[Even] though Frost is extremely gifted in his ability to make even the least lyric poem dramatic, he is primarily a subjective lyric poet, at his best in his apparently contradictory moods of response to experience and in his figurative ways of defining differences…. [The] matrix-pattern of A Boy's Will foreshadows his persistent pleasure in employing the lyric mode as an expression of self-discovery, even of psychological self-education, concerning his own ties to his beloved, to strangers, to nature, to the universe, to God. If it might be argued that these are the familiar concerns of most lyric poets, one differentiation may be suggested. For Frost, the ultimate and ulterior preoccupation is with a poetic view of life which he can consider complete, in the sense that it encompasses and integrates all these relationships figuratively, and yet not systematically. His ulterior concern is always with psychic and spiritual salvation. Frost's awareness of his differences from conventional attitudes, in his defense of the unsystematic, is at least implied in such a confession as this:

          And were an epitaph to be my story
          I'd have a short one ready for my own.
          I would have written of me on my stone:
          I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

Once again, the contraries implicit in that phrase "lover's quarrel" do not imply either physical or metaphysical rebellion against the human condition…. His "lover's quarrel with the world" may have begun through his wanting and trying to discover or define his own sense of simultaneous separateness and integration. More than that, a large part of his poetic pleasure would seem to be derived from his finding verse not only an end in itself but also a means to the end of making each poem a "clarification of life," at least a clarification of his own attitude toward life. (pp. 15-16)

Repeatedly, in Frost's lyrics, the playful seriousness evokes ironies and ambiguities which imply that some of the poet's representations of his outward quarrels with the world may also be taken as either conscious or unconscious projections of inward conflicts. At times, some of his poems achieve an extra dimension of meaning if viewed as constructed around his conscious and yet unstated realization of his own divided awareness. His taunts and countertaunts thus pick up enrichments of meaning if the poem is viewed as contending, at one and the same time, with enemies inside and outside his own heart and mind. (p. 17)

Frost, who boasted of his Puritan descent, and who was decidedly puritanical in many of his sympathies, might be viewed as a nonconforming Puritan nonconformist.

For the sake of poetry, there would seem to be a kind of convenience or luxury or at least artistic usefulness in the very posture of heresy. It provides the artist not only with greater freedom to manipulate his raw materials but also with the added chance to indulge varying moods of belief and unbelief. He can say with Horatio, in Hamlet, "So have I heard and do in part believe it." But in Frost's case it would seem more accurate to suggest that his poetic flaunting of heresies largely stems from his inability to derive adequate intellectual-emotional-spiritual satisfaction from any systematic dogma which imposes intolerable limitations on a temperament which delights to seek truth through questions and dialogue. (p. 20)

For various and complicated reasons, his fluctuating and ambiguous viewpoint mocks, at times, any complacent notions concerning a benevolent design in nature…. For Frost, the attempt to see clearly, and from all sides, requires a willingness to confront the frightening and the appalling in even its darkest forms.

Any careful reader of Frost's poems notices how frequently "fear" provides different kinds of premises for him. If nature and human nature have the power to reduce man to a fearful sense of his own smallness, his own lostness, in a seemingly indifferent or even malicious universe, then one suggested way to confront such fear is to imagine life stripped down to a minimum; to decide whether enough is left to go on with; then to consider the question whether the possible gains are worth the necessary cost…. [Many of the later poems] closely represent the confrontations of fear, lostness, alienation, not so much for purposes of shuddering as for purposes of overcoming fright, first through individual and then through social ingenuity, courage, daring, and action. (pp. 20-2)

