He plunged in work: his Southern notes he winnowed;
And, much as he a mean deception spurned,
In corresponding with the press, continued
To date from countries whence he had returned,
If he indeed had seen them; and so learned
The art—imaginative and dramatic—
Of writing foreign letters from an attic.
Rob’s friends “marvelled why such genius should remain / A beggar in a barren garret, when / He might, like many far less able men, / Become a lawyer, or a politician, / And strike for office, fortune, and position.” Plus ça change.
Such observations, such attitudes struck or stricken, have their insistent pleasures, as do Trowbridge’s lines—worthy of Pope—on society’s Pecksniffery: when Guy belatedly arrives in New York, “once more Good Society / Inclined to take Florinda into favor. / Those who had wronged her graciously forgave her.” Trowbridge turns the screw deeper:
Society is full of politic,
Smooth people, courteous, shunning all dissension,
Who, should they find even Judas in their clique,
Well-dressed, would treat him with polite attention,
And hardly think it worth the while to mention
That most unfortunate misunderstanding
He is reported to have had a hand in.
The later sections of Guy Vernon never quite regain the energy and reckless insouciance of the first half—there’s a slackening of detail, and the lines are more infected by the sins of Trowbridge’s minor work. (Many a reader who has started Don Juan has failed to finish it—something in rhyme royal and ottava rima encourages authors to go beyond their measure.) Nevertheless, Trowbridge often cleverly wrong-foots the reader, finding some twist of plot truer to human relations than to the necessities of drama.
It is hard to imagine a serious novel with a heroine named Florinda—she’s the joke of her own name—and yet, however often he mocks her imprudence, her silliness, her pretensions (“All in accordance with her utmost wishes, / Even to the monogram upon the dishes”), the poet takes her seriously; her sorrows are not cobbled up to make her a figure of comic humiliation. She is perhaps unfairly dismissed in the finale (I’m enthusiastic enough about the poem to obey the author’s wish that the ending not be revealed), but she has collaborated in her fate—and fates are often undeserved. Guy Vernon shows in half-light the social exactions and suffocating restrictions deemed permissible by mid-nineteenth-century society—the symbol Trowbridge uses is, almost inevitably, the lady’s corset.
What Trowbridge has borrowed from Byron, he has borrowed cleverly, down to the narrator who insinuates himself, anticipating our questions, telling the story partly for his own delight, professing ignorance of certain matters, and never quite receding into the background—the poet is the correlative of his own invention, the devious servant Saturn. Trowbridge is even at times Byron’s equal as a student of human behavior—his description of a madman, for example, seems a clinical diagnosis of manic depression:
“Sometimes for several years he is exempt;
Then the old indications: first, a strange
Irritability; then perhaps the attempt
To hide even from himself the coming change
In a forced gayety; then the symptoms range
From moody melancholy and fitful sadness
To deep despondency and downright madness!”
This “novelette” was, in length and form, unlike anything Trowbridge attempted before or after (his next-longest poem was not a quarter the length); its sly protest against social mores, its whirl of melodrama and comedy, its carelessness about the proprieties of poetry, its subtle intuitions of psychology, and its delirious and preposterous rhymes make it one of the most interesting descendants of Don Juan—it’s the poem of a man who had gotten drunk one night on Byron and never recovered. (Unfortunately, at this period the reputation of Byron and Don Juan were at an ebb.)
The use of rhyme royal rather than Byron’s ottava rima, whose every stanza requires a terrifying density of rhyme (abababcc), meant that Trowbridge didn’t have to grope about for rhymes quite as manically, or maniacally. English is notoriously poor in its rhymes, though that’s no fault of Byron, who relished the two- and three-syllable rhymes to which his invention was goaded. Rhyme royal, which rhymes ababbcc, would be merely a series of couplets if not for the second line in each stanza; that single interruption creates a form in which, however much they would like to move forward, the stanzas are forced to pause and recover. The trouble with rhyme royal and ottava rima is that the onrush of narrative often stumbles over the closing couplet of each stanza, where the poet is pressed to make a witty turn. Byron and Trowbridge used that hindrance to their advantage.
