Paul Greenberg: It's time to read Robert Frost

If this nation – now a global power despite itself – had room for only one poet, surely it would be the irrepressible Walt Whitman, he who made "barbaric yawp" a poetic term.

There was no part of America, or life, or death, that he shrunk from. In his uncontainable zest for all things American, in his infallible love and hopeless, hapless enthusiasm, Whitman is the fireworks show of American poets, which may be why he should be reserved for moments of high drama and shocking tragedy. Untamed and untamable, he shouted his poems over the rooftops of the world, announcing that he – and America – had arrived. To stay.

But a great nation has room for many poets and poets to come. Not just the splendiferous versifiers and star-spangled drumbeaters, but the piquant solitude of an Emily Dickinson. As for those times that try men's souls, when the sunshine patriots have fled, when endurance is all and perseverance the only duty, when gray winter sets in with no break in the clouds, as it did at Valley Forge and Bastogne, there is a poet for those somber seasons, too.

When hope is more duty than sensation, when a New England iron must enter the national soul or America will find herself incomplete and unarmed, it is time to re-read Robert Frost.

By nature Frost was a poet, not a poet laureate. But when called on to do his ceremonial bit, he would deliver a model of an inaugural poem, the one all others will inevitably be compared to, and be judged by how well they come up to it, for there may never be its equal.

"The Gift Outright," the poet would entitle his inaugural offering to John F. Kennedy and the nation on that blustery January day when a nation riding high needed to be reminded whence it came and the price to be paid for such a gift. For from those to whom much is given, much will be expected.

It was left to Frost on that heady occasion to speak of what comes with gifts outright – the deed of gift was many deeds of war. He saw things unblinkered, Frost did, even at that heady moment before an inaugural ball, as another Camelot is ushered in by every new administration, even if only for a gaudy moment.

We forget that it is the gift outright that comes at the highest price. Frost did not. In another poem, "The Black Cottage," Frost he wrote of the New England widow of a different century who understood that the war of her time had also been fought to redeem the simple words of the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal.

Hers will seem a naive belief to the sophisticates of this or any time, yet she clung to it with the obduracy of innocence:

One wasn't long in learning that she thought Whatever else the Civil War was for It wasn't just to keep the States together, Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.

She wouldn't have believed those ends enough To have given outright for them all she gave.

Her giving somehow touched the principle That all men are created free and equal.

And to hear her quaint phrases – so removed From the world's view to-day of all those things. …

Strange how such innocence gets its own way.

I shouldn't be surprised if in this world It were the force that would at last prevail.

What a naive, simple American faith, and yet the poet understood that its force cannot be denied, not even after 232 years. But why hold onto it in these uncertain times, when retreat is as appealing as it always is when the realization dawns that freedom comes with a price. Robert Frost's response:

… why abandon a belief Merely because it ceases to be true.

Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt It will turn true again, for so it goes.

Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

What is the Fourth of July? It's the day not only for Whitmanesque fireworks that rise and fade in a minute, but Frost's unblinking, everlasting patience. It is the day we rededicate ourselves to those truths we keep coming back to, especially when they are out of favor.

About the writer:

• Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Reach him at pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com.