Soc (2008) 45:572–573
DOI 10.1007/s12115-008-9146-9
BOOK REVIEW
Peter J. Stanlis (ed). Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher.
ISI Books, 2007 453 pp, $28.00. (ISBN 10:1933859202; ISBN 13:978-1933859200)
Paul Gottfried
Published online: 11 September 2008
# Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Peter Stanlis, who recently celebrated his 89th birthday, had
devoted much of his scholarly life to his mentor Robert
Frost, even before having finished this hefty book (a look at
his extensive bibliography would easily confirm this fact).
His friendship with Frost began in 1939 when Professor
Stanlis was attending Middlebury College, where he first
met the renowned poet and essayist who would later
become the subject of his scholarship. Frost had a cabin
nearby and participated each summer in the Bread Loaf
Writers’ Conference, the oldest writers’ workshop in the
US, which takes place just east of Middlebury and is
sponsored by the college. Frost developed a strong interest
in the young Stanlis, who showed poetic promise together
with a boundless enthusiasm for eighteenth-century English
literature. The scion of a Lithuanian working-class family
from Nutley, NJ, USA with exceedingly limited means,
Frost’s acolyte waited tables and found other part-time
work in order to attend Frost’s summer classes.
One historical curiosity that is worth noting is this:
because of the long-term relation between Frost and Stanlis,
the latter moved politically and philosophically from his
early left-of-center views in the direction of Frost, a harsh
critic of the New Deal and the democratic welfare state.
Although Frost had close companions such as the Jewish
Marxist and noted poet, Louis Untermeyer, whose views
differed sharply from his, he was, by his own admission, a
dye-in-the-wool reactionary. What struck Stanlis and may
have led to this voluminous study was that most work on
Frost has come from self-described leftwing intellectuals.
P. Gottfried (*)
327 College Avenue,
Elizabethtown, PA 17022, USA
e-mail: gottfrpe@etown.edu
Throughout his book, and most conspicuously in the
conclusion, Stanlis stresses the disparity between his
subject and his biographers; and, he lets us know to what
extent one leading biographer in particular, Lawrance
Thompson, misrepresented his subject’s thought. Before
Thompson is through, Frost is turned into a monist,
materialist, social Darwinist, and, in fact, given a variety
of guises, none of which belonged to Frost’s very explicitly
stated identity.
This tendency was particularly obvious in the way
biographers twisted Frost’s assertions about being a
philosophical and theological dualist. Stanlis’s study not
only traces and demonstrates the continuity of dualist
thought in Frost’s correspondence and poetry but also
points out the hermeneutic contortions to which some of his
interpreters have gone in order to deny Frost’s real
opinions. Stanlis suggests a failure of historical imagina-
tion, a flaw that causes modern “ideologues” (which is the
term here employed) to assume that those great minds that
operated in the past must have thought like them or else
were glaringly inconsistent or mentally disturbed. Stanlis
pokes fun at those who cannot believe that someone
endowed with poetic gifts, and who frequented intellectual
circles, was not a scientific materialist and atheist. In Frost’s
case, the evidence is entirely on the other side.
Frost’s last volume of poetry In the Clearing, published
on the poet’s 88th birthday on March 26, 1962, addresses
metaphysical questions that could also be found in his
earliest verse, going back to the 1890s. The same questions
as the ones Frost addressed in his later poetry already came
up in his written notes about his professors’ lectures at
Dartmouth and Harvard. They likewise show up in his
biting criticism about the materialist concepts of T.H.
Huxley and the German evolutionist philosopher Ernst
Haeckel.
