becomes a sinister mist clouding the genuine achievement. (pp. 73-4)

Yet Frost's success as a public figure, rather than being a calculated addition to his poetic career, is a natural extension of it, and one way to approach his poetry is to see that the character who moves in the poems anticipates the one who occupies the platform. They are in all essentials the same character—a dramatization of the farmer poet come out of his New England landscape bringing with him the poems he plays a rôle in. To observe this insistent regional stance is to realize that Frost has done, and is still doing, for American poetry what [William] Faulkner has more recently accomplished in American fiction. They both have made their worlds in the image of their particular regions, and, moving within these self-contained and self-made microcosms, they have given their provincial centers universal significance. But while Faulkner has concerned himself with establishing the legendary Yoknapatawpha county and its mythical components. Frost has, from the very first poem of "A Boy's Will," been engaged in creating the myth of Robert Frost, [the one Randall Jarrell calls, "The Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity"]. It is a myth with a hero and a drama.

The hero is the New England farmer who wears the mask, or better, the anti-mask of the traditional poet. But it is not a literal mask concealing the poet who lurks behind it; rather, it is a mode of being which releases the poetic personality in the person of a character who lives and moves. (p. 74)

It is Frost's ability to be a farmer poet which distinguishes him most sharply from [William] Wordsworth, with whom he is often compared. Wordsworth played the part of the Poet concerned with common man, but Frost has persistently cast himself in the rôle of the common man concerned with poetry. Such a strategy, while it cuts him off from the philosophically autobiographical poetry which Wordsworth built toward, opens up avenues of irony, wit, comedy, and dramatic narrative largely closed to Wordsworth. (p. 75)

[Instead] of direct revelation through autobiography and confession, Frost has from the start pursued the more indirect but equally effective mode of dramatizing and characterizing himself. Even the lyrics of "A Boy's Will" lean toward narrative and monologue, and the peculiar Frost idiom, so integral a part of the Frost character who eventually emerges, is evident in remarkable maturity in such early poems as "Into My Own," "Mowing," "A Tuft of Flowers," and "In Hardwood Groves." The dramatic monologues and dialogues of "North of Boston," which have impressed many critics as a wide departure from Frost's lyric vein, constitute a full discovery and perfection of that idiom. Moreover, Frost himself emerges prominently as a member of the volume's dramatis personae, playing an important rôle in nine of the sixteen poems. As a matter of fact, "Mending Wall," the first poem in the volume, marks the full-dress entrance of the farmer poet. Possessed of all the characteristics by which we have come to know him, this figure is full of sly observations as he assumes a slightly comic poise with eye asquint—already poetry is "his kind of fooling." He goes to great length to disarm his audience with colloquial familiarity and whimsical parentheses. Then, after an agile imaginative leap in the grand style, he returns to earth as if he feared being caught off guard.

This cautious refusal to declaim too far or too soon, while it may leave too much unsaid or enclose the issue in a blurred dual vision which accepts both sides, is often one of Frost's most effective modes of self awareness. (pp. 75-6)

Beyond this playfully ironic self portrayal so characteristic of Frost, there is also the tragic self-awareness which enabled him to create the great dramatic monologues In such poems as "The Fear," "Home Burial," and "A Servant to Servants," for example, sensitive wives are so caught between the lonely natural world and the rigid proverbs of their husbands that, locked in an unutterable loneliness, they disintegrate into hysteria or slump into depression. Those husbands bear enough similarity to the figure of the farmer poet to indicate how much Frost realizes, for all his willingness to exploit the poetic possibilities of aphorism—how blind and hard a proverb quoter can be. (pp. 76-7)

Like his great New England antecedents, Emerson and Thoreau, he casts his own shadow upon the landscape he surveys. Skeptical in his cast of mind, Frost inclines away from their tendency to abstract doctrine, but he retains much of the method and many of the attitudes they left behind them…. (p. 77)

Seeing the nature of his task, one can understand why he contended in "The Constant Symbol" that every poem is "an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements."… [The] drama he sees the poet playing recalls Emerson's insistence that a man must be self-reliant, "obeying the Almighty Effort and advancing on Chaos and the dark." But even as he accepts the antagonists of the Emersonian drama, Frost, lacking Emerson's evangelical temperament, recognizes a larger chaos and sees the drama of existence as man's willingness to risk himself before the spell of the dark woods. For him self-reliance becomes sell-possession, and the victory lies not in the march forward into the wilderness but in the freedom he feels while patroling the boundary of consciousness. (p. 80)

Unlike Emerson, [Frost] is deeply concerned with his past—not the past of organized tradition so much as the disorganized past he himself has strewn behind…. In repossessing [familiar rural New England artifacts], Frost is turning back upon himself to reclaim the fragments of his personal past—fragments which apparently meant nothing when they were current but which come to constitute the primary medium of exchange in the economy of reorganization. (pp. 80-1)

In addition to the remnants of abandoned farms, there are also the living victims who linger in stunned confusion along the border…. Above all, there is the poet himself, who feels the terror of loneliness…. [Occasionally, Frost's] entire landscape becomes a haunting reflection of psychic desolation. (pp. 81-2)

The haunting rhythms of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" express the powerful fascination the woods have upon the lonely traveler, who, in the face of a long journey, descending night, and falling snow, pauses in the gathering gloom of the "darkest evening of the year," transfixed by the compelling invitation of the forest…. The poem is about the spell of the woods—the traveler's own woods, we want to say, but they are alien enough and belong to someone else enough for him to sense the trespass of his intent gaze into them at the same time he recognizes their sway over him. His heightened awareness projects his concern for himself back to the representatives of civilization, the unseen owner of the woods and the horse in harness. Thus, the indifferent animal becomes, in his master's alerted imagination, the guardian who sounds the alarm which rings above the whispered invitation.

