The Brain of Robert Frost

Author(s): Norman N. Holland

Source: New Literary History , Winter, 1984, Vol. 15, No. 2, Interrelation of
Interpretation and Creation (Winter, 1984), pp. 365-385
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468861

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 The Brain of Robert Frost

Norman N. Holland

TH HIS TITLE may suggest that I have deliberately chosen a sm

subject, prompted to mercy perhaps by the weighty burde
of some of these cogitations on creation and interpretation
Mercy, however, was not my motive. I have three points in mind
First, I want to show how Robert Frost's interpretations share qu
exactly the general style of his writing. In other words, I think o
salient fact about the relation between creation and interpretation
that they embody the same personal style. Second, based on th
commonality of style, I want to propose a picture or metaphor
guiding principle that will enable us to put together Robert Fr
unique creator, with Robert Frost, a reader of poems like any oth
reader of poems. I want to suggest that one could refine that gen
picture to a model, even an electronic model. We could use suc
model-and this is my third point-to understand the relation b
tween the individuality that pervades both creation and interpretat
and the social and interpretive codes by which we collectively inte
pret. We could use the model to interrelate Robert Frost the in
vidual with, say, the codes addressed by a semiotician like Umbert
Eco, or the "interpretive communities" of which Stanley Fish wri
or the "horizon of expectations" described by a Rezeptionsdsthetiker
Hans Robert Jauss.

I have chosen Robert Frost to write about partly because I could

draw on what I have written on Frost before,' partly because every-
body knows something about Robert Frost the creator. I can count
on my readers' recollection of half a dozen poems, to say nothing of
a general sense of the kind of writer Frost was. Indeed, Frost himself
commented on his own processes of creation in quite revealing ways.
Here, for example, is what Frost thought he was doing when he
wrote his famous poem "The Death of the Hired Man." In the poem
an old man comes back dying to the farm where he had worked and
been fired. He meets the farmer's resentment and the wife's pity.

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366 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

They think I'm no New Dealer [said Frost]. But really and truly
know, all that clear on it. In The Death of the Hired Man that
long ago, long before the New Deal, I put it two ways abou
would be the manly way: "Home is the place where, when you
there, / They have to take you in." That's the man's feeling ab
then the wife says, "I should have called it / Something you som
to deserve." That's the New Deal, the feminine way of it, the m
You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to
father's. He's more particular. One's a Republican, one's a De
father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's a
ocrat. Very few have noticed that second thing [in the poem? in
always noticed the sarcasm, the hardness of the male one.2

What interests me is that Frost conceives his poem, his tho

in twos. He pairs man and wife, father and mother, Repu
Democrat, hardness and nurturing, obligation and lack of
He does the same thing in the dialogue of "Mending
neighbor says, "Good fences make good neighbors," b
puns, "Before I built a wall I'd ask ... to whom I was
offense."
Much of what Frost's admirers prize is his way of transforming
folksy, ordinary language into poetic conceits about the largest
themes of life. He had an almost uncanny ability to balance serious-
ness with humor. As he said, "Neither one without the other under
it will do." "I am a jester about sorrow." He said of himself, "I believe
in symbols." "Always, always a larger significance. A little thing
touches a larger thing." He believed, he said, in "the philosophy of
the part for the whole; skirting the hem of the goddess." He thought
the greatest writing, he said, "an attempt to say matter in terms of
spirit, or spirit in terms of matter."
In just these few passages one can see how Frost sets up the world
as paired opposites: matter and spirit, humor and sorrow, little thing
and larger thing, part and whole, the goddess and the hem of her
dress. People forget, said Frost, "that there are limitations to all
things; that there always is a balance to everything." Thus he could
say of Einstein's theory: "Wonderful, yes, wonderful but no better as
a metaphor than you or I might make for ourselves before five
o'clock." In general, he said about science, "Isn't science just an ex-
tended metaphor: its aim to describe the unknown in terms of the
known?" The same was true for a writer: "All that an artist needs is
samples." "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on
its own melting." "Every poem is an epitome of the great predica-
ment; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements." Frost pairs
things: metaphor and theory, known and unknown, limited and lim-

