8 - Frost and the Meditative Lyric

Summary

”Directive” (CPPP, 344) is one of the most widely and variously interpreted of Frost's poems. Randall Jarrell in his seminal essay on Frost's poems quoted it at length, and though pronouncing it largely uninterpretable, praised its “humor and acceptance and humanity.” Some have connected it to the Romantic solipsism of Emerson, seeing it as a kind of guidebook that one must write for oneself without benefit of the normal moral and intellectual landmarks. But as always with Frost's audience the appearance of solipsism, sarcasm, and even contradiction could not prevent many readers from seeing the poem as good plain country truth. By the time the poem appeared Frost had long been a figure of folklore, and there is enough of his familiar folksy routine in it to preserve it from a too close inspection by most of his admirers. Even his academic readership had by the time of Steeple Bush (1947) accepted Frost as a poet with the limitations implied by popularity. He was not (as a recent critic announced) “tinglingly alive with a sense of the modern.”