Different as [Frost and Eliot] are in many ways, and though Frost conducted a kind of private war with Eliot, it is possible to discern interesting resemblances beneath the obvious contrasts. In both men the central theme is metaphysical desolation. Both poets are profoundly at odds with the current of secular optimism flowing from the enlightenment through the nineteenth century. Frost's New England landscape, spare, hard, and usually unyielding, inhabited by its declining Yankee stock, can be taken as an extended metaphor expressive of that desolation. In Frost's poetry the central persona or dramatic voice speaking the poems finds ways to live with that desolation. In Eliot's poetry the central persona lives through and finally beyond the desolation.

Both Frost and Eliot were in the broad sense of the word conservatives, though of very different kinds…. [At] bottom [Frost's] conservatism had to do with both the valid claims...