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 367

itless, but his statements not only contrast the two items
inside the other, so that the lesser somehow manages
endures against the bigger, more threatening term: a me
anybody can make as against Einstein's large, obscure
limited and the limitless; the part for the whole; the kno
unknown; the ice on the stove-all in their way "sample
bigger, which includes the other, is the test of surviv
cannot be scientific about poetry, but poetry can be p
science. It's bigger, more inclusive."
You could call this way of using one small object to t
one Frost's "style." I call it his "identity," in a somewhat
of the word. Erikson taught us the word as a way of des
way we achieve two continuities, one an inner sense of p
tinuity, the other a sense of continuity and mutuality b
self and one's community. I do not want to lose, however
first, pre-Erikson meaning, from the Latin word for "the
Identity refers to the sameness of a self in time and
activities.
The best way I have found of exploring that samenes
of the psychoanalyst Heinz Lichtenstein: that we think o
a theme and variations like the theme and variations that
up a piece of music or poetry.3 I can think of Robert Fro
at any given moment as an identity theme plus the varia
then living on it. I can think of his identity in the fullest
history of his identity theme plus the history of all the v
has lived on it. In this definition, identity includes both
style and the history of that style.
Hence, in thinking about Robert Frost's identity, I need
a theme that will join together all the elements I see in F
acteristic style. I can understand the various remarks by
have quoted as each a different variation on a theme like
great unmanageable unknowns by means of small knowns.
could understand Robert Frost's whole, rich poetic ach
the same terms. He used the language and materials o
England farms to grasp the largest issues human bein
That is, he used folksy language to talk about big th
knowns to manage big unknowns.
This much I have said before in earlier essays, but what
looking at Frost again, and important for the topic of cr
interpretation, is that Frost interprets poetry in the sam
he writes it. That is, of course, no surprise.
Given my definition of identity as a style that pervades
a person does, I would expect to see Frost working to

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368 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

unknowns by means of small knowns in his reading. For e

was reading with Ezra Pound in 1913 Edwin Arlington
(now) well-known poem, "Miniver Cheevy." The poem m
a man who scorned the modern and lived the days of old T
Camelot and Troy. Frost wrote:

I remember the pleasure with which Pound and I laughed over t

"thought" in [this stanza:]
[Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it:]
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Three "thoughts" [said Frost] would have been "adequate" as the
praise-word then was. There would have been nothing to compla
had been left at three. The fourth made the intolerable touch of p
the fourth, the fun began....
There is more to it than the number of "thoughts." There is t
last one turns up by surprise round the corner, the way the sha
stanza is played with, the easy way the obstacle of verse is turned to
The mischief is in it.4

In reading Robinson's stanza, Frost literally hears it in terms of his

characteristic big-little, manageable-unmanageable dualism: he hears
the poet struggling against his poetic form. As Frost said of meter
generally, the poet "must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking
the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the
regular beat of the metre-or, here, the fourth "thought" across the
shape of the stanza. Frost perceives Robinson's extra "thought" as an
opposition, either to the regularity of the stanza or the three
"thoughts" that would be "adequate." The fourth "thought"-and
notice, by the way, it is a two times two, a double dualism-provides
a detail that invokes the larger "fun" or "mischief" that Frost calls
"the intolerable touch of poetry." Notice too how Frost balances off
the big word "intolerable" with the little word "touch." Or converts
his complicated thought to "mischief."
Once you are sensitive to Frost's characteristic dualism, you can
almost tell ahead of time what Frost would single out from this pas-
sage. Here Robinson describes the drunken, superannuated Mr.
Eben Flood offering himself a swig of whiskey on a hilltop:

'Only a very little, Mr. Flood-

'For auld lang syne. No more, sir: that will do.'
So, for the time, apparently it did,
And Eben evidently thought so too;

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 369

For soon amid the silver loneliness

Of night he lifted up his voice and sang,
Secure, with only two moons listening,
Until the whole harmonious landscape rang-
'For auld lang syne.' The weary throat gave out....

Now here is what Frost singled out about it: "The guarded pathos of
'Mr. Flood's Party' is what makes it merciless. We are to bear in mind
the number of moons listening. Two, as on the planet Mars. No less.
No more.... One moon... would have laid grief too bare. More than
two would have dissipated grief entirely and would have amounted
to dissipation. The emotion had to be held at a point."5 He picks out
the twoness of things, and he finds beauty in a precise balance be-
tween that duality and something larger (like "Mars") or more pow-
erful (like "grief").
Frost finds it beautiful when something small succeeds in holding
something larger to a point of balance. His mind moves in a constant
rhythm of large to small to large to small, the small somehow man-
aging to cope with or balance the large. It is this characteristic of hi
own mind that he discovers and admires in Robinson's poetry. H
explains his fondness for the novel Robinson Crusoe by saying, "I neve
tire of being shown how the limited can make snug in the limitless.
Walden has something of the same fascination. Crusoe was cast away;
Thoreau was self-cast away. Both found themselves sufficient." In
deed, this is the way he thinks about all literature. "There are no two
things as important to us in life and art," he said, "as being threatened
and being saved." Understanding what Frost prizes is what modern
identity theory adds to the old maxim. Beauty is in the "I" of th
beholder.
Frost sees more than beauty this way, however. He sees everything
in the same style, as indeed this definition of identity would suggest.
"The most exciting movement in nature," he says, "is not progress,
advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of
the eye, the hand, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with
a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person.
We explore and adventure for a while and then we draw in to con-
solidate our gains." Again, Frost has perceived in twos, expansion
and contraction, opening and shutting, outward or inward. Beauty
will be continuous with other functions of Frost's identity, like his
views on life in general or his perceptions of other people.
Both creating and interpreting are functions of Frost's identity (at
least as I interpret that identity). You arrive at Frost's identity theme
by abstracting patterns of repetition and contrast from the individ-

