Yankee Poet

A FURTHER RANGE--Robert Frost-- Holt ($2.50).

Robert Frost should be persona grata to two opposing parties: Yankees who never touch poetry and poetry-bibbers who shy at Yankees. For Robert Frost has a foot in both camps. New Englanders who pride themselves on their conservative shrewdness and rock-bound individualism think they recognize him as one of themselves; and poets know he is a poet. His prosiest lines are often lifted into verse by some piece of sly wit or canny wisdom, and at its best his poetry is as strong and simple as his Vermont landscape.

A Further Range, Poet Frost's latest collection, contains some 50 pieces, from two-line quiddities to an eleven-page discourse. Though the subjects are generally homely, everyday, they range a long way from home but always come back to a New England earth. The sight of a boy teasing some caged monkeys with a burning-glass leads Frost to some characteristic thoughts on monkeys and men:

They might not understand a burning- glass.
They might not understand the sun itself.
It's knowing what to do with things that counts.

Even star-gazing cannot hold him long from his proper study:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars -- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Without laboring analogies Poet Frost yet manages to convey in his homespun terms a philosophy that has both personal and political implications:

Let the downpour roil and toil!
The worst it can do to me
Is carry some garden soil
A little nearer the sea.

'Tis the world-old way of the rain
When it comes to a mountain farm
To exact for a present gain
A little of future harm.

And the harm is none too sure,
For when all that was rotted rich
Shall be in the end scoured poor,
When my garden has gone down ditch,

Some force has but to apply,
And summits shall be immersed,
The bottom of seas raised 'dry--
The slope of the earth reversed.

Then all I need do is run
To the other end of the slope,
And on tracts laid new to the sun,
Begin all over to hope.

Some worn old tool of my own,
Will be turned up by the plow,
The wood of it changed to stone,
But as ready to wield as now.

May my application so close
To so endless a repetition
Not make me tired and morose
And resentful of man's condition.

The Author-- Bigheaded, heavy-lidded, unruly-haired Robert Lee Frost was 61 last March. That he was born in San Francisco is an unimportant accident: from his father back, his ancestors were New Englanders, and New England has been his home since he was 10. Something there was in Poet Frost that did not like a college, in his youth. He left Dartmouth after a few months, Harvard after two years. He worked as a mill-hand, a shoemaker, a newshawk, tried farming, then teaching. At 37 he sold his farm, took his wife and four children to old England. There he published his first two books of poetry (A Boy's Will, North of Boston) made friends with such fellow-poets as Edward Thomas, T. E. Hulme, Wilfred Wilson Gibson, Ezra Pound. Thence he returned three years later to find himself a minor U. S. laureate. He turned to teaching again, for several years was "poet in residence" at the University of Michigan, now holds a similar position at Amherst. He has twice (1924, 1931) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Admirers describe Poet Frost as looking like "Puck in a sack-suit," his voice as "the barking of an eagle." Others think he looks like a Yankee hired man, talks like one. A Further Range, with Andre Malraux's Days of Wrath (TIME, June 1), is the June choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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