The Notebooks of Robert Frost
edited by Robert Faggen
The Belknap Press ₤25.95, 848 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20.76

In a 1921 essay on the metaphysical poets, T.S. Eliot suggested that the complexities of contemporary civilisation meant that modern poetry in turn “must be difficult”. And, certainly, most American poets of the era - those we read today, anyway - subscribed to this view. The work of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and of Eliot himself, is formidably difficult. Even after decades, it often still baffles its explicators.

The great exception to Eliot’s maxim was Robert Frost. That’s not to say his work isn’t difficult, but that this difficulty is concealed beneath, or within, a seeming lucidity. His poems, as he once put it in a letter of 1927, “are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless”. It is Frost’s sense of the boundless which so often undercuts the seeming triteness of his aphorisms: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”

This apparently straightforward celebration of the fundamental American ideal of individualism has been stitched into samplers and hung in innumerable New England homes, and features in dozens of book titles, most of the self-help variety. Yet the more often one reads the poem that these lines conclude, the more it looks like a mischievous and unsettling parody of Yankee independence than a wholehearted endorsement of self-reliance.

Difficult poetry of the kind championed by Eliot “butters no parsnips”, as Frost observed to a friend in the course of his two-and-a-half-year sojourn in England. Frost arrived in the UK in 1912, nearing 40, with no books to his name, and with a wife and four children to support. What kind of poetry would butter parsnips, and allow him to escape the drudgery of his earlier careers as a poultry farmer (largely unsuccessful) and schoolteacher?

While those such as Eliot and Stevens shivered with distaste at the idea of writing poetry that was intelligible to the masses, Frost was determined to evolve a style that would appeal both to an average poetry consumer and, through its secret equivocations, to the more discerning reader. Ideally, it would educate the former, and transform them into the latter. His stay in England taught him much about literary politics; he established a firm friendship with Edward Thomas, skirmished sceptically with Pound and Yeats, and had his first two books published.

In 1915 Frost returned to the US as something of a celebrity, and shrewdly set about cultivating on the one hand a popular audience and, on the other, the esteem of influential critics.

The Notebooks of Robert Frost offer an intriguing insight into Frost’s mind. They are not, it should be said, at all systematic. The first entries in Notebook 4, for instance, were made in 1909, and the last in the 1950s. Some contain drafts of work in progress, others fragments of lectures and notes for classes. Their scrupulous, perhaps over-scrupulous, editor Robert Faggen, has chosen to reprint the contents of all 49 notebooks in their entirety, which means many pages are taken up by inconsequential lists (”Milk Butter Potatoes Eggs... “), and random phrases, often crossed out, that don’t really amount to much.

Equally, one regularly comes across embryonic formulations that are both thought-provoking and pertinent to Frost’s poetics: “Metaphor may not be far but it is our farthest forth”; “The object of life is to feel curves”; “All a man’s art is a bursting unity of opposites”; “No surprise to author none to reader”.

While only the most devoted of Frost scholars will find their attention held by every page, this is a great book to open at random. Notebook 34, for example, begins with the question: “Now what is your attitude toward our having robbed the Indians of the American continent?” That really is a difficult one.

Frost became, partly through design and partly as a result of cold war politics, 20th-century American poetry’s fullest embodiment of the nation’s values: he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Soviet Union, where he had face-to-face talks with Khrushchev.

At J.F. Kennedy’s inauguration, before a television audience of millions, he recited from memory the patriotic “The Gift Outright” - which makes no mention of the Indians who once inhabited with their own stories and arts: “the land vaguely realizing westward, / But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced.”

Frost once described poetry as a “momentary stay against confusion”. There’s plenty of confusion in these notebooks, but they also offer a series of vivid glimpses into how and why he fashioned each “momentary stay”.

Mark Ford is Professor of English at University College London