Trowbridge echoes Byron’s ottava rima without going quite as far—indeed, you could say rhyme royal always comes up a line short. It was a great stroke, nevertheless, for the later poet to see the possibilities of the form in modern English. Rhyme royal had been out of favor since Drayton abandoned it when revising the book that became The Barons’ Wars—when William Morris used it in “The Earthly Paradise,” a decade before Trowbridge, he could make nothing better than a piece of taxidermy. If Guy Vernon reaches back to Don Juan and the heroic couplets of The Rape of the Lock, it reaches forward to Auden, who cast “Letter to Lord Byron” in rhyme royal.
Most poets are deservedly forgotten. Reputations are unmade even faster than they are made (for every poet who, like Byron, woke up famous, the reputations of a thousand died with them). Very few poets slip into anonymity only to be rediscovered later—the exceptions are usually those who, unpublished in their time, like Thomas Traherne and Emily Dickinson, left manuscripts behind. Byron offered Trowbridge a way out of the popular poetry in which he was mired (often poetry must move backward to move forward, retreat in order to advance), yet Guy Vernon proved a dead end. If there are other poems by Trowbridge half as good, I have been unable to discover them, though he showed an extraordinary facility with rhymed forms (including ottava rima—his poems have all the eclectic weariness of the nineteenth century) and just as astonishing a gift for mediocrity. He was always a little too quick to dip into the Gladstone bag of stock phrases.
Trowbridge never again picked up his pen for such corrosive satire. His later verse—he wrote for another ten years and then almost gave up poetry—returned to the country-bumpkin-come-to-the-city manners with which he began (the poet he most resembles is Whittier). Yet in its Southern and Caribbean scenes, Guy Vernon joins the books of the American outback—Martin Chuzzlewit, The Confidence Man, Huckleberry Finn—with its vision of a nation filled with forward-looking go-and-get-’em types and genial frauds, while the few stanzas devoted to New York society have the razor’s edge of The Bostonians. The poem’s cynical view of human existence (and especially of that most tenuous of gambles, hope) allowed a more sculptured line and a resistance to the treacle-coated sentiment that otherwise disfigured Trowbridge’s verse. In Guy Vernon, for unknown reasons, he wrote savagely—I’d trade the whole of “Aurora Leigh” and “Enoch Arden” for the best passages in it.
Some of the authors in A Masque of Poets, it’s said, entered into the diversion by masking their styles—but a few soon acknowledged their contributions or republished the poems under their own names. Not until his autobiography a quarter of a century later did Trowbridge publicly admit his part. Guy Vernon must have cost him long labor—why did he not claim this out-of-wedlock child sooner?* Perhaps that was not the sort of poet he wanted to be. Perhaps he felt the poem a failure—the reviewer in the Literary World called it “easy verse of no very high order”; yet the Boston Transcript, according to an early advertisement for the book, said Guy Vernon was “one of the cleverest literary productions of the last half-dozen years.” The poem pointedly did not appear in Trowbridge’s Poetical Works, published, like his autobiography, in 1903. Though he lived into his eighty-ninth year, John Townsend Trowbridge never re
printed Guy Vernon.
* Curiously, the Arlington Public Library Catalogue-Supplement, 1881 has an author entry under Trowbridge for Guy Vernon. Trowbridge lived in Arlington and was one of the library’s trustees. Perhaps as early as three years after A Masque of Poets he wanted to make a quiet out-of-the-way acknowledgment of his achievement.
