'The gaps I mean': A study of Robert Frost's poetry

The most recent influential studies of Robert Frost have highlighted the extent to which Frost's poems are essentially a gloss of William James' pragmatic concern with "making-believe," molding external reality into a useful order by virtue of the creative act. Virtually all commentary on Frost has emphasized the threat posed to the self by the "hugeness and confusion" of the external world, and Frost's redemptive assertion of form upon it. But what critics fail to recognize in Frost's work is the radical extent of his skepticism. As threatening to the self as contingent reality is, Frost perceived an equally potent threat from the other side of the Jamesian schema, from the ordering faculty itself. The "little form" the self asserts upon chaos inevitably threatens the self with imprisonment. The therapeutic value of order and form is equally weighed against this danger of which Frost was acutely aware. For Frost, it is not merely particular metaphors that break down, not only schemes of order issuing from a disturbed psyche that are dangerous, but all metaphors, all figures. Reading Frost through William James, critics have cleared a rather wide, safe lane between the "black and utter chaos" of external reality and those isolated moments when the ordering capacity of the individual consciousness is dangerous. But what for them is a lane, for Frost is a tightrope, so acutely aware was he of the inevitable dangers posed by any truth willfully asserted. "When you rested in a truth, it became an untruth," said Frost "The best way is not to have anything settled.".;Previous Frost studies have cast Frost's poems in light of William James, and have read them as redemptive "stays against confusion." This study reasserts the necessarily provisional nature of such stays, and restores the full sense of what Frost by his claim that a poem is a "momentary stay against confusion." In Frost's work such stays rarely last beyond their utterance. This skepticism regarding the redemptive quality of human consciousness distances Frost from the pragmatism of William James, a distance whose recognition is long over due.