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370 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

ual's choices-here, his choice of words. He is constantly w

reading new poems, thinking and doing new things, yet
creativity one can trace patterns, a sameness, a character
Frostness in everything Frost does. I can think of Frost'
a dialectic between sameness and newness, and the best w
to image that dialectic is as a theme and variations. I can t
sameness in someone as an identity theme or style th
persisting through the variations. I can then understand
and growth in that person as variations on that identity
thinking of Robert Frost that way, as a theme and varia
trace a continuity between his life and his reading and hi
poetry. I can fit the style of his creations and his interp
the style of his life.
For example, I can see a relation between Frost's adu
and his efforts as a child to cope with his parents. His f
drunken, unpredictable newspaperman. His mother w
Swedenborgian who saw symbols in everything in the
see how, with parents like that, he might have taken as h
his "project" in Graham Little's word,6 the managing of
forces through the symbolic power of smallness. I can see
between that childhood and his efforts very late in his li
Department tour of Russia to treat Chairman Krusche
other farmer like himself.
One can trace an identity theme through the long spaces and times
of a life. One can also trace it to the extremes of a life. Robert Frost,
for instance, tried to commit suicide at the age of twenty. His method
was to try to drown himself in the Great Dismal Swamp in North
Carolina, and this is, of course, a very "Frostian" submission to a big,
mysterious entity.
When I consider such evidence as Frost's attempted suicide, I can
believe that there is an identity theme in a person-a structure, like
an ego, established in infancy, that governs conduct. Or, perhaps, I
need say no more than that I can find such a theme. I can find words
like big or unmanageable which will trace continuities in Robert Frost's
choices. I can connect his style of interpretation to his style of creation
finding a single identity that governs both.

II

The next question seems obvious enough. How can we imagine this
identity? Is it something in Robert Frost? Is it just something I invent?
As a way of conceiving identity in this theme and variations sense

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 371

and as a way of linking my interpretation and anybody

tion, I want to draw on one of the great discoveries of
century. We humanists have not used it for imagining
of human experience as much, I think, as we should:
tems.

We might start with a feedback model of the brain developed by

computer scientist, William T. Powers. Powers treats the brain
perhaps I should say "mind") as a structure of negative feedba
loops. He states his idea in the title of his book Behavior: The Cont
of Perception.7
Behavior controls perception. If I see the highway ahead of m
turn right, I turn the steering wheel of my car right. I do so in j
such a way that I can continue to see the car's right front fender k
about the same distance, one meter, say, from the right side of th
road. If I see the right fender get too close to the edge of the road
I turn the steering wheel left. In other words, my behavior with
wheel controls my perception of the distance between the right fro
of the car and the edge of the highway. Any human behavior is p
of a feedback loop that serves to control a perception. My turn
the steering wheel closes what an engineer like Powers recognizes
a negative feedback loop or, if we were using information-process
language, a generate-and-test sequence.
This is a diagram of an information-processing feedback loop:

Standard
(= Identity)

Perception Behavior

System (= Self) Inner Reality

Outer Reality

Stimulus
Fig. 1

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372 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

A feedback loop, properly understood, has to have thre

a behavioral end that acts on the input-my hands
steering wheel. Second, some standard or reference
outside the perceptual-behavioral loop and (at least
simple version) unaffected by it, like my sense that I
one meter from the edge of the road. Third, a compar
eye and brain figuring out the distance between the r
the shoulder and comparing it to the standard. That c
sensing the difference between where the car is and w
to be, then becomes the perceptual end that the behav
trols.
Although some psychology textbooks treat feedb
though they were self-contained, there has to be that
from outside the loop. If I had an autopilot for my ca
able to keep the right wheel a fixed distance from t
road, but I or somebody would have to tell it what that
should be.
Behavior controls perception. Interestingly, that is exactly the way
Freud defines a wish in the last, metapsychological chapter of The
Interpretation of Dreams. A wish seeks to recreate the perception of a
satisfaction.8 According to the pleasure principle all our waking be-
havior serves to gratify a wish-as opposed to our dreams, where we
merely hallucinate our pleasures. Either way, however, a wish equals
a wish for a certain perception.
This feedback model, then, for all that it sounds electronic and
M.I.T.-ish, is profoundly psychoanalytic. It articulates Freud's life-
long belief in and use of homeostasis as a model for psychological
processes. Indeed, in Freud's Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895),
his first big psychological effort, you find drawings of cross-correcting
processes that look very much like feedback diagrams, although, of
course, feedback was not yet available for this kind of modeling.9
This feedback picture has a place for various random stimuli that
disturb the equilibrium established by the loop of driver, car, and
road. The road takes a turn or the wind blows across the road or a
pothole twists the front wheels. The stimuli are the same for ever
body, but the response will be unique. These stimuli from outside th
loop change what goes into the comparison, and I have to reset the
car. I steer so that I get the wheel back to the one meter from the
edge of the road that feels right to me.
"Feels." Notice that affect is crucial to the model. I need to perceiv
a difference that feels right between the standard and what I see "ou
there," that does not result in a danger signal. A "not feeling right
would correspond exactly to Freud's "signal of anxiety" (Angstsigna
in his second, structural model of the mind.10

