Lie there, my art

Ariel and Prospero

"Meaning is beginning to date. We do not spend much time in front of a canvas whose intentions are plain; music of a specific character, unquestionable contours, exhausts our patience; the over-explicit poem seems . . . incomprehensible. The dynasty of intelligibility is drawing to its close: what self-evident truth deserves the effort of being stated? What can be communicated is not worth lingering over." (E. M. Cioran, "Beyond the Novel")

It isn't every day that a great poet writes unfavorably of another great poet. True, the best poetry critic from the late 1940s until his suicide in 1965 was the poet Randall Jarrell, who wrote unfavorable reviews of many of his contemporary poets. But Jarrell was a fine minor poet, not a great one.

W. H. Auden reviewed the Collected Poems of Robert Frost and included it in his collection The Dyer's Hand. Auden begins the essay with a sensible distinction between art and truth: "Art arises out of our desire for both beauty and truth and our knowledge that they are not identical." It's a perfectly acceptable statement, but then Auden uses it to build a case for two different sorts of poets - those inclined more towards beauty and those who employ beauty to get at some underlying truth. We already know which side Auden is on from the epigraph by Nietzsche that he placed at the beginning of The Dyer's Hand: "We have Art in order that we may not perish from Truth." He calls the opposing disciplines "Ariel" and "Prospero": "One might say that every poem shows some sign of a rivalry between Ariel and Prospero. It is usually possible to say of a poem and, sometimes, of the whole output of a poet, that it is Ariel-dominated or Prospero-dominated."

"The Ariel-dominated poet has one great advantage; he can only fail in one way - his poem may be trivial. The worst one can say of one of his poems is that it needn't have been written. But the Prospero-dominated poet can fail in a number of different ways." Auden then quotes an especially moribund passage from a poem by Wordsworth, who, he claims, "of all English poets, is the one with the least element of Ariel that is compatible with being a poet at all." 

"Reading such a passage," Auden continues, "one exclaims, 'the man can't write,' which is something that can never be said about Ariel; when Ariel can't write, he doesn't. But Prospero is capable of graver errors than being just ridiculous; since he is trying to say something that is true, if he fails, the result can be worse than trivial. It can be false, compelling the reader to say, not 'This poem need not have been written,' but 'This poem should not have been written.'"

Which brings the reader to the point of Auden's essay: "Both in theory and practice Frost is a Prospero-dominated poet. His poetic style is what I think Professor C. S. Lewis would call Good Drab." (Becoming a mid-life Episcopalian is the only reason I can think of why Auden would introduce C. S. Lewis to his argument.) Auden tries, and fails, I think, to prove that because Frost is ultimately interested in the truth he finds through beauty - and that he uses the language of everyday speech - that his poetry is "drab." He quotes from Frost's Preface from his Collected Poems: "The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom ... It runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life - not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."

Auden blames Frost's verbal fixation on straightforward, common language on his being an American from New England. Amy Lowell did the same thing in her review of North of Boston in 1914 - except she was trying to explain Frost's choice of subjects, and her review was favorable.

I counted 308 poems in Frost's Index of Titles. Since he never revised his work (as Auden did), 308 is probably his lifetime's output of poems. In 1959, Frost was interviewed by Randall Jarrell. Jarrell's most famous quote, which sounds frivolous but is perfectly sound is "A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great." Any fair assessment of Frost's poetry would mention his finest poems, like "After Apple-Picking," "Meeting and Passing." "The Witch of Coös," "Home Burial," "A Servant to Servants," "Directive," "Storm Fear," "The Oven Bird," "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep," "Provide, Provide," "Acquainted with the Night," "After Apple Picking," "Mending Wall," "The Most of It," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "To Earthward," "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Spring Pools," "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers," "Design," and "Desert Places," "Dust of Snow," "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length," and "Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same." By this count, 24 poems, Frost is as great a poet as any. But of these twenty-four poems that represent Frost at his best, Auden uses only four in his essay: "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," "Acquainted With the Night," "The Most Of It," and "Provide, Provide". The other poems that Auden singles out are inferior and/or late Frost lyrics. Were Auden at all sensitive to the qualities of Frost's poetry, when he came to include the undistinguished poems "Were I in Trouble" and "The Middleness of the Road," both from Frost's 1947 collection Steeple Bush, he would've noticed the one poem that makes the collection worth reading, "Directive," a strange, despairing and passionate return to Frost's top form.

The problem with Auden's argument is that, while the Prospero poet always runs the risk of falsehood in his "clarification of life," of illuminating unedifying depths, the Ariel poet is always superficial. He is only interested in surfaces, which can sometimes be dazzling, and can provide the reader with momentary pleasure, but that leave no lasting impression. If Mozart had been a poet, he would've been an Ariel poet. It required the Romantics to introduce emotion to music. Music developed a conscience - it had to express something other than merely itself. It had to function as something more than just song. Auden may not have liked Frost's insistence, which was absolute, on sense, on his hard life's vocation of sensibleness. But, to apply Auden's own Ariel-dominated standard, his essay need not have been written.