Did lovers ever really talk like that, in Ireland or anywhere? Synge said they did, and I hope he was right. He also said they would not be talking like that much longer, and I am afraid he was right about that, too.
Synge died in 1909, at the age of thirty-eight. I have placed him here, out of chronological order, because of his relationship to Yeats, who died in 1939 at the age of seventy-four.
BEATRIX POTTER
1866–1943
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
Beatrix Potter (one of the nicest things about her was the way she spelled her name) was born in South Kensington, now a part of London, in 1866. She received an ordinary education in an ordinary school, and she lived quite an ordinary life. But she liked to tell stories and to draw, and in 1899 she began to send a series of illustrated animal stories, in letters and on postcards, to a sick child who was her friend. As the year wore on the stories grew longer and longer. The first of her books appeared in 1900. It was called The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and it is one of the most famous books in the world.
There is nothing sentimental about Peter Rabbit or about the dozens of other books with which Beatrix Potter followed it. That is another good thing about her: she saw the world, especially the animal world, very clearly, knew it was full of accidents and cruelties, and did not disguise these from her child readers. Some of the books are even a bit macabre. But the stories usually end up well, which is what children like best: hard times and travails, with a happy ending. In fact, who doesn’t like that kind of story best?
By the time Beatrix Potter died, in 1943, millions of copies of her little square books had been sold, with their wry stories and colorful illustrations. By now the count may be approaching a billion. Thank you, Beatrix Potter, wherever you are; you deserve all your fame and all your royalties. You gave us Peter Rabbit and the Tailor of Gloucester and Benjamin Bunny and Jemima Puddle-Duck and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle—how can we ever repay the debt?
ROBERT FROST
1874–1963
Selected Poems
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and moved when he was eleven years old to New England, where his family had lived for generations. He went to Dartmouth College when he was eighteen but dropped out to live at home, working at various jobs and writing poetry. In 1897 he entered Harvard but withdrew because of ill health. He farmed in New Hampshire for a while and taught school, but his life and career were not successful until he went to England in 1912 and found a willing publisher for his now considerable body of work. A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) appeared in England and made him well known.
Frost returned to New England in 1915 and for the next forty years held various academic posts, some of them honorary, and wrote poems. The winner of four Pulitzer Prizes for his verse, he was eminently a professional poet whose later works were often on bestseller lists. He made a memorable appearance at the inauguration in 1961 of President John F. Kennedy, reciting his poem “The Gift Outright” in the strong wind and sunlight of that day. The next year, at the age of eighty-two, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Frost died in Boston in 1963.
His death was a shock; it was hard to get used to his not being here. He had published his first volumes before World War I, and it seemed that he had always been what he later became, the most important American poet of the twentieth century. And then he was gone.
The personality of a poet has much to do with his fame. Frost was a crafty self-promoter. He knew how to remain in the public eye, how to be always at the top of everyone’s lists. His later books were the kind of commercial success on which publishers live. But was he really good? As good as everyone thought, as good as he seemed?
There is not the almost-unanimous consensus about this that existed a few years ago. As with Picasso, another who bestrode his age, it has become apparent that some of Frost’s productions were not first rate. Even Homer nodded, and Frost nodded often and disastrously. His easy verse could run on and on. His subjects could be so tiny that they seemed to disappear when you got down to examining them. Then, a handful of his poems were so famous that they seemed to wear out in the reading.
Take “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” That last stanza:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
It is hard to think of four lines by an American poet that are better known. Or these astonishing lines that leap out of the pages of “The Death of the Hired Man”: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there/They have to take you in.” “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
Or the famous boast (for boast it is) in “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Or (finally) this marvelous last stanza from “Two Tramps in Mud Time”:
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sake.
Do these famous lines, and a hundred or five hundred others, deserve their great fame? I think they do. Are they as good as they seem to be? I think they are. Are the sentiments, so clear, so intelligible (unlike so much modern poetry)—are the sentiments superficial, and is that why we understand them so easily? I do not think it is bad for a poem to be intelligible.
That easy verse I mentioned is truly a marvel. Usually in couplets, often either in a four-footed or a five-footed meter, it is as close to prose as verse can be and still be unmistakably verse. Take the next-to-last line of “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” Read the line aloud and see how the fact that it is verse, and that the verse has four beats in each line, forces you to put the emphasis where it belongs: “Is the deed (pause) ever (pause) really (strong emphasis) done.” The verse, apparently so easy and forgiving, in reality has you by the throat and will not let you go, will not let you read the poem in any other way. Frost was unequaled in the writing of verse in our time. The stories he told in verse, in pentameter couplets that can be compared, if they can be compared to any other English poet’s, only to Chaucer’s wonderful, easy couplets in The Canterbury Tales, are all the better stories because of the form he gives them. “The Witch of Coos,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “The Black Cottage,” “In the Home Stretch”—these are all extraordinary narrative poems, and narrative poems endure.
Best of all, probably, are the little poems that merely observe, often on the basis of a natural event or phenomenon, how life conducts itself in this world. “Fire and Ice” is a famous example, as are “Once by the Pacific,” “Birches,” and “Mending Wall.” The point is not made too obviously or too strongly, but you do not forget that both anger and hatred are sufficient to end the world, that the fury of the sea is the symbol of the fury of Nature itself, that “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches,” that “Good fences make good neighbors.” Homely truths, all of these, but true for all that! And it is the poet’s business to tell the truth.