The Humanistic Idealism of Robert Frost

Hyatt Howe Waggoner

ALTHOUGH Robert Frost's poetic position seems as secure as that of any contemporary poet, the philosophical point of view consistently expressed in all of his poetry has never been adequately set against the thought currents of the past and of our day. Critics of the poet tend admiringly to see him as the voice of New England, the plain man speaking simply of homely things, or the voice of common sense; or, disapprovingly, they charge that he is not really contemporary, since he does not deal with science and machine civilization, or with the problems arising out of these two determining factors of our age, but with country folk, birds, flowers, and snowstorms. Others, the Neo-Humanists, come closer to understanding his thought when they praise him for having the perspicuity to see the rightness of their position and the virtue to associate himself with it. But Mr. Frost says that he is not a Neo-Humanist. His protest against nearly all that science and the machine have done to our thinking and our lives has other intellectual roots; it springs, in fact, from a philosophical tradition so old and so respected in American intellectual history that it is somewhat surprising that no critic has ever adequately analyzed its background. An attempt to see the philosophy in Mr. Frost's poetry in relation to the tradition which he carries on and the current tendencies in thought which he opposes may help to clarify the issues.

I

When Robert Frost entered Harvard in 1897, he found there the same intellectual mood that had both disturbed and stimulated E. A. Robinson a few years before: fin de siècle disillusion and pessimism were in the air. During his two-year stay he was impressed most by two sets of ideas that seem to him now, in retrospect, to have dominated Harvard intellectual life in the late nineties: naturalistic disillusion about life, man, and (consequently) democracy; and scientism, the attitude of those so excited by the triumphs of the scientists that they proclaimed that everything—poetry, philosophy, and even common sense—must give way to science.

From the beginning Frost was hostile to both these complex points of view. While he shared Professor Santayana's distaste for the Bumstead variety of optimistic scientism, unlike the naturalistic philosopher he found nothing to emulate in the rather numerous Peter Aldens of the day. But the lack of intellectually congenial spirits among his teachers did not lead to bewilderment or uncertainty of direction. Beset by the same terrible problem that darkened Robinson's mind during these and later years, he found his solution more quickly, and with less groping uncertainty, than did the young poet from Gardiner. Unable to give credence either to scientific optimism or to scientific pessimism and equally unable to accept the philosophies of protest against scientific materialism developed by Royce and Babbitt, he turned to Emerson, whose poetry he had long been acquainted with, and to William James for an antidote for the poison of scientism and disillusion. Not by accident but guided by ideas and dispositions already taking mature shape within him, reading in the way that Emerson had urged American scholars to read, he had come upon what is perhaps the central tradition in American thought.

Mr. Frost has never grown away from that tradition. When asked today what philosophers most influenced his thinking during his formative years, he replies with the names of Emerson and James; when asked to give his reaction to thinkers with whom he came into contact, either personally or through books, during his Harvard years, having dismissed Adams, Santayana, and Royce, he says of James, "There was a man," and of Emerson, "A great spirit!" Frost's poetry, then, cannot be completely understood except against this background of the tradition of pragmatic idealism.

That Emerson did not develop a completely self-consistent system is too obvious to bear more than mention, but it is important for an understanding of what Frost has taken from Emerson. The poet found no necessity for adopting a "system" complete and ready-made or rejecting it entire; what he found in Emerson that appealed to him philosophically was attitudes and hints, passages and essays and poems which lighted the way along which he was groping. Emerson's emphasis upon the paramount importance of the individual and the necessity of self-reliance; his statement, perhaps the best that the past has yet produced, of the end for which democracy exists as the means; his attitude toward experience and scholarship and the relation of the two; his insistence upon the reality of moral and spiritual values—all this and more Frost found in Emerson, and all this is expressed in Frost's life and poetry. The Emerson of the poems, of "Self-Reliance" and "The Poet" and "Fate," of the flashes of insight that are valid without reference to German romantic transcendentalism, remains Frost's master.

In James, whose connection with Emerson has been shown by Mr. F. I. Carpenter, Frost found the pragmatic tendency of Emerson's thought developed; and he found, too, what seemed to him convincing reasoning in opposition to the swelling current of naturalistic materialism. Though there is no evidence that he was impressed by "the will to believe," he had great sympathy for James's valiant defense of a humanistic interpretation of man and experience in the face of a science that denied that either was what it seemed.

So, after two years, having already found what he wanted and fearing, perhaps, that to stay longer would interfere with what had become his chief interest, the writing of poetry, he left Harvard. To have remained, he thought, would have necessitated meeting naturalistic disillusion and confident scientism on their own grounds and arguing against them at close quarters; because he had already found the solid New England rock on which to build his intuitive philosophy, Harvard had lost its attraction for him. Here was the forking of the road in Frost's life. Along one branch, well-traveled, went most of the intellectuals of the day—Mark Twain and Henry Adams, E. A. Robinson and William Vaughn Moody, William Graham Sumner and John Fiske, each in his own way combating or accepting the domination of the doctrines of science over all things intellectual, each, whatever his ultimate position, taking as his...