Frost allies himself with Emerson, not Whitman, thereby demonstrating that he has resisted the temptation (so fatal because so self assuring) to take a way of poetry that only a person as tremendous as Whitman could take without losing his identity as poet. Even better than Emerson, Frost knows the dangers of too much inwardness. For this is clearly an Emersonian sentiment, and yet not quite the sort entertained by those readers of Frost who would make him "easier" than he is—a celebrant of hard-headed self-reliance, village style, a "sound" poet because somehow "traditional." Moreover, in the poems themselves, even this authentic Emersonianism is qualified, qualified by being projected always out of situations which are not quite "modern."… Frost has no interest in being a specifically "contemporary" poet—which is what Emerson felt he had to be, or perish. Moreover, in his poems Frost is master of all he surveys in a way that Emerson would never allow himself to be. Frost knows himself as person so well, he can record the knowledge in such exacting detail, that he never has occasion to celebrate the more general and inclusive concept of self which is everywhere the efficient cause of Emerson's poetry.

The gain is one of objectivity and precision. Unlike his prose (of which there is precious little), his poetry is not at all slippery. The loss is one of that inclusiveness and sense of ever-widening possibility, characteristic of Emerson's poetry at its best…. At the heart of Frost's achievement lies his ability to consolidate the Emersonian mode, to adopt it on his own terms, and so make it a means whereby a certain stability and certitude, however limited, might be achieved. From his position of strength, he bids others depart—and leave him behind. As poet, he will not be a leader. The farthest thing from his mind is the desire to be a culture hero. For good and for bad, this has been the heart's desire of most of his predecessors and contemporaries. Herein his work marks a pause—a series of moments in which confusion is stayed, perhaps comprehended—in the continuity of American poetry. Frost is our greatest stock-taker.

The major tradition of American poetry before his time serves Frost as a limiting condition for the making of poems. He has come to be a large poet (in a way, our most "complete" poet), because he knows how small man is when he acknowledges the limitations within which he labors. Frost has been able to perfect his work as have none of his contemporaries. Maybe we refer to this sort of thing when we are tempted to speak of him as a "minor poet." We mean perhaps that in his work he portrays a world, and himself in it, that is not as readily available to us as is that of some of his contemporaries. In any case, he has known quite clearly what he has been doing. (pp. 272-73)

The conditions which circumscribe Frost's poems are those of a world not yet dominated by urban, industrialized, bureaucratized culture—the very world which, seeing its inevitable coming, Emerson and his kind strove to confront and save for man before it would be too late. Frost glances at this world, only to turn to one he knows better. In that world the proper life style—which in turn generates the literary style—is that of Frost's characteristic protagonists: individuals who again and again are made to face up to the fact of their individualism as such; who can believe that a community is no more than the sum of the individuals who make it up; who are situated so as to have only a dim sense, even that resisted mightily, of the transformations which the individual might have to undergo if he is to live fully in the modern world and still retain his identity as an individual. But, of course, Frost's protagonists refuse to live fully in the modern world and will have little or nothing to do with such transformations. Frost's work is in the end a series of expressions of that refusal and assessments of its cost. The cost is great, and is acknowledged unflinchingly. Reading Frost, many of us—finding ourselves in the end unable to go along with him and deny the world in which we live—must deny the world of a poet who will not live in ours with us. It is not so much that he does not speak our language, but that we do not, cannot, speak his. Perhaps he means us to deny his world, so that we will be forced to live in our own, all the while knowing just how much we must pay in order to do so. This indeed would be freedom, but a dreadful freedom, generating none of the confidence in the future toward which Emerson pointed his poems. (pp. 273-74)

Even if we cannot speak his language, we yet know what he means. We listen to him as we would listen to a sage, not daring to interrupt him because not knowing how…. His individualism, as it comes out in his poems, is of a self which is emphatically not free to sound its barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world. Its freedom is a freedom to decide not what it will do unto others but rather what it will allow others to do unto it. (p. 274)

[Frost] puts the Emersonian doctrine of freedom to his own special use. For Emerson, and his great contemporaries too, conceived of the "free" person as, by internal necessity, one who had to break through and away from substantial concerns—the life of the workaday world, the life of the older order—so as to transform himself in the breaking…. Emerson broke from the past in order to look forward. Frost does so in order to look at the here and now, and thereby is by far more loyal to the past than Emerson could bear to be.

