In case you missed it, catch up with last week’s post: “Ranking Cormac McCarthy’s Novels”
Certain books address you with clarity and directness. On rarer occasions, multiple books will harmonize in a shared address. Such was the case while reading Jay Parini’s masterful biography of Robert Frost while simultaneously reading James Matthew Wilson’s ever-so-relevant defense of poetry, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. Furthermore, the overlapping conversation has dovetailed with my recent reading of Hugh Kenner (The Age of Kenner). What emerges is an intriguing eddy of concerns: poetry, modernism, meter, politics, biography, social theory, and philosophy.
In the spirit of such convergence, I’ll briefly comment on one of Frost’s theories of language and by extension poetry: “the sound of sense.” He described the concept in a letter. It’s worth transcribing at length:
“I give you a new definition of sentence:
A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.
You may string words together without a sentnce-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but – it is bad for the clothes.
The number of words you may string on one sentence-sound is not fixed but there is always danger of over loading.
The sentence-sounds are very definite entities. (This is no literary mysticism I am preaching.) They are as definite as words. It is not impossible that they could be collected in a book though I don’t at present see on what system they would be catalogued.
They are apprehended by the ear. They are gathered by the ear from the vernacular and brought into books. Many of them are already familair to us in books. I think no writer invents them. The most original writer only catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously.”1
This passage is richly speculative and distinctly Frostian. The “clothes line” metaphor immediately evokes rural New England. The mental picture is direct and adds a tone of disarming provincialism to his theory (too easily mistaken for a lack of sophistication). By acting as the clothes line, the sentence-sound brings words together into a harmonious and cohesive whole. This is quite beautiful.
However, as good metaphors tend to do, the beautiful image begins to ripple outward in expanding rings of questions. How could we more precisely describe this invisible clothes line or even know that it’s present? What does it mean that words can be tied together on their own, without the sound? Furthermore, Frost writes that we can overload the line. We can imagine a – to be vulgar – “wordy” sentence. But is it just a matter of removing words? What is the relationship between the garments and the line?
Frost senses our skepticism at the illusive sound of sense and reassures us of its definite existence. However, even in his denial of mysticism, we don’t quite grasp what this “definite-ness” would be like. Is the sound of sense like a proposition? He nods toward a “system,” but what sort of system could catalog them?
Frost continues. Not only do such sentence-sounds exist, but they exist to be discovered. The poet apprehends them with a trained ear, carefully listening to the fresh vernacular of life. Another metaphor emerges: sentence-sounds “grow.” We can imagine a row of tomato plants, densely green. The ripening flashes of red and yellow are weighing down the stems. They wait to be plucked. So the poet goes forth into the world of everyday language, looking for such flashes.
For Frost, the language of poetry is always entangled with human experience. It is constantly observed, and rightly so, that Frost’s poetry often has a colloquial tone. Consequently, his language does not intrude but invites.
His poetry is a testament to the relationship between human activity and art. His verse does not abstract away from life, it plunges into it. He reawakens the reader’s vision through the well-timed, unexpected, and delightfully ambiguous, resisting the modernist tendency to bludgeon the reader with erudite references or enact lexical shock therapy.
As much as I admire Pound and Eliot, the dizzying Cantos and “patient etherized upon a table” make us feel estranged from both the poem and the world. Oftentimes such detachment is necessary, securing the distance required for epiphany, disruption, and growth. Yet, such poetry creates a substantial gulf between language and our world.
Frost’s poetry drives the wayward cattle home.
Whatever we might say of the sentence-sound, we must note its humanity. It gestures at the ineffable authenticity of a poetic line, an evaluation of its mettle. Does the line resonate with reality? By this, I don’t mean a simple correspondence with some “real world” empiricism. Instead, does the sentence ring true? Does it have a heart that thumps in the world? To approach this apophatically, the sentence is not hollow, phony, contrived, shallow, or thin.
Frost searched for the genuine, and the genuine had a sound of sense.
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Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life, 133.
This essay speaks to one of my primary writing objectives, to write good sentences. In the days of our homeschooling, I used to pause in the middle of reading to the children, to point out good sentences, or awkward ones. You have given me much food for thought, and added to my joy, just by drawing my attention to the "sentence sound" and, of all things, its <i>humanity</i>! You have expanded my vision. Thank you for the long quote; and thank you, Robert Frost.