English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Frost's Scientific Nature

Robert Bernard Hass.  Going by Contraries:  Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science.  UP of Virginia, 2002. 240 pp. $45.00; $16.50.

By Stella Thompson, Prairie View A & M University

Scholars and critics call Robert Hass’multi-disciplinary analysis of Frost’s work a substantial literary contribution.  Biographer Jay Parini (Robert Frost:  A Life) describes Going by Contraries:  Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science “an intellectual history” and “one of the strongest books on Frost” that he has read.  William Pritchard (Frost:  A Literary Life Reconsidered) also praises Hass’ work as “fresh and convincing,” “informed and informative.”  Going by Contraries adds a new layer to our understanding of the poet, his literary environment, and his poetry.  Hass argues that the focus of Frost’s work is the poet’s intellectual and spiritual conflict with science.  Hass supports this argument with compelling historical and literary references, mapping Frost’s exceptional career as internationally acknowledged poet, cultural icon, and major figure in the ferment of modernism’s intellectual caldron.  Contraries provides a remarkable mirror for viewing the global engagement of Frost’s work.

The book’s index and reference list point the reader to historical figures, scientific and philosophical theories, and historical events that further align Hass’ major points and Frost’s work.  This book, more thoroughly than previous accounts, emphasizes the philosophical and scientific milieu that shape Frost’s work.  The bibliography and notes reflect the wide range of the investigation.  Contraries builds on the work of scholars in philosophy, science, history, language, and literature, thoroughly situating Frost’s poetry historically and politically.  The concise but substantial account presents facts and arguments systematically and consistently.  Chapter titles, taken from the poet’s work indicate the book’s serious, literary and historical tone and focus:  “A Narrow Choice the Age Insisted On,” “Darwin,” “We are Sick with Space,” “Education by Poetry,” and “The Risk of Spirit in Substantiation.”

Hass successfully meets the challenge of providing new substance to a body of literature that addresses a writing career measured in decades.  Contraries is a wide-angle look at the work of a “regional” poet whose “provincial” reputation began abroad, a beginning appropriate for the complicated career that followed.  Very little about Frost’s work or career is as simple as the surface indicates.  Frost was first perceived as a genial, country-gentleman farmer and was not quickly recognized in American literary circles.  American critics began to take Frost seriously only after he had established himself abroad, as a poet writing “under thatch” among English writers like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.  Later, critics and readers began to address the clever undercurrents of Frost’s poetry, seeing him more clearly as a nature poet dissecting key scientific questions of the day.  These reconsiderations complicated Frost’s “provincial” reputation, but did not diminish the popularity of his work.  This study appropriately establishes Frost as a nature writer, in contrast to those identifying him as a farmer who dabbled in art.  Hass' scrupulous tracking of the influences that shaped Frost’s perceptions of the natural world is amplified by the author’s knowledge of literary theory and family background in biochemistry and zoology.

Hass situates Frost’s poetry as awareness of both the coal-fired factories of the cities and the solitude of the pastures north of Boston.  Frost wrote from a culturally poised perspective that was not understood by his contemporaries; more widely-read than many of his readers and critics, Frost’s character and work were frequently misread by peers, even while he conversed with their literary icons.  Hass locates the poet conversationally, among historians, philosophers, and scientists, as few biographers have done previously, noting the conflict between Frost’s preferences for solitude and social exchange, a conflict that served as a catalyst for his poetry and career.

While many later biographers acknowledge the benevolence/malevolence tension evident in Frost’s work, Hass connects the poet’s personal history and the cultural mix that create these literary tensions.  Scholars trace a marked shift in the critical perception of Frost and his poetry, and Hass supports the growing awareness of Frost’s complexity.  Critics’ early perception of Frost as genial and his work as accessible eventually shifted to the opposing extreme, toward a perceived darkness that labeled Frost “a monster” in some circles.  Contraries negotiates the more exaggerated of these concepts, proposing an enlightened, middle-ground approach.

Hass’ generous reference to Frost’s poems sketches a philosophical outline of the development of Frost’s poetry and career.  Beginning with “The Demiurge’s Laugh” (1913), Hass tracks what he calls Frost’s “conflict with science.”  Beginning with the introductory gloss in A Boy’s Will, and the poet’s statement that the Demiurge poem was “about science,” Hass traces Frost’s pursuit of an acceptable amicability between deity and science, making literary allusions and reference to the most central of the turn-of-the-century scientific theories.  He also connects Frost’s work to thinkers and writers, like William James, Henri Poincare, Ernst Mach, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.  Clear links are made to Henri Bergson, one of Frost’s most significant mentors, and to their common search for the residence of “scientific truths” and the relationship of these truths to poetry and rhetoric.

Hass proposes that Frost found resolution in the work of scientists whose theories suggested less empirical and material certainty, leaving room for a more creative determinism.  Hass’ account indicates that Frost’s engagement with science during the 1920s and 1930s was more than a fundamental, intellectual search for facts.  In “Education by Poetry” Frost alludes to the Greeks’ similar pursuit in their effort to define “the All.”  The poet’s pursuit of a loosely defined deity and his longstanding quarrel with nature, in matters of fact and matters of spirit, provoked a dynamic writing career.  Similarly, critics continue to probe Frost’s preoccupation with the contraries influencing poetic imagination and conventional structure.

Hass’ presentation of a common reading of a poem, followed by a historically-informed reading, allows readers to experience the shift in perception that marked Frost’s later years.  Naive readings rush toward a definitive conclusion, while the closer reading, informed by historical data, makes the poem a “dramatic stage” for the interaction of natural and social forces, among them Frost’s favorites, determinism and free will.  Hass meets this challenge,  connecting Frost’s poetry and prose to the work of writers like Bergson (Introduction to Metaphysics) and creating a dialogue concerning the irreconcilable contraries that both believed were accessible through intuition.

Recognizing what Bergson calls élan vital, Frost asserts that the poetic imagination reveals alternative realities that are not immediately visible as concept and matter.  In contrast to Eliot’s and other writers of the period, Frost’s themes might appear provincial and accessible, yet Hass notes their universality and complexity.  He also underscores Frost’s preferences for poetic imagination and literary freedom within structural constraints.  Frost experimented with modified form, forcing the traditional form to serve his innovative purpose and compelling sound patterns of ordinary speech to carry his poetic message; Hass similarly compels science to inform literary theory and vice versa.  Through historical backstroke and forward projection, Hass skillfully interprets Frost’s poetic imagination and creative dualism.