For Frost there is a new order, to be sure; but it is the product of a recovery and reconstitution, rather than of a reinvention and transformation, of the old. For the great nineteenth-century poets, life consisted of an infinite series of willed, self-generated transformations forward; the opportunity for each transformation was only that—an opportunity, its possibilities exhausted as soon as the transformation had occurred…. Thus, in the deepest sense, the "opportunism" of their poetry. In Frost, however, this conception of the transformative opportunity has been stabilized to a point where it is not a means of advancing, but of withdrawing and consolidating…. The freedom, he might say, allows him to define, not unleash himself. To be sure, Frost has called freedom "departure." But, as he departs, he looks backward, not forward. He would have us enjoy our going hence because he knows so well whence we have come hither.

Frost's best poems demonstrate … his certainty that he is one kind of man moving down one kind of road. The most telling of the poems are the monologues and dialogues which begin in North of Boston, early in his career. Again and again the subject is the failure of communication, a failure which shows just how small and delimited the effective community can be. As often as not it comes to be a community of one—a community which can be called such only because its existence is, as it were, authorized by the fact that all men of high sensibility who live in it will quite readily come to recognize that in the end they can communicate only the fact that they cannot communicate, that they can but find the rather limited terms in which they can communicate this fact. The terms—deriving from Frost's abiding sense of farm, mountain, and village life—are sharp enough to cut off cleanly from his fellows him who lives by them.

Moreover, Frost is honest and clear-headed enough to admit that they cut off from one another even those who would together live by them. This sentiment is at the heart of most of the monologues and dialogues…. (pp. 276-77)

Always in Frost there is the desire (or a temptation so strong as to be a desire) to "go behind" something. Almost always there is the failure to do so, and then the triumph in living with the failure and discovering that it is a condition of strength—the strength in discovering oneself as a person, limited by the conditions which can be made clearly to define oneself as a person. This is the subject which "shall be fulfilled." In the dramatic poems it is difficult to find precise points where this is fully realized, because the realization is not the protagonist's, but rather the poet's—as a result of the total effect of the poem. For Frost (and this is an aspect of the achievement of such poems) the failure infuses what he makes out to be a whole experience. Here, one might say, Frost is almost a novelist, because the meaning of his poems depends so much upon a minute attendance to the conditions in which particular failures must be portrayed. There are moments of pure, unmediated realization, however—epiphanies. Such moments are by definition private and are accordingly rendered in first-person lyrics—"Tree at My Window," "Desert Places," "The Tuft of Flowers," "The Road Not Taken," "Bereft," "Once by the Pacific," "Stopping by Woods …" and so many more. To name them is to recall a series of instants of awareness whose abounding clarity is gained at the expense of a certain willed irrelevance to many of the conditions in modern life. This is, one is forced to conclude, a failure which Frost wills so that he can understand it and proceed to build positively out from it. (p. 278)

What finally gives the best poems their tremendous effectiveness is a sense of local detail so sharp, so fully controlled, so wholly the poet's own, as to make us know once and forever the gulf between his world and all others. Above all, Frost can call up a sense of place and of the working of an individual sensibility when limited by and therefore complementary to it…. (p. 279)

Frost has long well known where and who he is. But more and more he has chosen to speak only to himself, albeit in public. We listen, we are delighted, we are moved and enlightened; but we are on the outside looking in at a poet who remains resolutely on the inside looking out, telling us what we are not by telling us what he and his special kind are…. In his work the nineteenth-century faith in the ultimate equivalence of the "I" and the "we" has been renounced. He has no need for the after-the-fact transcendentalism toward which such a faith drove Emerson and Whitman. What is gained is a sense of the concrete, particular, bounded "I," anticipated only in the work of Emily Dickinson. Yet Frost lacks even her variety—the product of a mind which dares to be more capacious than his. That is what is lost, the expense of Frost's greatness: variety and capaciousness. Frost manages in his poems to create nothing less than an orthodoxy—as against Emerson's heterodoxy—of the self. (p. 283)