Robert Frost and Poetic Fashion

FROST has never let his head get caught in a halo. He has never stood still for admirers to pull a laurel wreath ^down over his eyes. He has kept free to exchange a taunt and a you-and-I-both wink with rogues, and with the repressed rascal in nearly all of us. He has let nothing come between his eyes and the "funny world." That slight offishness of his in part accounts for the success of his poems in the Armed Services Edition, in Pocket Books and in the Modern Library. It partly accounts, too, for the fact that no philosopher or artist is better worth listening to, no writer since I have been alive so well worth reading. But his slight offishness, his refusal "to adapt" himself "a mite," also accounts for the fact that he is out of fashion.