on frost

---Frost was the first American poet to live a considerable living exclusively through poetry, a man paid simply for being a poet (for readings, in universities; the public bard we saw images of last week). Poetry was always a mode of work for Frost, and work was a model of poetic activity. Meaning is always something made, what the poet works on and for. Frost's modernity consists in the idea that truth is concrete and contingent, not a metaphysical matter, not an ideal principle; it is only available in the act (the moment) of deriving it, or constructing it, an act that is ordinary, incompletable, and thus necessarily repeated, an ongoing task. Frost is a materialist who calls attention to the circumstances of imagination: poetry is an encounter between fact and desire, focusing the terms, or conditions, on which something can be known. Tools are in Frost an image of those enabling conditions, and they include, in poetry, meter, rhyme, and all the technical resources of verse, the materials of language.

Professor Langdon Hammer