The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (17 page)

I have often heard artists describe this “cutting along a nerve.” Sculptor Anne Truitt said, “
The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” Frost found the experience exhilarating.

“My Butterfly” was Frost’s first published poem. When
The Independent
editor William Hayes Ward saw it, he recognized the genius there. Ward later questioned Frost: Who are you? Where did you come from? What was your education? Frost had to admit to Ward that he did not have a college education at all. He declared that it was his love for
poetry—and his ambition to write
great
poetry—that had compelled his self-training. “
To love poetry is to study it,” he said to Ward. (Frost became one of America’s greatest autodidacts.)

By the age of twenty, Frost had fallen in love with words, and had decided that he would be a poet—though he did not know how this would come to be. He set himself very intentionally on a training program to study the great poets. “Specifically speaking,” he said to Ward, “
the few rules I know in this art are my own afterthoughts, or else directly formulated from the masterpieces I reread.”

4

My friend Ethan’s early life resembled Frost’s in surprising ways. His parents owned a dairy farm in Vermont, and he grew up with the same earthbound rhythms that Frost loved so much. He often said to me, “Frost is telling me my own life.”

Ethan was a tall, intense young man, with dark eyes and thick, tightly curled chestnut hair. He walked on the earth with an unmistakable lope, like a cougar stalking its prey. I could always spot Ethan’s distinctive walk across the busy expanse of the Amherst quads.

I had met Ethan on our very first day at college—both of us sitting alone and forlorn at the top of what is called “Memorial Hill,” looking out over the distant Mount Holyoke Range and wondering how the heck we’d gotten ourselves in so far over our heads. We were both socially out of our element: he a farm boy from rural Vermont, me a rube from the cornfields of Ohio. We recognized in each other a kindred spirit. And over the course of those first few months of struggle we became inseparable.

Ethan was driven to succeed. I didn’t even know what “driven” was then. I did not have that quality—nor did anyone in my family. But I knew that Ethan was unlike anyone I had ever met. He was good at whatever he put his hand to: soccer, lacrosse, baseball—a golden boy on the playing fields. Later, when I met his lovely and soft-spoken parents, I wondered where his intensity came from. Not from them. They were thrilled to have a son in college at all. Stardom was not required of him. He’d already succeeded in their eyes.

In addition to sports, Ethan was in love with poetry. He knew from that first day on Memorial Hill that he wanted to be an English major. Ethan taught me how to read poetry in late-night sessions sprawled out in the first-floor lounge of our dorm. Sometimes we spent nights reading poetry together and critiquing it. We went for long hikes on the Holyoke Range. Ethan and I were the same age, almost exactly, but he seemed to me more like an older brother. He was much wiser than I—or so I thought then.

Ethan introduced me to Thoreau, and we cut a day of classes in the spring to visit Walden Pond, which we approached like a trip to a great shrine. He was particularly in love with Thoreau’s insights about “the wild,” because he felt a wildness in himself that he did not understand. Even in freshman year, Ethan was thinking about becoming a writer. He spent some of his spare time working on short stories and poems, and talked to me about a novel he had cooking away in his head. He wanted to know everything about writing.

Part of Ethan’s wildness came out on the playing fields. He was intensely competitive. I didn’t understand this side of him. Ethan would become moody around game time and afterward. He was exuberant if he won, devastated if he lost—and highly critical of his performance in either case. His moods sometimes scared me. He said his mother called them “spells.” In fact, his mother actually took me aside once and asked me if Ethan had been having “spells.” Of course I had no idea that this wildness in him would later turn in on itself—as it did on Frost, who was dogged by depression throughout his life.

5

With the publication of “My Butterfly,” Frost had gone public with his poetry. And he was getting a great deal of positive response. After reading “Butterfly,” a friend of Ward’s offered to be young Frost’s literary advisor. This “advisor” then proceeded to give the young Robert Frost one of the most misguided pieces of counsel ever given to a great poet. He suggested that Frost try for “
a more elevated tone.” His poetry was “
too close to the speaking voice,” he declared.

Frost was incensed. The speaking voice was his direct line into
truth—into the heart of poetry itself. He wanted, in fact, to write poetry that would mine
precisely
this rich ore of human speech.
Too close to the speaking voice?
It was misguided advice, yes, but the confrontation itself had a silver lining. It became the opportunity for Frost himself to understand exactly what he was doing. It was the moment when he made explicit the connection between the
sounds of poetry
and the
sounds of ordinary speech
. This discovery was one of the central epiphanies of Frost’s life, and he would later describe it as a crossroads experience.

“Perhaps,” wrote Frost later, “
when that preacher friend of Ward’s looked me up shortly after my first poem appeared in
The Independent
and talked to me about it, something providential was happening to me. I’m sure the old gentleman didn’t have the slightest idea he was having any effect on a very stubborn youngster who thought he knew what he knew. But something he said actually changed the whole course of my writing. It all became purposeful.”

I once heard country-and-western singer Dolly Parton declare a stunning bit of truth: “Find out who you are,” she said, “and then do it on purpose.” This homespun proverb is a gloss on Robert Frost’s life.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose
.

For the first time, Frost knew what he was after. And he began to do it on purpose. He started calling his poems “
talk songs.” He discovered that the rhythm of his most authentic poetic voice came very close to prose, but “
is lifted just enough so that it stays inside the boundary lines of verse.” Frost came to call his voice the “
sound of sense.”

He exulted in this discovery. “
The sound of sense!” he exclaimed. “It is the … vitality of our speech. It is pure sound—pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist.”

The sound of sense! This is precisely what I had first loved in Frost’s poetry.
Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice
. I loved the way the words
felt
in my mouth. He had captured the sounds of real life, and distilled out of them their very music. This is what Ethan meant when he said that “Frost was speaking my New England life to me.”

Frost discovered that his vocation was to artfully bring the sounds of everyday speech into poetry. He wanted to catch the humanness of speech in his poetic net. He became fascinated with the tension between the classical forms of poetry and the vernacular performance of speech.
Where do the stresses normally fall in speech? He began to experiment with pulling the speech slightly toward the form, and the form slightly toward the speech.

Now Frost was “onto his bone,” as Thoreau would say. He knew that this was a task big enough for a lifetime. He knew that he would be chewing on it for the rest of his career.
Bury it, circle ’round it, unearth it, bury it again!

6

When I arrived back at Amherst after a junior year in South America, something in Ethan had changed. He had abruptly taken up a premed course of study (in preparation for a medical career), and had unaccountably ditched his previous major in English literature. What the hell? How and when did this happen?

Ethan didn’t want to talk with me about it. “You were in South America,” he complained. “How was I going to talk with you?”

“You didn’t think about maybe writing me a letter?” I retorted, hurt.