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 373

Using just these three elements, perception, behavior

ence signals, Powers proposes to treat the whole brain
a ladder of such negative feedback loops. He simpl
feedback loops into a hierarchy in which the higher
the reference signals for the loops below them. My hig
to drive toward a certain destination uses, as it were,
standard about positioning the car on the road to g
want to go. Here is a two-loop diagram:

Standard
(= Identity)

Perception Comparator Behavior

O -. Comparator

Person J
Environment

Stimulus o
Fig. 2

Each loop consists of a behavioral output, a perceptual input, and a

comparator governed by a standard or reference. We can concatenate
the loops by having one loop, the upper, provide as its output the
standard for the lower. Suppose that in the lower loop I maintain the
distance between the right front wheel of my car and the right edge
of the road. Ordinarily I make that distance one meter. But suppose
in the upper loop, which considers general driving conditions, I no-
tice that there is a big truck coming up on my left and the shoulder
of the road is a continuation of the asphalt. I might well decide to
keep the right front wheel of my car half a meter or less from the
edge of the road. I change the standard and let the lower loop now
maintain this new distance.
The feedback diagram allows me to visualize how my individual
values about big trucks relate to the car or the road that we all share.
The feedback picture lets me understand how, although the car and
the road are the same for all drivers, no driver will drive that same
car down that same road the same way.

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 374 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

So far, however, I have mostly been talking about the biolog

our physical perceptions. Culture enters into our perception
indeed, permeates them. You and I, for example, live amid stra
lines and right angles and corners in what anthropologists call a
pentered" world. Zambians do not. Where we can see a certa
ture made up of straight lines as a perspective of a box, they se
a flat, two-dimensional design. The anthropologist Colin Tu
reports that his pygmy guide, who lived in a forest where the g
distance he could see was a hundred feet, could not recognize b
grazing some miles away as buffalo. He was sure they were
and proclaimed, when the two men got closer and saw that the
were in fact buffalo, that, before, a witch had turned them in
sects. 1
In effect, the Zambians and the pygmy guide demonstrat
what we internalize of our culture can limit our physiology, rem
some possibilities in even so basic a visual schema as the correl
of size and distance. Our two-tier feedback metaphor lets us v
how, when we make them part of our psychic economy, social
cultural values interact with physiology and identity.

Standard
(= Identity)

Perception Behavior

Internalized
Culture 1

Physiology

Person

Stimulus,

Fig. 3

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 375

The human being lives in the world by means of behavior th

trols perception. In the lower loop, a person's physiology act
physical world to change perceptions to make them more sat
(as in Freud's definitions of wish and anxiety signal). The up
however, testing experience against the limits we have inter
part of growing up in a culture, sets the standard for the lo
sets, for example, the criteria for the relation between size
tance or between angles and perspective. Then, at the top, th
vidual identity decides how and when these cultural value
applied or not applied.
Confronted with something two miles away, quite unconsc
you or I would "set" our reference levels for judging dista
would program ourselves with data about the angles, the hue
sizes and silence that indicate large black objects two miles a
do so by means of cultural resources, but the pygmy's cu
never let him learn-internalize reference signals for-a lar
object two miles away. In effect his social loop has not set a r
level for his biophysical loop, and as a result a buffalo two mi
simply doesn't-can't-exist for him.
Conversely (and from the opposite end of my anatomy), by
in chairs I have atrophied the muscles for squatting that Afri
Orientals constantly use. As with the pygmy, my internaliz
my culture has ruled out some possibilities. The culture I carr
body as well as my brain has limited what my physiology ca
Culture can also enlarge. As a modern American, I know
use a hammer to drive and pull nails that I could not with m
hands. In that context, my internal (and external) cultural r
enlarge my physical capacity. In the same way, the pygmy h
in tracking and hunting I can scarcely even imagine.
My culture equips my body with a language. So provide
fashion, for example, the thoughts you are reading. That
also, however, puts limits to what I can hear or think or say
know all too well from our freshmen.
At the physical level, I have a tongue and vocal cords with which
to speak, ears with which to hear, and (so Noam Chomsky says) part
of my brain wired for language. In that sense, my body, like everyone
else's, is built for language. But I speak English and not Italian. That
means I can't hypothesize and therefore can't even hear the differ-
ence between r and double-r in Italian, and even though I speak some
French I have trouble not hearing nom and non differently (which I
have to do if I am to read Lacan).
Further, my English is not quite the same as yours. I speak with a

