Robert Frost for our times
[NOTE: This is a revised version of a previous post.]
Robert Frost’s poem “A Case for Jefferson” isn’t great poetry—even though it’s a poem by a master of the genre. It’s more in the vein of light verse, which Frost sometimes also wrote.
The treatment is light, that is. Not the subject matter:
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
By the way, the “Russian Jew” reference in the poem is not, IMHO, anti-Semitic. Frost is suggesting that “Harrison” (not ordinarily a Jewish name) doesn’t even have the excuse for his radicalism of being a Jew in Russia, subject to the pressures and ethos there. Harrison’s “Puritan Yankee through and through.”
“A Case for Jefferson” was first published in 1947, but I can’t find anything that says when it might have been written, although obviously it was prior to that. Frost later disavowed it as “dated,” (although he wasn’t able to see the future—the late 60s and of course the present—in which it became undated again), and thought it was bad as a poem.
Well, as I said, it’s not really a poem. It’s a ditty, a verse—but unfortunately, it’s not dated. I’m not sure it ever will be, because the strains in human thought it was describing seem to have a certain staying power.
More background on the poem and on Frost’s politics:
Frost held that not traditional religion and culture, but revolutionary Marxism and reforming liberalism were the true opiates of the people. Marxists and secular liberals rejected or were often agnostic about God, but they deified the party or the state; they rejected the traditional religious concept of heaven, but they believed in an eventual heaven on earth. They rejected religion and much in Western culture as superstition, but were themselves superstitiously addicted by the idea of progress through science and revolutionary ideology. What Frost called “the sweep to collectivism in our time,” which characterized the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century, could destroy the principle of limited political power even in America, through the growth of the federal bureaucracy under the New Deal. Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power. When modern politicians play God they invariably promise far more than they can achieve as men, and the gap between their promises and their achievements is filled by the abstract slogans and dialectics of ideological propaganda. The language of revolutionists and reformers is characterized by the jargon of rationalized deceit. In a letter to Bernard De Voto in 1936 Frost wrote: “The great politicians are having their fun with us. They’ve picked up just enough of the New Republic and Nation jargon to seem original to the simple.” In 1939, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost said: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”
I knew absolutely nothing of Frost’s politics when I began to admire his poetry, and nothing of them when I started this blog and designed the photograph at the top, which features Frost’s collected works as the book with the dark cover above the Churchill biography.
[ADDENDUM: Some commenters have wondered why it’s called “A Case for Jefferson.” I’m not sure, but I found this:
To Thomas Jefferson, such would indeed be a case of democracy gone wrong…
[Frost is quoted as having said to Reginald Cook]: “I said to a person high up in the government lately, I said “As long as all my educated friends and Mrs. Roosevelt think that socialism is inevitable and can’t be avoided and has got to come that way, why don’t you and I hurry it up and get it over with? It couldn’t last…I wouldn’t favor that policy.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.]
The first Jewish family in my home town was named Harrison. We were about the fifth or sixth.
We are beyond yak yak talking. What now counts is lead. Death, their death, is all they will understand. Crude, brutal but I’m not sorry.
neo: Top link has died since you last checked. (Happens to me all the time too.)
I’m feeling dense. I get Jefferson, but who is Harrison?
I’m guessing Henry Wallace, who was FDR’s veep in 1940 but in 1944 FDR replaced him with Truman. Wallace was ahead of his time as something close to a “fellow traveler” when it came to communism and New Age-y sympathies. He ran for president under the “Progressive Party” banner in 1948.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace
A curious fellow. IMO he should be more well-known.
The Frost poem reminds me of an e.e. cummings:
________________________________________________
kumrads die because they’re told)
kumrads die because they’re told)
kumrads die before they’re old
(kumrads aren’t afraid to die
kumrads don’t
and kumrads won’t
believe in life)and death knows whie
(all good kumrads you can tell
by their altruistic smell
moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
kumrads enjoy
s.freud knows whoy
the hope that you may mess your pance
every kumrad is a bit
of quite unmitigated hate
(travelling in a futile groove
god knows why)
and so do i
(because they are afraid to love
–e.e cummings (1935)
________________________________________________
In 1931 Cummings visited the Soviet Union. Unlike many Westerners who visited then, he returned a staunch anti-communist. Which is something you might not expect from an avant-garde poet (and painter btw).
(all good kumrads you can tell
by their altruistic smell
moscow pipes good kumrads dance)
Preach it, brother!
Despite cummings’ eccentric punctuation, capitalization, line breaks and spelling, he often wrote in strict verse forms like the sonnet or, here, a sestain, a six-line form, in this case with AABCCB rhymes.
Family named Harrison?
hehe cough cough …
Hmm. neo’s “more…” link is to an essay on Frost’s politics. It mentions Wallace twice in less than admiring terms, but as to the “Jefferson” poem, the author asserts that “Harrison” is not any specific person:
Several of the critics of A Further Range could have sat for [Frost’s] satirical portrait of the archetypal American ideological revolutionary in his poem, “A Case for Jefferson”…
It’s true there were many fashionable intellectuals in that day, keen on the Soviet experiment and Freudianism.