Frost at Midnight
When the flesh departs, when the reader can no longer ring up the author to badger him about an obscure line or quiz him on his influences, there are only the material remains of his workshop. For Shakespeare we have virtually nothing—no foul papers (apart from the scraps of Sir Thomas More and what might be the palimpsest of revision in his own plays), no letters, only tittle-tattle from years after his death and the elegies of his friends: in other words, so little matter that speculation conquers all. Other poets, whether by accident or design, have been less stingy with their disjecta membra—Milton left the drafts to “Lycidas” that so shocked Charles Lamb; Coleridge enough trunkfuls to overturn the myths he told about himself; and many modern poets warehouses of overdue bills, tattered school-essays, and airline tickets, so many aisles of flotsam and jetsam that scholars get lost and never emerge.
To go behind the scenes of the poems, to find out how they came to being, gratifies impulses contrary and even conflicting. There is the simple curiosity to know how brilliant things began (few readers want to examine the drafts of a hack), to see if they are in reach of the ordinary grinder or the pure result of inspiration; there is the scholar’s hunger to discover, in the backwaters of the poem, the source of the Nile; there is the critic’s itch for context and explanation (the same longing that would ferret out the “original intent” of the authors of the Constitution rather than settle for the homely ambiguity of words on the page)—these motives share an exhaustion of means, of wanting to know all that can be known. (The metaphors of scholarly attention derive from gluttony rather than other deadly sins.) More darkly, consider the village gossip’s appetite for the dirty secrets of composition, the suspicion that there is less than meets the eye, the prurient desire to tear off the fancy dress to show the poem’s shabby underdrawers.
The draft of a poem can reveal too much but is always doomed to reveal too little. Poets sometimes consider wild alternatives, reject weak phrases even while scribbling them down, complicate by ambiguities they did not intend—looking at the trace evidence of drafts and notebooks may give the critic too much confidence in devising a meaning of his own. Drafts are always what has been rejected, the pentimenti of abandoned hope; and the crooked path to meaning may, in its course, leave only a trail of bread crumbs a poet wanted to brush from the page. W. H. Auden loved to disturb a line simply by tossing in a not, as a man faced with a quiet pool might throw in a rock—that doesn’t mean he was equivocal. Like most great poets, he wanted to see what happened when he played with words. Sometimes a reversal of meaning betrays a deeper meaning.
Robert Frost was the most American of American poets after Whitman. When poets love their country, their poems usually suffer from nickel-plated patriotism (even good poets go bad in time of war) or a taste for writing down myths and calling them history; but you forgive Whitman and Frost their moments of naivete and touches of sentiment because they saw squarely, unmistakably, the figures in that imagined landscape. If every trace of the continent were to vanish, you could almost reconstruct America from the clues left in Leaves of Grass (1855) and North of Boston (1914). These poets saw their country through an alien eye, with a sympathy few foreigners have granted—and it is through those few, like Alexis de Tocqueville and Frank Marryat and Isabella Bird, that we have known America for what it was.
Frost relished the country he found and lamented the country ways already vanishing—he was an adopted New Englander but became more of a Yankee than most Yankees. Even now, almost half a century after his death, when people reach for a poet plainspoken and plain dealing, who says what he means and says it rare, they reach for Frost—yet Frost was never as simple as he seemed. His poems are full of anger, betrayal, wrenched pride, foolishness, all the frailties of men; and he brooded upon weakness like a philosopher. You have to drag younger readers to Frost today—in part because he’s so badly taught, represented in anthologies by some of his most egotistical and kitsch-befouled verse. Even his darker poems, rubbed into lessons by generations of high-school teachers (something there is that doesn’t love a symbol), have lost their murderous underthoughts. A few of his best poems leave a sour aftertaste, because there’s nothing worse than poetry gnawed down to meaning. (Frost famously said, “Poetry is what is lost in translation”; but it’s usually forgotten that he added, “It is also what is lost in interpretation.”) In the fluorescent light of the classroom, even “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” can seem genial as Whittier, a buggy ride with a cup of hot eggnog at the end. It’s a poem that should be read only at midnight, and in freezing temperatures.