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376 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

certain drawl and pitch. I write using sentence modif

theless and however more than most people do. In lin
write and speak an idiolect and a dialect and a languag
sets the standards for my particular brand of English,
tunes my body's speech equipment to certain sounds
Our internalizations of language, tools, cooking, and
ture all set standards for eyes, ears, tongues, and fing
of our lives is physical and biological, yet our cultural
limit our physiology, as with the pygmy guide's dist
enlarge it, as with my hammering. The two-tier diag
vides a figure for the pygmy guide and for all of
individual uses the hammer or works with his ability
a distance or, indeed, works with his inability (sa
bewitched).
Now, obviously, I have (or Powers has) grossly overs
vast architecture of the human brain. Neurons are no
output elements. There is great redundancy among
networks. In particular, we are dealing with somethin
complicated than a simple one-chain hierarchy. Power
velops an eight-level hierarchy. The brain physiol
many parallel hierarchies or, more exactly, heterarchi
trol may pass from a high element in one hierarchy t
in an adjacent hierarchy. The physiologists even speak
as made up of "coalitions" which combine several elem
brain to work closely with elements in the outer worl
Powers greatly oversimplifies. Even so, both psy
physiologists agree that we can use two of the general
which he built his model. First, feedback. As two bra
say, "No line can be drawn between a sensory side and
in the organization of the brain."12 When, for examp
the pages in Robinson's book and moves his glance
those are motor actions, but they also set up new vis
When Frost acts, he acts so as to control his percepti
Powers's general point, that behavior-motor action
of perception. Our brains do operate like feedback
iorally. We feel good or bad as various events meet
our standards. Obviously, we can't use so broad a g
map particular neural circuits. We can be fairly sure,
there are reference signals of the kind feedback circ
where, somehow in our brains, and these reference si
express goals or purposes or intentions, the adapti
functioning.

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 377

The second principle of Powers's model that hold

levels controlling lower levels. When we will an actio
goal. When Frost writes a poem, he thinks of his hir
wall to be mended. He does not think of dotting h
his t's or getting the subject to agree with the verb.
the "mischief" in Robinson's fourth "thought," some
process recognized t-h-o-u-g-h-t. He didn't have to th
consciously. In the same way, a marksman thinks o
opera singer of her perfect high C, or a trapeze artis
somersault. They do not think of finger, left leg, or
Rather, all kinds of subordinate reflexes handle thos
cular details while the higher levels of the brain poin
flexes toward one overall goal. Then our feelings
enjoying the triumph of a bullseye or a triple somer
or the "mischief" in Robinson's poem-these affects t
back has been successful.
The feedback picture thus lets me visualize the working of Robert
Frost's brain, at least in very broad outline. Frost had purposes and
goals at the top of his brain, or at least I can guess at such higher
goals and put them into words as my perception of Frost's identity.
These higher goals, this identity, set the references and signals for
simpler reflex processes of sight and taste and touch at lower levels
of Frost's brain or at the edges and boundaries of his body. In the
same way, his identity set standards for his literary behavior. We all
share the English language, but no one will write a poem just like
Robert Frost. Further, no one will interpret a poem just like Robert
Frost.

Basically, the model I am proposing embodies three ideas about

the mind as it is engaged in interpretation and creation: feedback, a
hierarchy of governance, and an identity which is the history of a
theme and its variations governing and permeating that hierarchy.
Perhaps "model" is too strong. In the first instance, anyway, I intend
to put forward only a metaphor or a guiding principle or, simply, a
picture that one can carry about in one's head with which to think
about ideas like creation and interpretation.
Incidentally, this is a picture of the human being in a social context
different from the one presupposed by our usual metaphors about
"social coercion" or "political forces" or "economic pressures" or "the
impact of society" acting on individuals. The most coercive and to-
talitarian regime can do no more than take over the lower two loops,
the way the society of Orwell's 1984 guards the language of history
and experience. The Ministry of Truth can reach the private, indi-

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378 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

vidual choice only through those lo

in his thoughts. To be sure, society
very costly, but the abstraction "So
chains or drugs do. For the indivi
much like a physical pressure as lik
a means.

