“But all the fun’s in how you say a thing”: Robert Frost’s Risky Readings
This article is a part of a series on the history of modern poetry recordings. Part I is available here.
I
Robert Frost, the twentieth century’s best-selling American poet, was a pioneer on many fronts. One that we tend to forget is the part he played in solidifying that modern poetic institution—the poetry reading. Frost was one of the first twentieth-century poets to make public performances of his work a central and consistent strand of his career, to the extent that Allen Ginsberg recognized him as among the “original entrepreneurs” of live readings.
Robert Frost in 1913
By the mid 1910s, Frost had launched his career-long practice of reading his poetry aloud at universities, cultural centers, and other institutions across America. But despite his self-presentation as an all-American poet––what Adam Kirsch designates as his “Norman Rockwell carapace”––Frost’s poetic career, and perhaps his enthusiasm for poetry performance too, were forged in London. Shortly after the 38-year-old Frost moved to England in 1912 to give poetry one final shot, he found himself drawn into the orbit of Harold Monro’s newly opened Poetry Bookshop. It was a drafty building in a shabby corner of Bloomsbury that hosted poetry readings from an extraordinary range of fabled early twentieth century poets. Tagging along to the Poetry Bookshop’s opening party in 1913, the unknown Frost encountered 300 of literary London’s brightest lights, and it was through the Bookshop—in the attic of which he even lived for a brief period—that he made his first firm literary contacts, from W. B. Yeats to Ezra Pound, Rupert Brooke, and Edward Thomas.
Monro’s belief that all poetry books on sale should be considered as scores for performance seems to have reacted productively with Frost’s notion that “it does not seem possible […] that a man can read on the printed page what he has never heard.” The American poet’s theories of “sentence sounds” and “sound-posture” insisted that tone and spoken vocal inflection—how words sound when we say them—should be the material of poetry, a poetic paradigm that was perfectly suited to performance. Frost developed these ideas early on and they remained his motivating principle throughout his life; gratifyingly, they were also the terms in which he was praised at the publication of his first important book, North of Boston (1914). Pound’s review of the collection admired his crafting of “natural spoken speech,” while literary heavyweights like Thomas and Abercrombie Lascelles praised the steadiness of his conviction that human speech could be the material of poetry. The collection, still one of his most loved, captures a range of distinctive speakers, often caught in dialogue, inscribing minute shifts in tone and vocal ticks into the texture of its lines.
But another, less prominent feature of his poetics was also always foregrounded in Frost’s performances: the act of communicating with an audience. His tendency to stand behind a lectern and habit of interpolating chatty interludes between poems may appear in the tradition of the public lecturer, but attendees like Robert Francis found that his performances were characterized by a kind of risky electricity rather than the lecturer’s aloof superiority:
[W]hen Frost spoke from the platform, one felt that it was the audience's wordless response on which Frost depended for his next word. To leave so much to the participation of the audience and to the spur of the moment meant for both audience and speaker constant drama and surprise. It also meant for Frost himself, by his own testimony, a never-absent nervousness. To achieve spontaneity he had to take risks.
In a 1953 reading at UC Berkeley, Frost distilled this improvisatory ethos, defining the essence of a poetry reading as “the art of taking hints when hints are hinted, and not taking 'em when they ain't hinted.” It was arguably this same ethos of responsivity that took over at JFK’s inauguration in 1961, when he became the first poet to perform at a presidential inauguration.
II
Robert and Elinor in New Hampshire, 1911
While Frost’s recordings lack some of the spontaneity audiences experienced in his live performances, they can still give us an insight into his performative poetics. Frost clearly thought so, and made many recordings throughout his life: the first sustained session was at the Columbia University Speech Lab, under the aegis of Professors W. Cabell Greet and George W. Hibbit, as part of a series of literary recordings that began in 1931. Though these records were later distributed commercially for entertainment, the original aim of the speech lab was socio-linguistic: to create a map of dialects from across the U.S. Hibbit and Greet’s attempts to map the dialects of the nation align strikingly with Frost’s poetic attempts to do the same for regions of New England in collections like North of Boston (1914) and New Hampshire (1923). Many of the poems he chose to record in these sessions gain their power from their distinctive, geographically rooted voices—from the folksy farmers of “Mending Wall” and “Mowing” to the wise weathered travelers of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or “The Road Not Taken.” The vocal virtuosity of the poems is intensified by his delivery: despite the muddiness of these early recordings, there is a speed and energy to them, an audibly gleeful tone switching between and within poems.
