The Man With Two Brains

From the 1890s until he died in 1963, Robert Frost wrote down ideas, homemade aphorisms and fragments of poems. As one of his jottings says (God knows in what context), "I reel them off with one brain tied behind me." As you'd expect of a man who fetishized plainness, he used cheap spiral notebooks and flip pads and school composition books. Frost wouldn't mind our looking through them: he often destroyed drafts of his poems, but gave notebooks to friends and institutions. And now that Frost scholar Robert Faggen has published them--700 pages, with all the crossings-out and [illlegible]s preserved--we can see that the notion of having two brains wasn't just a gag. "Hegel taught the doctrine of opposites," Frost wrote in another entry, "but said nothing about everything's having more than one opposite." This was a squash court of a mind, in which two Frosts--or more--whacked contradictory thoughts that ricocheted in all directions.

Frost remains America's chief celebrity poet, but don't expect his notebooks to hold intimate shockeroos, like those in John Cheever's journals. (Still, Focus on the Family may not care for the unfinished, and undated, poem about "two women on a farm without a man" who have a dairy cow named "Lesbia.") Since Frost used his notebooks to think through his poems, his essays and his teaching, they reveal only his working mind--and that's revelation aplenty. "Form," one entry reads, "is only the last refinement of subject matter"--which solves the old form-versus-content debate. Or: "An idea comes as close to something for nothing as you can get"--which uses deliberately crass language to celebrate the mind as a cornucopia of gifts freely given. Or: "Suppose we write poetry as we make a dynamo without ornament--well only the great poetry can be written that way"--which is as good a statement of function-over-frills modernism as any by Ezra Pound. Or a thought for 2007: "A nation should be just as full of conflict as it can contain ... But of course it must contain."

That last aphorism is one of Frost's many variations on his idea that "Life is a bursting unity of opposition barely held," and of the related idea that art doesn't take sides or give answers: "Artist of very high degree," one possibly self-praising entry reads. "He is neither moral religious nor patriotic." By now, nobody buys Frost's old image as a rustic autodidact or a versifying Andy Rooney. He read as widely and deeply as any American poet--the notebooks allude to the likes of Dryden, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Santayana and Maria Montessori--and funny as he was, he could still outbleak T. S. Eliot. He was also American poetry's biggest ham (at least until Allen Ginsberg), and his poems were performances: not just in his well-known public readings but on the page. These deliberately preserved notebooks, too, might have kept one eye on an audience. But unlike the much-revised poems, they sometimes show this least innocent of men taking himself by surprise.