Language and literature are means, too. Ident

back yields a picture of the communicating hum
from many of our familiar metaphors about w
livering" or "conveying" meaning. It may even
Saussurean idea of "signifying" needs to be
embody the contradictions of what Michael
the Conduit Metaphor for Language: language a
or conveyor belt. You put meanings into it
them at the other.13 If this feedback metapho
rate picture of what is going on in our brai
reason to believe it does, then people make mea
ical texts in front of them using the various c
petencies available to them. The codes themselv
messages; individuals build messages.
Certainly one thing the identity-governing-f
gests is that creation and interpretation are so
natural metaphor for interpretation. We ou
poems delivering messages or novels conveying
should be using metaphors that reveal the rela
individual performance and the shared codes. W
ample: Robert Frost built his readings on the f
sical education- or he constructed them or deve
Robert Frost improved on Pound's reading-
mended it, he filled the gaps in it. Robert Frost
itself a beautiful performance-or it is an elega
construction or a botched scribble or a highly visib
Frost limited his response to imagism-or contr
shaped it or inflated it-and so on. In general, I
phors of passively being hit or poured into or
with metaphors that reflect the craftsmanship
tery, or artistry that we bring or don't bring t
attending a movie, or even watching television
So far, I have put forward the idea of identit
only as a general metaphor or guiding principl
about-for example, to arrive at useful metap

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 379

interpretation. I also think, however, that a concept of identity

includes feedback can make a larger claim on our belief than a m
aphor. I think, for example, that this picture, because it emb
such psychoanalytic concepts as wish or homeostasis or ident
character, draws on whatever validity psychoanalytic psycholog
Identity guiding feedback becomes more of a theory or a model
a metaphor or general idea.
The principle of identity governing feedback also draws on ot
kinds of psychology besides psychoanalysis. In particular,
thinking of the long line of research by Piaget and many other
the psychology of perception, cognition, and memory, demonstr
that we see and hear and know and remember actively. Things d
just impinge on us. We bring schemata to bear on things to assi
them to our minds. We reach out to see, hear, know, or remem
using our innate capacities to see, hear, know, or remember
picture of a self using "hardwired" capabilities to feed back beh
into an internal equilibrium corresponds quite usefully to what
cognitive psychologists tell us.
Similarly, the brain physiologists in experiments going back m
than fifty years arrive at something that in broad outline looks
feedback network. I am thinking of Sir Charles Sherrington's fam
if somewhat grisly, experiment, in which he cut the spinal cor
dog and found that the dog would still scratch fleas although th
was no connection between the flea scratching and the brain. Sh
rington concluded that the dog's mind and, for that matter, yo
and mine, operates by having a higher "roof-brain" direct l
order circuits or reflexes. We walk by reflex, yes, but to a plac
in a manner decided by a higher level of our minds. We lis
automatically, but we hear according to our personal interest
concerns.

Furthermore, the picture of identity directin

sponds to efforts to model the human mind by t
the computer. Artificial intelligencers at Stan
M.I.T. are programming computers to understand
they have to give the lowest level, at which th
word, a context in which to place that word, so i
example, that you mean "salt" in a restaurant, no
The computer needs something like a hierarchy o
human does.
This feedback picture also clarifies the idea of identity that I have
been urging for the last ten years or so as a useful explanation for

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380 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

differences in interpretations and readings. Given the fee

ture, we can see that the concept of identity has at least three
aspects that we have, like jugglers, to keep in the air all at
using the concept. First, identity is an agency. It is what
carries out these various generate-and-test sequences. It is
hypotheses and schemata into the feedback loops to pay of
Second, identity is the consequence of those loops. It is in
of feedback, of course, that what initiates the loop is also
from the loop. Here, identity initiates, say, a poem. Then
becomes part of Frost's cumulating identity, which is both
consequence of the poem.
Third, identity is a representation. By that term, I want
the foreground the fact that it is I who am reading Robert
way. It is I who see Robert Frost as managing great un
means of small knowns. You might see him quite differen
tainly you would phrase him differently, and words ar
hypothesizing an identity. That is, one makes an interpret
identity through just exactly these feedback loops. Frost's
a function of my identity. A unique me uses shared codes
pretation and language to arrive at a theme and variations
for Frost. Therefore I want to follow the lead of Murray
and include in my definition of identity the language one
uses to represent another subject, Frost. Identity is thus
agency, representation, and consequence. We can, then, an
questions with which I introduced this second section. Fros
is not simply something in Frost, nor is it something I in
between us. It is in the relation between Frost and me. Id
way of representing a relationship, an identity-finding rela
Frost's identity, but since I do so as a function of my ow
what I call his identity mingles his and mine.
By the same reasoning, anytime I represent something,
function of my identity. The picture of an A-R-C, theme
tions identity governing a hierarchy of feedbacks thus lea
to an idea of Robert Frost's brain but to a general model
we use our cultural resources to achieve expression and
cation (or creation and interpretation) in a world of priva
ences. As Erikson said, there is no person without society
even in the theme-and-variations sense, are social and pol
as individual. More precisely, identities are a way peop
and political. Still more precisely, identities are a way to de
people are social and political. The model thus leads us t
point.