[Frost] mentioned Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Thoreau's Walden as thematically rhyming for him: "Robinson Crusoe is never quite out of my mind. I never tire of being shown how the limited can make snug in the limitless. Walden has something of the same fascination. Crusoe was cast away; Thoreau was self-cast away. Both found themselves sufficient. No prose writer has ever been more fortunate in subject than these two." By implication, no subject matter has ever made stronger appeal to Frost, for poetry, than that same question as to how the limited man can make snug in the limitless. As it happens, many of his poems talk back and forth to each other as though calculated to answer something like Pascal's old-new observation, "When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and behind me, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid." Understanding that kind of fear, Frost expresses much the same mood, with a twist, in his poem entitled "Desert Places." But he more often prefers to answer the existential problem of "what to make of a diminished thing" by representing characters who confront the excruciations by means of order-giving actions. For example, in the dramatic monologue entitled "An Empty Threat," the speaker is a fur trader who has chosen to work out his purposes almost alone, on the frozen shore of Hudson Bay. Although he recognizes all the symbols of defeat and death in the bleak landscape, the speaker is represented as uttering his flat rejoinder, "I stay," in the first line of the poem…. [The question of plan or design] obliquely raised suggests answers not so much in terms of the known or unknown but rather in terms of the possible. The poem concludes with the suggestion that if man is given his choice of succumbing to paralyzing doubts and fears or of translating even limited faith into possibly constructive action, then the choice ought to be made with ease. (pp. 22-3)

Even though he likes to indulge at least the posture of not-knowing, Frost sooner or later makes it clear that not too much is left in doubt, for him. If there are times when he seems to take particular pleasure in defining his beliefs in terms of his heresies, he cannot play metaphorical hide-and-seek too long without trailing clouds of puritanic certainty. For example, one of his most paradoxical and most metaphysical poems ["All Revelation"] begins by tantalizing the reader with ambiguities, and even continues with various forms of teasing provocation through the last line…. (p. 24)

The last line of "All Revelation" makes a use of hyperbole which ought to be challenged by any thoughtful reader. "All revelation has been ours" is a very bold assertion. It might suggest that man endows nature with whatever order and meaning it has. But if that way of interpreting this last line may be attractive to some readers, it is not congenial to the controls provided by Frost's larger context of poetic utterances…. For Frost, whatever kind of revelation man here makes or achieves, through the uses of sense and skill, implies at least some kind of precedence of order and of design in nature. So the word "revelation," as poetically operative here, would seem to pick up its Frostian meaning only if it is viewed as representing a two-way process: an act of collaboration…. ([The] same theme, with its religious overtones of meaning, is developed further by Frost in A Masque of Reason.)

The counterbalancing of contrary attitudes or viewpoints, in "All Revelation," further suggests the poet's distaste for lingering too long in moods which merely accentuate the apparent design of darkness to appall, in the structure of the universe; his distaste for stressing too heavily the fright which can be and is derived from too much contemplation of inner and outer desert places. Yet he never lets us forget the limitations. At times, he editorializes or even preaches, poetically, with unabashed and strongly puritanical tones of warning and corrective, against the sin of indulging too much concern for the imponderables, in or beyond nature. (pp. 26-7)

Frost's recurrent elements of theme involving fear, isolation, lostness, not-knowing, and discontinuity … remain operative in the poems, side by side with these recurrent elements of faith and love and continuity. His juxtaposition of contrary and yet ultimately complementary images and themes finds its most elaborately paradoxical expression in those two masques which Frost chose to place in a significant summary position, at the conclusion to his volume which he also chose to entitle, with figurative overtones, Complete Poems.

As the titles suggest, A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy explore contrary themes; yet once again they are contraries which permit us to view the two masques as complementary. More than that, they provide an epitome, or a gathering metaphor, of many major themes developed by Frost in the poems which precede and succeed them. Relationships are again explored in each of the masques; man's ultimate relationships to self, to society, to nature, to the universe, to God. Or, to say it another way, the two masques further extend themes involving man's perennial sense of isolation and communion, of fear and courage, of ignorance and knowledge, of discontinuity and continuity. (pp. 32-3)

In the initial action [of A Masque of Reason], Frost represents Job, his wife, and God as conducting an intimate postmortem concerning the strengths and weaknesses of human reason in trying to understand the divine plan or design. Intimacy permits Job to ask his questions with all the ardor, boldness, even insolence of one participating in a family quarrel. If the orthodox reader should find himself offended by such apparent irreverence, or should find God represented in terms contrary to trite conventional concepts, the implicit mockery of accepted notions is again not accidental.

