Recently, I had the opportunity to catch a performance of the current play about the poet Robert Frost, Entitled, “This Verse Business” it’s a one-man portrayal of the poet that is now touring Vermont. It ran for two weeks at Lost Nation Theatre in Montpelier and is scheduled at Dorset, St. Johnsbury, Burlington, and Marlboro.
“This Verse Business” has much to recommend it. It is, first of all, very entertaining. Gordon Clapp, the professional actor who plays Frost, does so with great skill and understanding. One of the pleasures of the play is that it offers Clapp the opportunity to recite several of Frost’s best poems – including “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” “The Tuft of Flowers,” and a wonderfully deep and very touching recitation of a Frost masterpiece, “The Death of the Hired Man.”
But ultimately, I felt a bit let down by the play. It was well acted and good entertainment, just as Frost himself, in his public appearances, was good entertainment, and more than a bit of an actor. But it could have been considerably deeper. And so I felt it was something of a missed opportunity.
The play never really gets at the poet’s darker side. It presents Frost in his guise as wise old Yankee sage dispensing bits of homely wisdom – precisely the mask that Frost created for himself - and used to shield his more unpleasant aspects from his public.
Frost was not a perfect man. He had a darker side that he masked with his public persona. He could be vain, selfish, and manipulative.
And in fact, Frost’s greatest poems often deal with dark, tragic subjects – the hapless lad who dies after accidentally sawing off his hand in a sawmill, the husband and wife whose marriage is broken by the death of a son, the fire of lust, the ice of hatred.
Despite his public acclaim, in the 1960s and 70s, it was common to regard Frost as somehow second-rate, a bit commonplace, a bit old-fashioned and obvious.
Perhaps that was because for the literary hoi polloi, Frost had committed two unpardonable sins – his poetry, at least on the surface, was easily understood, and he was immensely popular with the general public.
By the late 20th century, it was thought, especially in university literary circles, that to be worthwhile, poetry had to be complex and hard to penetrate. That belief is fading now, thanks to national spokesmen like former Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and others. And, at the same time, Robert Frost’s literary reputation has been resuscitated. He is recognized as one of the truly great American poets, in the same literary realm as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
But genius is never simple. Great poets – great artists of any stripe – are complex people. We need to get to know them in all that complexity, That’s the only way to really understand their work, and to understand the price that genius so often extracts.