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 381

III

How can I (admittedly through my own identity) grasp the relation

between this unique individual, Robert Frost, and Robert Frost Amer-
ican, or Robert Frost reader of poems, or Robert Frost owner of a
brain? In other words, how can I relate the uniqueness of Robert
Frost to what is not unique, to the things he shares with the rest of
us, the English language, for example, or the texts of Robinson's
poems, or that brain which, if we had it in a jar of formaldehyde,
would look about like your brain or mine?
In our feedback metaphor, the individual sets the limits within
which culture sets the limits within which the individual puts limits
on the world so as to control the individual's perceptions. Metaphors
of social "forces" or "determinism" cannot convey that curious mix-
ture of limitation and freedom. I think it more accurate to say the
individual uses what cultural resources are available, which in turn
use what physical and biological resources are available. I like the
term transact. We transact cultural and physical realities, much the
way we carry on affairs, either of the heart or the briefcase.
Thus, as we have seen, the feedback picture shows how a unique
person transacts something which is common to everybody, as when
I drive a car or Frost uses the English language, and yet the individual
experiences the situation according to his own highly personal feel-
ings, intuitions, and past history. Indeed, feelings are essential in the
feedback.
Thus the hierarchy of feedbacks gives us a way to visualize the
relation of the unique individual Robert Frost to the social and cul-
tural codes that Umberto Eco describes or to the interpretive com-
munities of which Stanley Fish speaks or to the Erwartungshorizont,
the horizon of readerly expectations, of Rezeptionsdsthetik. When we
internalize codes, we acquire references and skills for the individual
identity to use, just as the Zambians do by living in flat spaces, or the
pygmies by hunting in a jungle, or the Americans by hammering. A
semiotic code is just such a reference or skill. A semiotic code, it seems
to me, has to be defined thus: "No normal member of this culture
would read this otherwise." Fish's interpretive communities are more
elastic. They provide us with something like ready-to-wear hy-
potheses about a given word or phrase, but we are always left a choice
between ready-to-wear and tailor-made and even between various
styles and colors of ready-to-wear. In the same way, the various Er-
wartungshorizonte of this period or that, the literary expectations of a
certain class or era, provide ready-made hypotheses. Perhaps they

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382 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

are somewhat harder to shed than the various interpr

nities within a certain period, but they do not seem
equivocal as the language or syntax of an era.
In other words, we have to include in our feedback p
Chomsky's most useful concepts, degrees of gramm
loops that govern eyes and ears are physiological, almo
as physical laws. The loops that govern the way we
words are cultural, not physical, but to be understood
member of this culture could see this otherwise." A code like that
functions almost like the hardwiring or environment of the feedback
loop. By contrast, the interpretive communities or Erwartungshorizonte
to which we hold fleeting allegiances provide us with ready-made
conventions, expectations, or gambits for reading, like "This poem
has a unity," or every poem is "expressing a significant attitude to
some problem concerning man and/or his relation to the universe."
These are hypotheses which we feed into a poem and to which we
get either positive or negative feedback. They would appear in our
diagram as behavioral outputs from an individual, not in the same
place as semiotic codes. This kind of convention does not limit or
enlarge us in the willy-nilly the way physical or (I would say) cultural
codes do. They open up possibilities, to be sure, but we are quite free
to choose otherwise.
These conventions are thus not at all the same as a grammar to
which Chomsky's term "competence" properly applies. They do not
rest on the huge consensus of all the speakers of a language inventing
billions of sentences every day. They rest on a far more limited base:
the institution of literature teaching in American colleges and uni-
versities. And anyone who has ever tried to get an English-depart-
ment to agree on a curriculum or a candidate must wonder how one
could ever imagine that as a consensus at all. As Stanley Fish points
out, the conventions of reading in classrooms are of a piece with the
other social and political conventions of universities.15 That is what
is so coercive about a concept like Jonathan Culler's "literary com-
petence." He is trying to make the conventions of classroom inter-
pretation as strict as a grammar, to write Brooks and Warren into
the syntactical circuits of our brains. Culler needs to take into account
degrees of grammaticality.16
If I have been competent in this essay, I have made three points.
First, interpretation and creation are so much alike that we can use
the same words for both. Robert Frost "built" a poem; Robert Frost
"built" his reading. Interpretation and creation are each aspects of a
single personal style or identity or, perhaps, brain.
Second, we can imagine that brain as a series of feedbacks in hier-

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 383

archies in which higher loops set standards for lower

whole, we can "read" behavior as controlling percepti
right to a governing and permeating identity. Such a
oversimplifies an actual brain, to be sure. Nevertheless
or image of identity governing feedback turns out t
with psychoanalytic theory, modern brain physiolog
work in artificial intelligence. It is more than a metap
as a model for the processes of creation and interpre
My third point has to do with Frost's interpretatio
By thinking of identity as permeating and setting th
hierarchy of feedbacks, we gain a way of imagining
tween a personal style and the codes or rules or c
interpretive communities within which it operates. W
relations between individual creation or interpretatio
tural and physiological contexts within which creatio
tation take place. We can see the difference between
semiotic code and the conventions of an interpretive
the expectations of an age. In the relation between pe
creation lies the relation between brain and individua
mind and communication.
In short, we have moved from what may be a small subject, the
brain of Robert Frost, to a very large one: how, in a world of private
experiences, one human brain communicates with another-as, I
hope, I have just finished doing.

