One errs greatly to mistake restraint for coldness; or decorum for lack of passion. Mr. Frost's restraint is the natural reserve one associates with persons with generations of New England ancestry. When such persons are able to give freely they can give abundantly. It is no opening of the sluices to let through a truckle. An Englishman could better appreciate Mr Frost than the American who linguistically is not a part of the small New England area...
In Mr. Frost's earlier work...., the sensuous elements dominate vut never obscure the rational; in mid-career the sensuous and rational are about evenly distributed; in his [late] work sensuous and rational elements must be present at the beginning and persis to the end. Perhaps it would be truer to day that the sensuous elements in the later lyrics become subtler, are lee od the surface than of the deeps. Since Mr. Frost brought his wares later to market this should be so. A man who publishes his first volume at thirty-seven must bring more than pure sensuousness if he expects to live. Mr. Frost is most sensuous in thse subjects were persons are generally so, in their attitude toward love and nature....
He looked for no basic change in the fundamental renets of this faith, only a greater surety of their truth.... The purely contemplative life away from the world, however, was not enough. He knew that man needs man; ot, however, was not means of escaping from himself, but as food for his thinging He needs to observe him in daily activites, he needs to ponder the meaning of death, and even more the aims of life. When these do not suffice, he needs to turn to a bruised plant, the earth, or look into the 'crater' of an ant.... He needs the perspective possible through a telescope and the accutacy of facts possible through a microscope, and the tolerance that sometimes comes from politics. Mr. Frost's version is not restricted to one plane. He has looked up, into, and across others. Because he baser his thing on facts---'the fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows'---he has attained unto wisdom...
Mr. Frost os strongly traditional; although he has little use for tradition as such. He is conservative in the finest sense of the word with a strong mixture of Yankee shrewdness and sommon sense. Each generation, he believes, must reexamine the customs by which it lives and discard the outmoded ones in order to keep vital those which are sound.... Not to do this keeps man from progressing; holds in fact, to the mental havits of a dweller in the stone age. This does not mean, however, that the poet believe a person should seize on ever new and untried idea that passes by,or that he should discard a belief that happes to be out of fashion. Quite the contrary...
[His] consist insistence on the necessity for vibrant awareness of the immediacy of life here and how and his unwillingness to escape from life constitutes much of Mr. Frost's strength. Sensuous beauty may be enough in youth---a kiss from the beloved, a tough of a rose petal on the hand---but maturity (if it is to continue to grow) takes its nourishment from sterner stuff....
There is no pretence at metaphysical profundity in Mr. Frost's poetry. There is only the profundity that springs from his wrestlings with the problems of like. If his answers differ little or only slightly from those found by others to the same questions, their validity is no less. The restatement of these answers in terms that enrich they communication is important. We have not only the ideas themselves, but Mr. Frost's passionate expression of his conviction and joy in those truths, in language that inspires the reader of his poems with a renewed conviction of the timelessness of basic ethical truths. Few modern poets have with so little ostentation assimilated the findings of science....
Adequately to grasp the reaches of Mr. Frost's thought, one must understand his use of nature as a metaphor. In the early work him images are drawnn largely from the woods. The woods represent his own inner nature and his withdrawl into them typifies his examination of himself. It is necessary, he repeats over and over that a person must withdraw himself from the activities of life that absorb so large a part of one's time and make experiences from the sensations accompanying these activities. In his middle years references to the woods are less frequent. In...Steeple Bush, the metaphors from the woods have almost wholly given away to those drawn from the stars. The poet has made the transition with more graciousness, because no one else pessesses in such a large measure the saving grace of humour which laughs through all cant and sham to the basic truths so far as man has yet been able to reach them....
Because of the manner in which Mr. Frost has clothed his conclusions on life, he has at one time or the other been called non-intellectual. This is, of coarse, to minunderstand him and his avhievement. He is intellectual enough. As a poet, however, he is aware, as I have mentioned, of the value of colour. He is almost impressionistic in the concern for colour in his work. Because of his insistanceon this quality---evident in his images, image-words, rhythms, and prosodic, he achieves a correspondence with the reader otherwise impossible. the majority of his poems have an intellectual idea, but the idea is so transfused with emotion that it becomes knowledge and wisdom rather than cold fact. He knew, too, that wisdom came not so much from books as from an intelligent observation of life. He realized, too, as he grew older that although the colours of a poet's palette may become cooler, the emotion they evoke is no less prfount....
Mr. Frost's imagery never gives the impression of being tacked on or borrowed. It springs from his own observations of the world about him and, more frequently than a reader might suspect, from the world of literature, particualrly from Shakespeaer and some of the Latin poets. Nowhere is the poet's whole-hearted absorption in nature more clearly revealed than in his dependence on nature for vivifying an impression from the world of people.