Because the action begins some two thousand years after the death of Job, all the characters have the advantage of encompassing modern knowledge and attitudes, so that the seeming anachronisms of reference suggest continuity in time and space. Job's concern is to ask God's "reason" for inflicting torture on innocent human beings. After preliminary hesitancy and sparring, God takes occasion to thank Job for his collaboration in an epoch-making action:

     I've had you on my mind a thousand years
     To thank you someday for the way you helped me
     Establish once for all the principle
     There's no connection man can reason out
     Between his just deserts and what he gets.

That phrase "the way you helped me" may recall notions advanced by William James and others concerning a suffering God, limited and thwarted in his plan to realize his divine purpose so long as man is indifferent and uncooperative. Also echoed throughout the masque is the related Bergsonian concept of a continuously creative process which develops the universe. But as Frost adapts these assumptions to his own sympathetic uses, he combines them with his favorite puritanic emphasis on the limitations of reason as it affects the relationship between man and God: "there's no connection man can reason out …". (pp. 33-4)

[God's] phrase "it was of the essence of the trial" may permit a further reminder here that Frost's earlier poems can be taken as notes and grace notes to these two masques. He had previously honored the conventional puritanic tendency to heap a heavy burden of meaning on the word "trial."… In A Masque of Reason, these various views are again invoked and now mingled with Jamesian-Bergsonian notions, as God reviews the changing or evolving attitude of man toward God, achieved with the help of Job and others. (pp. 34-5)

But Job, not yet satisfied with God's explanation of suffering, says at one point, "Such devilish ingenuity of torture / Did seem unlike You …" God has already admitted to Job that even as Job had been one of his helpers, so Satan had been another, with all his originality of sin. Job's wife helps by describing Satan as "God's best inspiration." In other words, good needs evil to complement it, else each would be meaningless. The conclusion of the masque represents God as confessing his motive had initially been that simple: "I was just showing off to the Devil, Job." (p. 36)

Considered as a work of art, A Masque of Reason is too largely composed of talk-talk, and too little dependent on action, to give it dramatic merit. But if considered as poetry, it can at least serve to clarify and unify many of the contrary meanings in the earlier and later poems. Notice that Frost's mockery of conventional religious concepts is here once again counterbalanced by sympathetic representations of theological views which, however fragmentary, are quite in accord with certain elements of Calvinistic Puritan doctrine. The masque thus provides further evidence that no matter how much Frost may have thought he rejected the received assumptions of his religious heritage, he indulged that posture of rejection, through his art and thought, to realize a difference which was never too pronounced. (pp. 36-7)

[The] dominant thematic concern of A Masque of Mercy may be said to pivot once again on the limitations of human knowledge as it involves different responses to various kinds of fear, starting and ending with the wisdom-unwisdom of man's fearing God. Indirectly, these notions are related to the convictions of Job, in the earlier masque, that no matter what "progress" may be, it cannot mean that the earth has become an easier place for man to save his soul; that unless earth can serve as a difficult trial-ground, the hardships of existence become meaningless. (p. 38)

Robert Frost did not bother to articulate more than fragments of his poetic theory, and yet certain essentials of it can be deduced from his poetic practice. If we remember that his wide acclaim has been earned during an era of artistic innovation and experiment, we may marvel at his having achieved such distinction merely by letting his idiom discover old ways to be new, within the traditional conventions of lyric and dramatic and thematic modes. While Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and others invoked or invented elaborate mythic frames of reference which have enriched and complicated artistic strategies, Frost would seem to have risked successfully the purification of poetic utterance, in complicating simple forms. As we have seen, however, he quite consciously assimilates to his own New England idiom such varieties of classical conventions as the relaxed modes of the Theocritan idylls, the terse epigrammatic brevity of Martial, the contemplative serenity of Horace, the sharply satirical intensity of Juvenal, the homely didacticism of Aesop. Yet his treasured firsthand familiarity with and admiration for the classics have not been displayed in ways which make his meanings depend on esoteric scholarship. Quite clearly, he has deliberately chosen to address himself to the common reader.