The poem is the counter-spell against the invitation, the act by which the traveler regains dominion of his will…. The logic of the rhyme scheme, in which the divergent third line of one stanza becomes the organizing principle of the next, is an expression of the growing control and determination described in the syntax. Thus, the first line of the last quatrain finally names the nature of the spell and also provides the term which is answered in rhyme by the poet's decision to refuse the invitation.

Seen in this light, the poem reveals what Frost means when he says that "every poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into the commitments deeper and deeper to a rounded conclusion…."… The poem in its totality is the image of the will in action, and the poet's spirit and courage convert words into deeds. (pp. 82-4)

Frost, like the Paul Bunyan in "Paul's Wife," is a terrible possessor; indeed, the action of that poem recapitulates Frost's own process of creation…. Frost too has gone back into the desolation of a world abandoned to seize his own particular kind of beauty.

Of course, he has shared it with the world, but he clings fiercely to his poems as his private property, and even the titles of his several volumes describe the progress of his endeavor to lay claim to his world. From "A Boy's Will" he went on to define his province, "North of Boston," and in "Mountain Interval," "New Hampshire," and "West Running Brook," he established enough landmarks within the region to open what he calls "A Further Range." (pp. 84-5)

Frost's long career of returning into his own to enlarge his province has been a continual thrust of both will and memory, and he quite logically defines the initial delight of making a poem as the "surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew." If there are times when his poetry fails, as in the editorializing poems which have been increasing in ratio until they fairly dot "Steeple Bush," he fails because he is remembering something he knew all the time, and his poetry hardens into provincial cynicism. Although critics have lamented this departure from the earlier lyric and dramatic vein. Frost's penchant for bald statement followed as necessarily from his earlier poems as self-assurance follows self-possession. Moreover, out of this almost brash assurance comes "Directive," surely one of Frost's highest achievements.

Here the poet is not the listener or the narrator, but the confident guide leading his reader back into a "time made simple by the loss of detail," to discover among the ruins of a vacant farm the broken goblet the guide has hidden under a cedar tree against the day of his return. The broken goblet, originally cast aside by the adults as a mere toy for the children's playhouse and again abandoned when everyone departed, becomes the all important detail which the poet has seized to save from the ruins of the past. It is for Frost an image of the charmed grail itself, a talisman not carried like a spear of grass but stored away in a secret niche and displayed only to the right persons who, following the poet along the intricate pathways toward the heart of his property, are lost enough to find themselves. (pp. 85-6)

Yet Frost maintains a sharp comic detachment from the central association he exploits, the allusion to the grail quest. His poem is not a recapitulation or variation of the legend but a masque, a performance staged for his audience's benefit by the knowing god who owns the salvaged grail. His whimsy … is actually an aspect of his comic delicacy…. (p. 86)

"Directive" rehearses the course Frost has pursued as a poet and is thus a survey of the ground he has possessed. But it also points toward what is to come, toward the masques and beyond to his latest poem, "Kitty Hawk," in which, while commemorating the Wright brothers' famous flight, he seizes the chance to celebrate his own first flight into poetry with his sacred muse—an event which considerably anticipated the first propeller-driven flight.

Finally, "Directive" is a performance by the same "character" who so often commands the central stage as lecturer and whose public performances imitate to a remarkable degree the structure of his poems. For Frost's primal subject is always poetry and the poet—his poetry and himself the poet…. Even in [the poem's] introductory movement, Frost is already retreating from his audience toward himself, and the conversational idiom functions as an invitation, never as an appeal.

When he reaches the poems he is to "say," as he puts it, Frost has gained a presence of remote loneliness. His manner of "saying" them is neither recitative, declamatory, nor bardic; rather he seems to be remembering each poem as he moves through it, and even when he forgets his way he usually chooses to find himself without benefit of text. There is a manifest anticipation both in speaker and audience as the remembering proceeds, a kind of wonder and suspense as the tenuous thread of the poem is pursued; and when the end is grasped there is a distinct sense of discovery and relief. (pp. 87-8)

To know Frost's poems and then to watch his mind close tenderly about them is to see again that they are his triumphs in form wrought out of the chaos he has lived through. (p. 88)

James M. Cox, "Robert Frost and the Edge of the Clearing," in The Virginia Quarterly Review (copyright, 1959, by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University of Virginia), Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter, 1959), pp. 73-88.