New light on frost.

Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One Another, edited by Matthew Spencer (Handsel, 224 pp., $24)

The Poems of Edward Thomas (Handsel, 148 pp., $17)

A MAJOR writer is a world in which discoveries are always to be made. No matter how much we know about Frost, this elegant and concentrated book makes discoveries about him, both biographical and analytical; and the new edition of Edward Thomas's poems will introduce many to the valuable work of Frost's "elected friend." The word "elected" is used in the Calvinist sense also employed by Goethe in Elective Affinities: the chosen, the seemingly inevitable. Each of them powerfully assisted the other in his emergence as a poet.

Elected Friends brings together a number of materials in an important critical act: focusing on what Frost was discovering about his medium. First, we have a bit of biography, well laid out. Frost, going on 40, had published a few poems in provincial newspapers, farm journals, and the like. With his wife Elinor he sailed for England in August 1912. He thought he must finally achieve recognition as a poet--or give up. At their cottage, he spread out on the floor his poems, published and unpublished, arranging them into a plot of sorts about the development of a poet. The final poem, "Reluctance," shows that Frost could write in something like the grand style and announces the fact of a major poet. In April 1913, his collection A Boy's Will was published in London. The word "will" is important, a phrase from Longfellow, but meant to distance Frost from Longfellow and to align him instead with the William James of The Will to Believe. His roll of the dice in 1912 was an act of will. Frost in England made his luck: He was "discovered" by Ezra Pound. A Boy's Will was a critical success; in 1914 came North of Boston, which made Frost famous.

Edward Thomas, an established English critic, published three reviews of North of Boston. Included here, these demonstrate remarkable acumen. Frost's use of language pointed the way for Thomas, as did his method of seeing parables in unexpected places: parables, not pantheism. The two men had met in London and experienced their "election" in a running conversation about poetry and much else. They were together about a year and a half, Frost sailing for New York in February 1915, Thomas enlisting in the army in July 1915. Their very rich total correspondence here lasts until Thomas was killed at Arras in 1917. Thomas produced some 50 very fine poems and clearly had been decisively enabled by Frost's genius and concentrated will. Thomas, in return, had provided Frost with highly intelligent appreciation; Frost said that Thomas "gave me standing as a poet." The death of Thomas inspired a number of Frost's greatest poems. All of this the books under review here bring to a remarkable focus.

The analytical illumination centers on the nature of language and Frost's use of it. Pound was--inevitably?--the one to define this. In 1912 (Patria Mia), Pound noticed a distinctive quality of the English language, something in the collective temper that strengthened it and gave it fiber: "a race conviction that words scarcely become a man." One undertakes to keep quiet until there is something worth saying. This is a major formulation for modern writing. Hemingway a few years later worked with this knowledge. In A Farewell to Arms, Catherine's fiance has been killed in battle. Near the end of the novel, dying, she corrects her lover, Lt. Henry, as he blathers:

   "You're all right, Cat," I said. "You're
      going to be all right."
   "I'm going to die," she said; then waited
      and said, "I hate it."

The necessary style has passed from the fiance to Catherine, now to Lt. Henry; in the last three pages of the novel Henry walks away from the hospital having spoken to the hospital personnel with the Style. More often than not in Hemingway, it is the heroine who has the Style (quiet, feminist critics, and listen). After five acts of the wonderfully voluble Prince Hamlet, his last words hit with terrific force: "The rest is silence." Hemingway at his best strives toward that silence--and Frost too knows how to use it.

Frost, well aware of the odds on the Western Front, was profoundly moved by Thomas's enlistment in 1915. He knew that words scarcely became a man at a time like this, writing to Thomas in France: "You rather shut me up by enlisting. Talk is almost too cheap." Somewhat contradictorily, he put this in a strong poem:

   France, France, I know not what is in my
      heart.
   But God forbid that I should be more
      brave
   As watcher from a quiet place apart
   Than you are fighting in an open grave.

   Not mine to say you shall not think of
      peace.
   Not mine, not mine: I almost know your
      pain.

Those last two lines declare the limits of words, sharpening their edges. Frost never published this poem: Words scarcely became a man. It is that awareness that presses Frost's language into concentrated power, charges ordinary words with unexpected meaning. Another example, the three words "not to keep." In the poem of that title, inspired by Thomas, a soldier is wounded and sent home to recuperate with his wife. But he must go back to the Front:

   She dared no more than ask him with her
      eyes
   How was it with him for a second trial.
   And with his eyes he asked her not to
      ask.
   They had given him back to her, but not
      to keep.

Not a word in this poem is out of the ordinary. Frost makes the last three extraordinary.

The sonnet "The Oven Bird" (1916) is one of Frost's many verse manifestos expressing his poetic mission. This drab feathered creature

   says the highway dust is over all.
   The bird would cease and be as other
      birds
   But that he knows in singing not to sing.
   The question that he frames in all but
      words
   Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The verb "make" there has a great deal of reach, but every word counts. In Hemingway, the pressure comes from death; in Frost, from New England skepticism. In his famous "Birches" he dares to write against Dante. When he is lost in the dark wood, Frost thinks of a boy swinging on a birch tree up "toward heaven," then back to earth: "Earth's the right place for love: / I don't know where it's likely to go better." This is precise. He does not know; this is not the arrogant certainty of the village atheist. Unlike Dante, this New England individual does not appeal to a powerful tradition. In "Desert Places" (1936), he knocks Pascal: "I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places." The tough-minded Frost will have nothing to do with glamorous "terror"; the word "scare" says it all. He is above terror. Get thee gone, Sartre, Dostoevsky, Kafka. Frost has made a different world out of language, and constituted himself a one-man American Revolution. His is a "diminished thing" only so to speak.