Such careful attention to the feeling of speech in the lines was not incidental: in a May 1915 lecture, Frost explained the extraordinary degree of attention he paid to the vocal tones of each line of his poetry. Discussing “The Pasture,” the first poem in North of Boston, he precisely designates the different tones in which each line is to be spoken:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; (light, informing tone)
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (‘only’ tone—reservation)
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may): (supplementary, possibility)
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too. (free tone, assuring) (afterthought, inviting)
More an actor with an audience than the overheard lyric poet, Frost carves up the poem according to the feeling behind each line, emphasizing the construction of conversation and character through voice.
In the 1950s, Frost returned to the recording studio to produce a series of recordings with Caedmon. In this later series, though his voice is still remarkably clear and full for a poet well into his eighties, the earlier energy has faded, dissolved into a greater emphasis on measured cadences and rhythm. His voice has softened and slowed, its strident Yankee accent mellowed, but listening more closely we can hear that the tonal shifts and vocal quirks that mark his earlier performances are just as present, only a little more subtle. In “The Pasture,” for instance, the sing-song, high-pitch emphasis Frost places on “wait,” before descending the scale through a triplet of words alliterated on the “w” to end on “I may,” perfectly replicates the sense of carefree possibility he prescribes in the 1915 lecture.
Though the husky, rolling stream of cadences, rhymes, and rhythmic pauses sounds polished and assured at first, after a couple of listens (and Frost would often read his poems twice when giving performances) we can also start to detect some of the oral risk Frost sought in his live readings. A small hitch accompanied by a quiet “eh” at the mid-line pause in the repeated invitation of “The Pasture” (“I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.”) cultivates the vocal illusion that this is an off-the-cuff invitation, extended with a sudden and careless urge for company. But the most striking instance of this improvisatory, conversational ethos comes in the record’s first track, a recording of Frost’s most enduringly popular poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Composed after Frost’s return to New Hampshire in 1915, this recording from 1956 realizes the poem’s wistful, retrospective framing: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” Working against the lines’ well-worn familiarity, the patterning of Frost’s pauses in the reading builds moments of hesitation and suspense into the sonic shape of the poem. The gently swelling, relatively monotonous cadences of the recording (it has a pitch range of 1.04 octaves; on the same record “Fire and Ice” spans 1.58 octaves, and “Mending Wall” 1.83) breaks at moments of potential divergence: he inserts a weighty mid-line pause after “Then” in “Then took the other” before proceeding with the line, offering a chance for us to imagine his voice echoing down each of these possible paths.
Pitch-time graph for line 7 of “The Road Not Taken,” 1956 Caedmon recording by Robert Frost. All graphs produced using Drift.
Most readers would make the longest pause fall after the semi-colon following “undergrowth” at the end of the previous line, which also marks the end of the stanza: “And looked down one as far as I could/ To where it bent in the undergrowth;.” But Frost deliberately delays it, taking only a quick intake of breath after “undergrowth,” which allows him to suspend for longer on “Then,” disrupting the expected rhythm of these lines. Most striking of all, though, is the jar he inserts into the poem’s famous penultimate line, the line that has launched a thousand motivational speeches: “and I–/ I took the one less travelled by.” In this recording, Frost’s voice stumbles, or gives the impression of stumbling, after the second “I,” shattering the gentle lull of his measured cadences with a sharp drop in pitch.
Pitch-time graph for line 19 of “The Road Not Taken,” 1956 Caedmon recording by Robert Frost.
It sounds as though he’s caught himself out here, interrupting himself for a moment before resuming his measured rolling growl to finish the poem off. Are we hearing an elderly Robert Frost on the precipice of forgetting the most famous line he ever wrote? It seems unlikely; even setting aside his four decades of experience performing this same poem, he would have had the opportunity to rerecord if he felt it had been wrong. Rather, I think this moment of suspense, the thrill of almost slipping up, that he inserts into that so well-trodden line is a poignant reminder of the power of performance to enliven, to make vivid, and to bring into question the solidity of any poem on the page, turning it back into a live act of communication. As he tells us in “The Mountain:” “But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
Isabelle Stuart is a DPhil student currently working between Oxford and Princeton universities, where she researches poetry recitation practices in the period 1889 to 1945. She has edited and written for the Oxonian Review and the Cambridge Humanities Review.