Certain pages of ["West-Running Brook"] remain for me, after several attempts to find more in them than meets the eye, trivial; and certain others are merely good enough. But at least five poems here have all of their author's unique excellence, which is to say that they are not to be compared with the poems of any other living man, and to say that they give an absolute, almost undiscussable pleasure.
These few do not include, though they come near doing so, any of the several epigrams in which Mr. Frost may be seen taking a swing through universals. I suspect that he cannot afford extreme brevity, any more than he can afford great length; and universals (directly stated) are not for him. Neither do they include the one dialogue of the volume, which incidentally is the title-poem. And certainly they do not include any of the half-dozen pieces which are but conceits, even if these conceits have the pure mark of Mr. Frost's mind upon them. But they do include the poems which represent Mr. Frost in the act of standing and looking at some very definite thing—a pool in the spring woods, a chimney smoking under the new moon, the water coming in off the Pacific, a bird going to bed, or a "winter garden in an alder swamp"—standing and looking at it and talking about it in such a way that it suddenly and weirdly becomes a world.
This is a free excerpt of 240 words. There are 444 words (approx.
1 page at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Frost, Robert 1874–1963: Critical Essay by Mark Van Doren Access Pass.
