Robert Frost and the Comic Spirit

TN A CELEBRATED SPEECH Lionel Trilling made the following proJL nouncement: "I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet. Call him, if it makes things any easier, a tragic poet, but it might be useful every now and then to come out from under the shelter of that literary word. The universe that he conceives is a terrifying universe."'l Probably Mr. Trilling was not trying to confine the multiplicity of Frost's poetry within a single adjective, though for such a purpose "terrifying" would be a shrewd choice. Impressively, though not preponderantly, the effect of this quality is indeed the emergence of a tragic view of life. But much of Frost's poetry is brilliantly comic, and, as is classically the case, his comedy is an inverted expression of the insight which makes him likewise a tragic (or terrifying) poet. This correspondence Frost himself neatly formulates in "The Lesson for Today," as he banters "pedagogue to pedagogue" with the fancied Master of the Palace School: