”Directive” (CPPP, 344) is one of the most widely and variously interpreted of Frost's poems. Randall Jarrell in his seminal essay on Frost's poems quoted it at length, and though pronouncing it largely uninterpretable, praised its “humor and acceptance and humanity.” Some have connected it to the Romantic solipsism of Emerson, seeing it as a kind of guidebook that one must write for oneself without benefit of the normal moral and intellectual landmarks. But as always with Frost's audience the appearance of solipsism, sarcasm, and even contradiction could not prevent many readers from seeing the poem as good plain country truth. By the time the poem appeared Frost had long been a figure of folklore, and there is enough of his familiar folksy routine in it to preserve it from a too close inspection by most of his admirers. Even his academic readership had by the time of Steeple Bush (1947) accepted Frost as a poet with the limitations implied by popularity. He was not (as a recent critic announced) “tinglingly alive with a sense of the modern.”

Proust's inquiry into the nature of the unconscious in A la recherche du temps perdu begins on the first page, with the Narrator's loss of his identity in the book he is reading. An insomniac, he wakes in the middle of the night, so disoriented he does not even know who he is. Feeling 'plus dénué que l'homme des cavernes' ['more destitute than a cave-dweller'] he has 'seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l'existence comme il peut frémir au fond d'un animal' (I, 5) ['only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness' (I, 4/4)]. Having stripped him of his identity, sleep - and its absence - has carried him to man's beginnings. In fact, it has reduced him to the core of existence itself. But sleep has also carried away his furniture, his room, everything of which he was only 'une petite partie et à l'insensibilité duquel [il allait] vite [s']unir' (I, 4) ['an insignificant part and whose insensibility [he] should very soon return to share' (I, 2/3)]. He has fallen into ‘le néant’ (i, 5) [‘the abyss of not-being’ (i, 4/4)] from which, he says, he could never escape by himself. Memory arrives to pull him out of the abyss and is already working to rebuild ‘les traits originaux de [son] moi’ (i, 6) [‘the original components of [his] ego’ (i, 4/5)]. In the first four pages Proust has given a metaphorical description of the tabula rasa from which the quest for the lost treasure of the Narrator’s identity begins. Memory, already a companion in the search, has only just begun the foundation for what will become ‘l’édifice immense du souvenir’(i, 46) [‘the vast structure of recollection’ (i, 54/64)] that, as the Narrator will discover, actually holds the very treasure he has lost.

Frost's poems address the ancient theme of the opposition between absence and presence. Here I will discuss (though not chronologically) ten poems published between 1916 and 1942 in which Frost explores this opposition. They all assume a universe without divine order, absent of purpose, awareness, human comprehension; in them humanity is on its own, the only locus of value, intention, self-consciousness, presence. One does well to be aware of the lure of night and of the deceptive whiteness of snow, to be free of any illusions about them. The heroism available to one is small in scale, and its accomplishments, though real, cannot be grand; it is only the upkeep of human self-consciousness and purpose in a universe otherwise void and absent of meaning, and this scope has shrunk since Frost wrote. These ideas, familiar to the last hundred years, comprise one theme common to the ten poems. One could observe as well that the ethos of the New England countryside has its parallels in the cosmic myths of Yeats, the Christianity of Eliot, and the sequence of ideologies in Auden, though my few pages do not admit of a discussion of these parallels. These ten poems display the poet's attachment to traditional forms and his artistry in using them; blank verse, open couplets, quatrains, sonnet-like poems, one true sonnet, terza rima, and various other lyrical stanzas. They are traditional without being “poetic”:as slant rhymes, metrical variations (sometimes bold ones), colloquial diction, clichés, and homely metaphors that very often open onto darkness indicate.

To classify Robert Frost as a poet in a traditional New England vein can be dangerously misleading or entirely proper, depending on how you define your terms. Biographically, he was a New Englander not by birth but by adoption - or rather readoption: the first canonical writer to return from the New England diaspora to his parental region and claim it as his literary home. By the same token, artistically, Frost's tastes were cosmopolitan, not strictly regional. His first favorite poet was Poe; he was an able and zealous student of the classics, especially Virgil's Eclogues; he once described himself as “car[ing] most for Shakespearean and Wordsworthian sonnets”; the one significant fellow poet to whom he dedicated a poem was the English Georgian, Edward Thomas; and in the formation of his mature poetic styles no writers of the New England Renaissance era were more important to him than Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. Yet Frost was also acutely conscious of his relation to his New England precursors. Sometimes he showed it by explicit claim or allusion, more often obliquely, by imitation, repossession, echo, or parody - and not just by means of the written word. Also important to the construction of the Frost image was visual iconography: photographs like the one facing the title page of his 1949 Complete Poems (New York: Holt), which depicts the grizzled sage as serene Brahmin in a work shirt.

To call Robert Frost a pastoral poet is at once to say too much and too little. Frost himself said that “he first heard the speaking voice in poetry in Virgil's Eclogues.” Virgil's ten Eclogues are models of pastoral poetry, dialogues or dramatic monologues of shepherds dwelling in a mythic Arcadia, a land of innocence and beauty. Frost's relation to Virgilian pastoral, as Reuben Brower has observed, “is so deep and pervasive that it is nearly impossible to describe.” Ezra Pound shrewdly called Frost's poems “modern georgics.”He was referring to Virgil's four great didactic poems about farm work that form the basis of a tradition that stands in contrast to pastoral; it is a type of didactic poetry extolling hard labor and a scientific approach to nature. Pastoral itself is a rich and complex tradition. Not only a genre or set of conventions, it is often a mode by which authors from Theocritus and Virgil to Dante and Milton as well as Wordsworth and Thoreau have explored questions of human equality, man's place in nature, and the nature of faith. If by pastoral one means a mode that emphasizes the beauty and simplicity of country life, then Frost's poetry seems decidedly dissonant. But Frost's dissonant renewal of this ancient tradition allowed him to explore complex, modern attitudes about democracy, science, and faith.

If there is any truth to Emerson's aphorism “to be great is to be misunderstood,” then Robert Frost is surely one of the greatest poets. In a century in which some of the most celebrated literature seemed to follow Emerson in reverse - “to be misunderstood (or incomprehensible) is to be great” - Robert Frost's seductively limpid lines were taken as evidence of the author's simplicity or, worse, simplemindedness. Frost's popularity, as well as his willingness in his later years to perform as a hoary public sage, left many among the academically sophisticated suspicious. His adherence to ancient literary traditions and his disdain of political radicalism angered those with more revolutionary temperaments. A reviewer, commenting in The New Yorker on his Collected Poems of 1930, proclaimed that his “popularity can be put down to the fact that he always expressed with imaginative sincerity, American nostalgia for a lately abandoned rural background,” and that he was a bard “always occupied with the complicated task of simply being sincere.”

Shortly before Robert Frost's death on January 29, 1963, County Government Magazine published in its December 1962 issue the poet's response to its request for his participation in a symposium on the theme “The Cold War Is Being Won.” His tone is less that of the disheartened cold warrior that he is sometimes taken to have been than of the resigned, though still optimistic, poet-diplomat he had become in the last ten years of his life.

A la recherche du temps perdu spans the period in France between the 1870s and the years of the 1914-18 war, together with an ill-defined post-war period: this represents more or less Proust's own life (1871-1922). Navigational aids are sparse in this work of fiction which is essentially nonlinear and which moves rapidly and often imperceptibly backwards and forwards as in cinematographic flashbacks, but there are occasionally some markers to help the reader traverse the political and social seas. Balzac's aim as a novelist had been to paint a sociological canvas of his time, to produce an inventory of French society in the first half of the nineteenth century. Proust, however, observes and analyses essentially the interior world of his characters set against a background of selected exterior, actual events which provide an authentic sociological backcloth to his novel in the period commencing some twenty years after Balzac's death. As early as 1894, in his introduction to his first published work Les Plaisirs et les jours, he identified the best vantage point for observing social behaviour as from within an enclosed space, in this case Noah’s Ark: ‘Je compris alors que jamais Noé ne put si bien voir le monde que de l’arche, malgré qu’elle fût close et qu’il fît nuit sur la terre’ (JS, p.6). [‘Then it was I understood that Noah could never have had so clear a view of the world as when he gazed upon it from within his ark, sealed though it was, and when darkness was over all the earth’].

If someone were to suggest that the texture of Proust's novel resembles nothing quite so much as molasses, it would be difficult to dissent with any great conviction. The over-long book, with its over-long sentences, over-long paragraphs, over-long sections and over-long volumes, is as thick and viscous as treacle, and little more transparent; it expands not only in all directions but also, and especially, in every dimension, so that its excess is ultimately one of density rather than one of magnitude. And its sweetness, as one of its earliest tasters was quick to point out, is best sampled in very small doses. 'Reading cannot be sustained for more than five or six pages,' writes Jacques Normand; 'one can set down as a positive fact that there will never be a reader hardy enough to follow along for as much as a quarter of an hour, the nature of the author's sentences doing nothing to improve matters.' Forced to compose a report for the Fasquelle publishing house in 1912, the same Normand ends up reduced to exquisite despair. ‘After the seven hundred and twelve manuscript pages,’ he complains, ‘after infinite amounts of misery at being drowned in a sea of inscrutable developments and infinite amounts of maddening impatience at never returning to the surface – one has no notion, none, of what it’s all about.’

