United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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Frost As KERS ' ' I McLEAN conditions that are necessary to it. Those con¬ ditions he realizes involve choice and decision, and the understanding by men that they are, at least to a certain point, responsible for their decisions. (“The Road Not Taken.”) He is aware that there is a great area of uncertainty where we do not know, and that we are forced to lead a moral life in a great and awful ignor¬ ance. He feels that humanity is fighting against odds and that there is a need on the part of all men for human love and solidarity. He believes that pain and death are essential and inevitable to life, that the beauty we find and the sense of mystery are among our greatest consola¬ tions. (“In Hardwood Groves.”) He thinks that the essential conditions of men’s happiness are the same in any age. He is particularly concerned with the issue of human loneliness and the tragedy in the ignorance and misunderstanding that is the cause of much of human estrangement. “Storm Fear” is a beautiful and moving presentation of the need of humanity for com¬ munion and our sense of the forces that are pitted against us. He is not sentimental, how¬ ever. He is aware of the commitments we make as a human creature and the solemn and in¬ evitable demands of others upon us. Conse¬ quently he never has committed the sin of the artist who has run away from men and his obligations in search for natural beauty. (“Stopping By Woods.”) He is sensitive to the isolation of every man, but he is aware of the obstacles we put in the way of achieving our mutuality and companioship with one another. (“Mending Wall.”) He realizes that life is a matter of gain and loss, and shares in some measure at least Emerson’s idea of compensa¬ tion. For a gain that we make we lose some¬ thing. Life is a series of checks and counter¬ checks, and we play an everlasting game against odds. (“The Armful.”) He is not blind to the stupidities and the coarseness of much of human motivation, but he feels that there is a fundamental moral energy in life that makes man struggle for distant goals. (“On a Tree Fallen Across the Road.”) He is indifferent to creeds and dogma. His conviction is more of emotion than intellect. The sources of his own personal inspiration are in things and the simple peasant qualities of which he writes. He feels deeply and honestly, and that feeling, refined and purified into the precision and concentration of his New Eng¬ land vernacular, is the source of his verse. He has great limitations as a thinker; there are great (and crucial) areas of human experi¬ ence and perplexing social and moral ques¬ tions that find no echo in his verse. He is peasant-like and clings to the land. His answer to the problems of the contemporary man is in the way of a personal and artistic integrity we sense in his work—an honesty that in its sad¬ ness, accurate observation and ‘frugal but gal¬ lant hope’ convinces us of its worth. He has not given to this age any answers to its prob¬ lems in the terms in which it would ask its questions. It may be that he speaks too quietly for us. At any rate his voice is heard in the byways and quiet moments of our turmoil, and whether or not it voices the true answer to our needs we cannot know, because it is not addressed to answering our questions, but to singing its own quiet and beautiful lyrics. 19

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Eliot and THIN ROBERT JjTROST as a teacher has expressed the opin¬ ion that just as important as a professor’s classroom instruction and his competence as a technician, is the man himself. He believes that on any campus there should be a man who by his achievements in fields outside the univer¬ sity can inspire the youth on the campus. His own teaching has been highly successful and has been based on a determination to make it “personal” in the best sense of the word. I mention this because I believe it is a clue to the nature of the man himself and to his “be¬ liefs” as they are discovered in his verse. He believes in the intangibles, in the strength and vigour that comes to a man through the weld¬ ing of men’s purposes and aspirations togethef in friendship and understanding. But as much as he believes this, he is not demonstrative either as a person or as an artist. He is quiet, unassuming, and competent. He has a pro¬ found and scientific reverence for the “fact”— the thing in itself. He is an acute and tireless observer of the ways of men and nature. Throughout his career as a poet he has re¬ mained true to his intention to write only of what he has detailed and honest knowledge. It is first-hand careful observation that he has put into verse. His poetry is a quiet and patient chronicle of what he has seen and heard in New England. It is observation stripped of accidental qualities; object and word are re¬ fined to an amazing concentration of effective¬ ness. It would be foolishness to suggest that there is nothing further to be found in Frost. It is true that when one first begins to read him he demands undivided attention and concentra¬ tion, but as one persists he quite literally blooms into one’s consciousness, melodically, rhythmically, and in intelligence. On the whole I have not found him as obscure as I was led to assume he would be. His “beliefs” are no more hidden than in the work of any highly conscious artist. His idiom is “personal” and individual. Usually it is not didactic, but not always. As one reads, the contours of his thought rise from the factual surface of his verse. From the very tone one is convinced that there are meanings and intuitions under the surface of the words. The style, the subject matter, the tone is the intensely personal one of a confession of conviction. The