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For Once, Then, Something Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike, Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths--and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. --Robert Frost

The PSA honored Robert Frost at the Los Angeles Public Library's Central Library on October 29, 1997. Robert Mezey, Kay Ryan, and Timothy Steele read, and were introduced by Robert Fagen. Here Mezey writes about his favorite poems by poetry's "greatest maker."

A large part of my country has come to me through its literature, which we can say, without swagger or being in the least invidious, is one of the great literatures of the world. (Or, one might say, a large part of the greatest one of all--surely one of the glories of English literature is what has been written on this continent during the last 150 years or so.) And one of the great makers of our literature--I would say its greatest poet--is Robert Frost. I can think of no terms of praise that would be too extravagant.

When I bring to mind how much life is to be found in his poems--by which I mean both how much of his own vitality and how many other lives, lives seen with pitiless clarity and with the deepest sympathy and humanity--when I bring to mind his dazzling and seemingly effortless command of his art, I can think of no American writer, poet or novelist, who is his equal. I can think of a few English writers who are--in this century, only Hardy. Frost had one of the best ears of any poet who ever wrote English verse. (I have been working on an essay that will, I hope, demonstrate beyond doubt that he was the most original and inventive prosodist since Milton.) Even in his slightest pieces, the little jokes or scraps of the bawdy, or the too avuncular, too cracker-barrel performances, the verse is wondrously deft and easy and always interesting. There is more wit and truth and humor and wisdom and mastery in his minor poems than in most poets' masterpieces. And he was rare in another way: a great poet who was widely read and much loved by his fellow citizens--perhaps not as deeply as widely, but that's all right. His poems can be read at many different levels. They offer honest pleasure at their lowest and simplest, and for the most alert and attentive readers, the rewards are lavish. There are not many poets in any language one could say that about. When I think of him, I see him "in the summer heaven godlike / Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs."

Everyone knows "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and very likely "Birches" and "Mending Wall" and "The Road Not Taken," and if any of the longer poems, "The Death of the Hired Man," and these are all wonderful and inexhaustible poems. But there are as good and better, hundreds of them. On readers not yet besotted, I would urge "A Leaf Treader," "Spring Pools," "The Ingenuities of Debt," "The Investment," "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length," "The Draft Horse," "To an Ancient," "Provide, Provide," "The Subverted Flower," "The Most of It" (and its exquisite companion poem, "Two Look at Two"), and among the longer ones, "A Roadside Stand" and "The Black Cottage." Oh, and "The Silken Tent," a Shakespearean sonnet as good as any of Shakespeare's. And "The Gift Outright," the poem he recited at the Kennedy Inauguration--the most beautiful poem about America, I think, better than "Concord Hymn," far better than "I Hear America Singing." He played his tennis with the net up, and he was one of the best to play the game. Now mostly we play without a net, and it isn't the same game. Not nearly.

--Robert Mezey

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