Frost was a dull, generally unrevealing letter writer who guarded his workshop door by destroying most of his rough drafts. From the days when he was a young man, however, he kept tablets and memo books in which he scrawled the private thoughts he worked into public speech. The raw sources for The Notebooks of Robert Frost form a seventy-year exhibit of American stationery—according to the descriptions, there are stitched pages in black buckram, loose-leaf binders, various strip-bound pads, a clothbound notebook that includes a calendar for 1910, a record book, a diary book bound in green canvas and another smaller than a man’s palm, theme books, and spiral notebooks of the kind you can still pick up at Wal-Mart, some forty in all surviving, with scatterings of loose pages besides. Frost not only failed to destroy these homely volumes but, for reasons that are unclear, gave some of them away; even so, many have pages torn out, and a scattering of stray sheets comes from notebooks now lost or destroyed.
Frost picked notebooks up and threw them down as it suited him, used and abused them, wrote sideways or upside down, skipped pages, started at the rear and worked his way back—the poet, in other words, has not cooperated with those after his secrets. (You could say that Frost’s brilliance in poems was where he refused to cooperate.) The editor, Robert Faggen, has made informed guesses in dating these worn survivals; but, as in all cases where the author is not by nature compelled to order, the difficulties quickly become impossibilities. An occasional date, a datable draft, a drafted occasion—these are rare anchor posts for the editor’s conjectures. Some of the books must have stayed within reach for decades, so the editor can only throw up his hands and say, “1890s–1950” or “1910–1955.”
What we find in this stolid volume are notes on teaching (the only things the editor has suppressed are lists of students and a grade roster, though even these might have proved of interest); notes toward lectures of the poet-takesthe-podium type, a genre that has almost died out; a mass of tedious philosophizing on man’s place in society, from which the weaker strain of Frost’s poems descends; much pointless noodling in prose, or whatever interim form the poet’s thoughts assumed before they were pressed into verse; a few half-worked, pretentious dialogues (between, for example, a pair of Romans soon to be short-lived emperors); and the usual detritus and waste matter of notebooks—potential titles, addresses of acquaintances, scraps of conversation. Only rarely, amounting to perhaps a quarter of the whole, are there drafts of poems, some of them unpublished. (It’s good to see Frost sawing away at half an idea for a poem without much chance of succeeding—it makes his best poems seem the more remarkable.) Every twenty or thirty pages the poet says something extraordinary, something you don’t quite find in the poems—the stray and straying thoughts emphasize the governors Frost put on his poetry, or the filters he found there. The best of his poems, those dark and divided affairs, must have emerged from the same slovenly rumpus seen in the notebooks, their internal disorders intact.
We consider Frost a modern for dragging speech out of the preciousness of the fin de siècle and the stud
ied airs of the Georgians into an idiom that a century later still sounds colloquial; except in his plastic and conversational handling of meter, he was the most formally conservative of the moderns, one who could call Pound, with a devilish wink, “Bertran de Bornagain.” Frost sought a language that captured his own rhythm and intonation, and it took him a long while to find it. At the turn of the century, at an age when Keats was already dead, he was writing humdrum and decorative verse, prettily rhymed, that said nothing a florist doesn’t say when he tries to sell you wilted flowers. A Boy’s Will (1913) contains a good deal of such verse (“Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too, / And the daft sun-assaulter, he / That frighted thee so oft …”); but Frost already understood that the American character could not be recorded in diction so tearstained and thumbed-over—it had to come from the “real language of men,” as Wordsworth had called it more than a century before. However different their temperaments, in the depth of Frost’s notice of the poor he was Wordsworth’s heir (he preferred a vocabulary “not too literary; but the tones of voice must be caught always fresh and fresh from life”). In that first book, published when Frost was almost forty, there is already a scheme of human attention amid a naturalist’s observation, though he has not yet purged the outdated syntax (the “laborers’ voices late have died”) or the stock ballad-figures of “maidens pale” and the “bravest that are slain.”
Even the earliest notebook displays an ear for American English that obeys a rhythm Frost found superbly adaptable to pentameter.
I preached a sermon on him once He didnt come
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