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

NOTES

1 "The 'Unconscious' of Literature: The Psychoanalytic Approach," in Conte

Criticism, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-Upon-Avon Stu
(London, 1970), pp. 130-53. "A Touching of Literary and Psychiatric Ed
Seminars in Psychiatry, 5 (1973), 287-99. "Unity Identity Text Self," PMLA, 9
813-22; rpt. in Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism
P. Tompkins (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 118-33; translated as "Unita Identita T
Gradiva, 1 (1976), 5-20, and "Einheit Identitat Text Selbst," Psyche, 33 (197
48.
In general, I obtained my information about Frost, unless otherwise indicate
Lawrance Thompson's encyclopedic biography, Robert Frost: The Early Yea
1915 (New York, 1966), Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (N
1970), and (as completed by R. H. Winnick) Robert Frost: The Later Years 1
(New York, 1976). The reader will be able to trace any quotation of particular
by looking up key words in the excellent indices.
2 Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, ed. George Plimpton, 2nd s
York, 1963), p. 25. Richard Poirier conducted the interview with Robert Fros

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 384 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

3 Heinz Lichtenstein, "Identity and Sexuality" (1961), in his Dilemma

(New York, 1977), pp. 49-122.
4 Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick, N.J
22.
5 Frost on Writing, pp. 123-24.
6 Graham Little, Politics and Personal Style (Melbourne, 1973); Faces on the Campus: A
Psychosocial Study (Melbourne, 1970). Little has applied this kind of identity analysis to
political activists and campus types.
7 William T. Powers, Behavior: The Control of Perception (Chicago, 1973). Also by
Powers: "Feedback: Beyond Behaviorism," Science, 179 (1973), 351-56; "Quantitative
Analysis of Purposive Systems: Some Spadework at the Foundations of Scientific Psy-
chology," Psychological Review, 85 (1978), 417-35.
8 Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey (London, 1953-74), V, 566.
9 I think psychoanalysis would have made faster and greater scientific headway had
Freud had available to him metaphors of electrical amplification and feedback instead
of the hydraulic models to which he resorted and for which he has sometimes been
derided. For example, the "signal theory of anxiety," the last step in Freud's transition
into ego psychology, is readily understandable in electronic terms, although Freud's
own metaphor for it is political. See Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Standard
Edition, XX, 92-94, 138-41.
10 See n. 9.

11 Jan B. Deregowski, "Difficulties in Depth Perception in Africa," British Jo

Psychology, 59 (1968), 195-204. Colin Turnbull, "Some Observations Regard
Experiences and Behavior of the BaMbuti Pygmies," American Journal of Psycho
(1961), 304-8. For discussion of these and many other such effects, see Robert
Ruth H. Munroe, Cross-Cultural Human Development (Monterey, 1975), pp. 67-7
shall H. Segall, Donald T. Campbell, and Melville J. Herskovits, The Influence of
on Visual Perception (New York, 1966); Barbara B. Lloyd, Perception and Cogni
Cross-Cultural Perspective (London, 1972).
12 Walle J. H. Nauta and Michael Feirtag, "The Organization of the Brain," Sci
American, Sept. 1979, pp. 88-111, 106.
13 Michael J. Reddy, "The Conduit Metaphor-A Case of Frame Conflict
Language about Language," in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew J. Orton
bridge, 1979), pp. 284-324.
14 In his response, Professor Iser said I had suggested that the interrelati
between creation and interpretation collapses. True enough. If so, he went o
"I think the question would be why ... we have these distinctions?" To answ
be another paper and a half, obviously, but I can point to a direction for my
The assumption that interpretation differs in any fundamental way from c
rests, it seems to me, on another assumption, namely, that creation creates som
finished, done-an "event" in Professor Iser's terms-which is then interpret
interpretation proceeds from an object that did not exist for creation, the
fundamentally different. I am making the contrary assumption-and I thin
full warrant for that assumption in the contemporary psychology of percept
cognition-that such an "event" becomes an event only through acts of interpr
like the feedback processes I am describing. Those processes therefore form b
ation and interpretation, and one can draw no definitive line between them.

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THE BRAIN OF ROBERT FROST 385

15 Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Cl

16 The "significant attitude" maxim in th
of a necessary principle in "Literary Compe
Response Criticism, pp. 101-17. Curiously, C
and seems to introduce an element of flexi
insisting on certain "facts" and "mistakes" (
a fact or a mistake in reading is a matter o
to our grammatical competence.

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