Marcuse and Foucault were merely updates of that tradition.
And here we are today.
Today we have the rural counties of Oregon trying to get petitions on the ballot so that they can join Greater Idaho, and leave Oregon.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jul/19/move-oregons-border-greater-idaho-puts-initiative-/
It has nothing to do with Frost, but “A Case for Jefferson” similarly reminds us of the political movement in the rural northern counties of California to become a separate state, or to leave CA and join another.
Harrison, Harris, Miller… gotta say that my E T A Hoffmann Whimsical Surname Dodger Antennae perk up at the sight of these 😛
But Frost really had a point there and it’s one that everyone on the Right (no… not you Cucks in the Corner) need to constantly remind themselves of: the termite it from the inside and blow it all up mind virus was in the West long before the Jewish Enlightenment and their later waves of immigrants — some of whom certainly *did* do their fair share of termite-ing to be sure and some of whom became model citizens.
History of C19/20 Yankeedom is a gradual then accelerating internal radicalization then enervation, then capitulation. End Result… Well, one thing is for sure, the New Elite doesn’t look anything much like the old one, ethnically… and sure as hell doesn’t have the faintest vestige of noblesse oblige or sense of responsibility toward Flyover People. Let them eat Fentanyl.
But we’re not here today to talk about who really *does* have inordinate clout today. And even if we were, the original sin in losing the plot and destroying most of what was good in Western Civ and betraying the ordinary folk of the Shire lies with the Old Elite… whether it be Boston Brahmins, Oxford PPEs, Or Whatevers.
We did it to Ourselves. Which probably explains some of the virulence of some aspects of antisemitism. Serves them right though for coming up with the concept of ‘Projection’. Late-stage rotting civilizations can do one thing well: Irony.
Speaking of the malice of the left. The NYT is trying to doxx Tucker Carlson.
Do these people have any idea of the potential horrors of the – literal – social war they are busy precipitating?
Carlson has already had to move once, two years ago, when his family was tracked, assaulted, threatened with violence and his home made unsafe. Now, the “paper of record”, is itself hunting down the man who has developed from a kind of collegiate imitation of the ineffectual and supercilious George Will, into one of, if not the most, articulate, perceptive, persuasive, and effective critics of the emergent Woke Terror, its ideologues, lap dogs and running dogs, as the Chinese used to say.
So they are going after him. What will your liberal friends say when you mention to them that his family has been attacked, he has been forced to move, and now the NYT is obviously attempting to push things a step further?
Their answer to that, will tell you what they would say if the same program were directed against you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7IkxdLpJJg
“Frost attributed the political wisdom of dividing and balancing political power against itself to the religious orthodoxy of the Founding Fathers. They knew that only God had or should have absolute power, and their religion taught them that the moral and intellectual weaknesses of man required putting bounds to political power.”
I, too, had never considered Frost’s politics, but I made that exact case to a theology professor many years ago. I must have been clever once. He was a raging near-atheist mostly-faux-Buddhist SJW practicing kabuki theology in a supposed Christian institution. The pop his head made still makes me chuckle.
CS Lewis wrote, in a similar vein. “I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.
I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.
The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . .
The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.”
As to Frost’s line “not a Russian Jew,” I took a slightly different take – and not mutually exclusive. (Poets like to do more than one thing at at time.) I took it is “not like the conclusion some of you are jumping to.”
Also, @ Huxley, thank you for the e e cummings poem. I had never seen it before.
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
“…for our times.”
Indeed.
From 1920:
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice….”
And from “our times”:
1.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/not-an-unprecedented-thing-dhs-says-it-is-in-portland-to-protect-federal-property
Key graf:
“Over the Fourth of July weekend, the courthouse was attacked with commercial-grade fireworks, and the federal employees guarding it were struck by frozen water bottles….”
2.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8546473/Almost-50-Chicago-cops-injured-protesters-throw-fireworks-frozen-bottles.html
Key graf:
‘Chicago Police officers had fireworks, frozen water bottles and other projectiles thrown at them in what started as a peaceful protest,’ the department said.
And so, the poet as prophet? (Not for the first time, certainly…)
And/or, Antifa / BLM are lovers of poetry, in particular, “applied poetry”?—especially poetry written by Dead, White, Conservative Males? (Entirely possible, since “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”?)
In any event, certain common denominators would indicate that there does seem to be a pattern here. A playbook? A blueprint?)
Also, @ Huxley, thank you for the e e cummings poem. I had never seen it before.
Assistant Village Idiot: You’re welcome! cummings is a complicated fellow, but still worthwhile.
JimNorCal – a judge quashed the petition today.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/oregon-petition-to-create-greater-idaho-sees-new-roadblock-from-judge