Soc (2008) 45:572–573
Frost chose to take out of the lectures and books of the
Harvard professor Will James not so much his pragmatic
approach to religious belief but rather James’s stress on the
dualism between spirit and matter. Like James, Frost
viewed this dualism as basic to all world religions, and he
put it at the center of his own worldview and understanding
of the creative process. He also read with intense interest
two books by one of James’s most famous students, the
intellectual historian Arthur O. Lovejoy. In The Revolt
Against Dualism (1930) and in his William James Lectures
at Harvard, later turned into the book The Great Chain of
Being (1936), Lovejoy plots the ascent of monism from the
Romantic era in the early nineteenth century down to the
cult of science in the twentieth. Both Lovejoy and Frost
defended what they understood as “natural dualism,”
recognition of a fundamental duality between conscious-
ness and the natural and material world, a duality that they
should dawn on anyone who gave serious thought to his
relation to objective reality. Frost placed in opposition to
this dualistic view monism, an outlook that he argued in his
essays and letters took two mischievous forms. Either the
monist, as in the case of Ralph Waldo Emerson, someone
whom Frost discussed in a well-known essay in 1959, tried
to spiritualize matter, thereby denying the reality of the
physical world, or else, he tried to reduce mind and
consciousness to material processes, thereby offering a
simplistic understanding of human thought.
Stanlis does not contend that Frost was a systematic
philosopher, an appellation that the poet himself would
have refused. Rather, he depicts him as someone who starts
with certain perceptions about reality, a series of insights
that he seeks to confirm through study and conversation
and which he puts into verse that would become an honored
part of the American literary heritage. A Protestant by
tradition and ancestry, descended on his father’s side from a
Puritan who had reached New Hampshire from Devon,
England in 1634, Frost showed a noticeably tough-minded
view of God and His relation to humanity. In this study and
in his earlier writings, Stanlis has portrayed the painful
composure with which Frost accepted the frequent tragic
deaths that occurred in his immediate family. Indeed the
figure who emerges from Stanlis’s pictures belies the image
of the cheery old gentleman who read his poetry at the
inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Stanlis’s book also notes
the extended discussions that Frost had held with one of his
disciples, a distinguished Reform Rabbi Victor Reichert.
From Reichert’s comments on the stern Hebraic Deity,
Frost came to view himself as an “Old Testament
Christian,” as opposed to a “New Testament saphead.”
Although such a self description was not meant to be a
573
disparagement of the Gospels, clearly, Frost had had it up to
his ears with a certain kind of liberal Protestant, who is
perhaps more common today than he or she was at the time
that Frost first met Reichert.
The poem Frost recited at the Kennedy inauguration in
1961, “The Gift Outright,” had been originally composed in
1942; and, it was read in lieu of another poem, “Dedica-
tion,” that had been produced for the event but which the
glare of the sun prevented the elderly poet from focusing
on. Looking at this work from a distance of 45 years, it is
unimaginable that anything as politically unfashionable
could be read anywhere in public today without generating
a backlash. The opening line that “The land was ours before
we were the land’s” would be cited to prove the poet’s
insensitivity to Native Americans and to other groups who
were not being “included” because of white Christian
cultural hegemony. It is doubtful that these present frantic
concerns ever crossed Frost’s mind, in the 1940s or at any
time after.
An obvious similarity between Frost and his present
student–biographer is that both embarked on major projects
well into their eighties. But unlike Frost, Stanlis has taken
on projects that are not closely related. His work has dealt
with three areas of research that have led him in at least
partly different directions: Edmund Burke’s concept of
natural law and its medieval and ancient sources; eigh-
teenth-century English literature and cultural history; and
the life and thought of Robert Frost. Despite his longtime
preoccupation with the other fields, in recent years, Stanlis
has gone back to writing studies of his onetime mentor with
a vengeance. Anyone who reads this capacious work,
loaded with learned references, would figure out that the
author’s involvement with Frost has progressed steadily for
decades, whatever else Stanlis might have been working on
at a particular point in his research career. I would also note
that his career unfolded mostly at a small, out-of-the-way
college, where for many years he was my senior colleague.
An ornery chap like Frost, Professor Stanlis has never
suffered academic fools gladly. He was of course my role
model, as Frost had been his, in dealing with such human
types.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at Elizabeth-
town College and the author most recently of Conservatism in
America: Making Sense of the American Right (Palgrave Macmillan,
2007). He has also published inter alia After Liberalism (Princeton,
1999) Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt (University of
Missouri, 2003) and The Strange Death of Marxism (University of
Missouri, 2005).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.