But if the majority of Frost's admirers would seem content to share the poet's delight in cherishing the humble beauties of nature, recorded by him with such precision of response to images of experience among New England fields, farms, roadsides, and forests, those readers have been willing to settle for too little, when so many other and deeper levels of meaning are available in his poems. It has frequently and correctly been pointed out that Frost's poetic concerns are akin to those which led Wordsworth to choose incidents and situations from common life and then to present them in a language actually used by the common man whose heartfelt passions are not restrained. Like Wordsworth, and like many poets before and after Wordsworth, Frost has particularly emphasized his concern for catching within the lines of his poems the rhythms and cadences and tones of human speech. Among modern poets, he has been one of the many who have advocated a capturing of what he has repeatedly referred to as "the sound of sense" or "sound posturing" to provide a complicating enrichment of the underlying metrical rhythm. (pp. 40-1)

His primary artistic achievement, which is an enviable one, in spite of shortcomings, rests on his blending of thought and emotion and symbolic imagery within the confines of the lyric. It would seem to be an essential part of both his theory and practice to start with a single image, or to start with an image of an action, and then to endow either or both with a figurativeness of meaning, which is not fully understood by the reader until the extensions of meaning are found to transcend the physical.

While no one could correctly call Frost a transcendentalist, his kinship with Emerson goes deeper than might at first be noticed. (p. 41)

We have noticed in Frost's poetic theory and practice he likes to endow images and actions with implicitly metaphorical and symbolic meanings until they repeatedly suggest a continuity between his vision of the human "fact" and the divine "fact." We have also noticed that he likes the tension between two ways of looking at such thought-felt moods; that his own moments of doubt, in these matters, seem to afford him the luxury of reaffirmation. In such a context, a poem like "Mowing" reveals further kinships between Frost and Emerson. In his essay on "The Poet" Emerson writes, "I find that the fascination resides in the symbol." Frost would agree. Emerson goes on to say that the response of the farmer to nature is a sympathetic form of worship…. Again Frost would agree, at least in part; but it must be pointed out that Frost's view of nature-assymbol does not coincide with the Emersonian view. Neither does it coincide with the New England puritanical view of nature-as-symbol. Nevertheless, to those Puritan forefathers against whom both Emerson and Frost partially rebelled, self-reliance was God-reliance. Even those Puritan forefathers also insisted that laborare est orare. Whatever the differences in the three positions, the likenesses are significant.

"Prayer," says Emerson, with almost puritanical exultation, "is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul." Frost would have been embarrassed to speak out that frankly in open meeting; but his poems obliquely imply his own assent to the notion. The core of his poetic theory, as of his poetic practice, is to be found in his uses of the sensuous responses of loving and cherishing, first as important poetic images of human actions; then, simultaneously, as even more important symbols of divine worship and even of prayer: "May my sacrifice be found acceptable in Heaven's sight."

In conclusion it should be said that the approach here used, in an attempt to increase our appreciation and understanding of Robert Frost's life and art, is only one of many possible approaches. It is calculated to suggest that many elements run counter to themselves, therein, without any ultimate contradictions. It also provides a means of noticing that Frost's entire work is deeply rooted in the American, even in the most vital Puritan, idiom. It is "native to the grain," and yet thoroughly original. (pp. 43-4)

Lawrence Thompson, in his Robert Frost (American Writers Pamphlet No. 2; © 1959, University of Minnesota), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1959.