unity of the poet’s personality is evident. There is a sense of form. It is the mark and mystery of a con¬ summate artist that he says simply what he wants to say; and when he reaches the point when he cannot in so many words express the inner truth which burns in his consciousness, that he can somehow suggest it too, so that this final mystery is at once inexpicable and accepted. In the ‘form’ of the work, its sense of completeness, there is a final statement of faith that the writer could not reduce to factual ob¬ jective statement. Such a state is achieved in Shakespeare and Keats. It is present in the work of Robert Frost as well, and is the stamp and seal of his genius. Since I have stated that there are convic¬ tions and “beliefs” in the work of Frost it is a proper question to ask me what they are and where they are to be found. I shall list them first and reserve until later an evaluation of them. He is deeply concerned with the nature of man’s existence as a moral creature and the 18

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T. S. Eliot violates the temperament of our age by violating the contemporary distrust of ultimates phrased as anything but questionings. He has cried out for standards and criteria in an age that rejects the possibility of standards, and much of the abuse and resentment that has gathered about him can be traced to this. He is, as artist and as a man, acutely aware of the desolation of the human spirit without faith and sanctions, and in his analysis of the modern mentality and soul’s rest, and in his own intellectual activity he has accepted the warning of Waldo Frank: “In times of basic cultural transition the criticism that does not start out from metaphysics and a true under¬ standing of religious experience is idle, irrele¬ vant, and anti-social.” The last charge that could possibly be made against Eliot is a want of seriousness or a failure to understand men’s predicament. Whether or not one subscribes to his conclusions one cannot deny the honesty of his search and the depth of his concern. He is convinced of man’s need for sanctions and for himself he has found them in a return to tradition and the authority of tradition. It is an antiquarian short-cut to faith. Eliot has con¬ vinced himself that one must bow to the ex¬ perience of the past and learn to accept what the past can teach us. It is this characteristic that has led certain exasperated contemporaries to exclaim that “T. S. Eliot was born middle aged and has not been growing any younger.” Eliot would (and has) turned the argument in another way, and has written that the darkest ignorance of the modern man is his pride and attempted self-sufficiency—in a sense his demo¬ cratic faith—and has said “the greatest, the most difficult of the Christian virtues (is) the virtue of humility.” It is this kind of thinking that has led Eliot to the point where he has announced that he is “a classicist in literature, a Catholic in religion, and a cavalier in poli¬ tics.” Those who admired him as an analyst of post-war frustration and damn him as a re¬ actionary, and those who praise him since his entry into the aristocratic fold are equally guilty of doing him an injustice. The present position of Mr. Eliot is inherent in the search he set himself and the premises on which he based that search. As early as 1921 he wrote in connection with the English metaphyicals (of whom he is a direct descendent): “That firm grasp of human experience is their distinguish¬ ing mark as a group. This wisdom, cynical perhaps but untired, leads toward and is only completed by the religious comprehension.” It is unfair to assume that Mr. Eliot made a sud¬ den breach of faith with truth in his entry into the high Anglican church. It is unfair to sug¬ gest that he rests easily in the faith he has ac¬ cepted there. One cannot but realize that a profound and moving honesty and a tense search for faith motivate Eliot. Frost is apparently capable of resting in a humanism that is without a comprehensive metaphysic. But T. S. Eliot cannot be so easily satisfied and the boundaries of his search for sanctions have been immeasurably broader than those of Frost. One has been content with an emotional conviction. The other has sought a coherence between what he feels and what he believes. His very nature is intensely analytic and intellectual and he demands a con¬ sistency between thought and emotion. No one who has not travelled the hard road he has set for himself can lightly condemn him as a traitor to a cause of undisciplined emotional¬ ism, without revealing his own limitations. For Eliot has accepted the “iron fact that art issued from religion and is forever allied thereto and must in sober truth become more and more religious as religion itself loses its hold upon the minds of men.” Whether or not one in¬ cludes in this, allegiance to the Catholic church may be a matter of dispute, but I do not think it can honestly be argued that Eliot has “escaped” into the church easily and happily. The meaning of his poems and the phil¬ osophy of composition behind them is briefly this. Civilization and meaning are disintegrated and despair and disillusion stalk the waste land. By a “learned and calculated chaos” in method Eliot sought to parallel and describe the chaos and futility of contemporary existence where man in frustration and loneliness cannot feel or think. His verse is extremely intellectual and analytic. He is typically modern in the manner in which he has turned his sensitive¬ ness to account in an intellectual process. His technique is subtle and brilliant though for the most part I have failed to cope with him be¬ cause of an incapacity to deal with his highly literary associations as he searches for a blend¬ ing of the individual talent with the stream of (Continued on page 34)