Within the first thirty-five pages of A la recherche du temps perdu, one comic scene threatens the author's entire literary project by calling into question the possibility of communicating through words. In this episode, which directly precedes the drame du coucher, the Protagonist's great aunts, Céline and Flora, attempt to acknowledge the case of Asti wine their neighbour, Charles Swann, has sent them. During the meal, when Flora mentions the friendliness of another neighbour, M. Vinteuil, Céline sees an opportunity to express her gratitude: '“Il n'y a pas que M. Vinteuil qui ait des voisins aimables,” s'écria ma tante Céline' (I, 25) [' “M. Vinteuil is not the only one who has nice neighbours,” cried my aunt Céline' (I, 27/32)]. Flora, determined not to be outdone by her sister, obliquely extends her thanks to Swann after a remark about a maréchal de France resembling a bottle of foolishness: '[j]e connais des bouteilles où il y a tout autre chose' (I, 26) ['I know bottles in which there is something very different' (I, 29/34)]. After Swann’s departure, when the grandfather scolds the sisters for neglecting to acknowledge the gift, Céline expresses her shock: ‘Mais voyons, Swann n’est pas bête, je suis certaine qu’il a apprécié. Je ne pouvais pas lui dire le nombre de bouteilles et le prix du vin!’ (i, 34) [‘Come, come; Swann isn’t a fool. I’m sure he understood. You didn’t expect me to tell him the number of bottles, or to guess what he paid for them’ (i, 39/46)]. Instead of showcasing the women’s mental and verbal agility as they had wished, this comic episode effectively demonstrates the inadequacy of language.

Lady Chatterley's Lover is famously, even notoriously, a book about sex. The novel is divided into three sections: the first seeks to register the nature and causes of psychic and social degradation; the second stages a series of sexual encounters between Lady Chatterley and the gamekeeper, Mellors; and the third considers the viability of their existence as a couple. Lawrence created three different versions of the novel, using a range of characters and circumstances to articulate its different forms of individual and social dysfunction, but the basic structure of degeneration, rebirth and consequent fragility remains intact throughout all of Lawrence's re-writing. What has less frequently been noted, however, is that Lady Chatterley's Lover is also a novel about work: about the alienation of industrial labour, the desperate compensatory quality of intellectual work, the inescapability of physical toil, and the imaginative and ideological work of narrative fiction. The novel begins with the observation that: 'The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work.'

Although he is remembered and celebrated today primarily as a novelist and short-story writer, Lawrence first saw publication as a poet, wrote poetry throughout most of his life, and granted a privileged status to poetic language and vision: 'The essential quality of poetry', he declared in a 1928 essay, 'is that it makes a new effort of attention, and “discovers” a new world within the known world.' That he was far too prolific and undiscriminating a poet, few readers would dispute: the posthumously published Complete Poems, at more than 1,000 pages long, functions better as a doorstop than as light bedtime reading. That a great many of his poems are didactic, prosy, irrational, undisciplined, sentimental, obscene, ranting, whiny or otherwise virtually unreadable, critics have agreed at least since 1919, when the rawly emotional marriage poems of Look! We Have Come Through! prompted Lawrence's sometime friend Bertrand Russell to snort, 'They may have come through, but I don't see why I should look.' Lawrence's less fortunate poetic efforts do occasionally have value, if not as aesthetic masterpieces, then at least as historical documents of artistic struggle. His most memorable poems, however, stand alongside the finest poetic efforts of the twentieth century and are still widely anthologised and admired by readers today.

The word 'modernism' raises two immediate problems. It usually refers not to modern literary consciousness at large but to the more specific and selfconscious avant-garde movements associated with such writers as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Woolf. Furthermore, even these writers had different, sometimes competing, conceptions which are still a matter of controversy. Yet there is a distinctive set of cultural and artistic concerns shared by these writers and Lawrence stands in a peculiarly significant relation to them. He is usually seen as being at best marginal to the modernism which these figures came largely to define, and they were almost uniformly hostile or condescending to him. But once it is properly understood, his apparently marginal position becomes critically central. For Lawrence provided then, and still provides, one of the most significant critiques of modernism arising from the same historical context and concerns.

‘The Lawrence problem’

It seems that everyone, or everyone of a certain age at least, has had experience of Lawrence. For many, their first experience of Lawrence comes in adolescence or early adulthood, in a setting fraught by the most personal of questions. Who am I, sexually speaking? What am I in the cosmic scheme of things? Lawrence's books ask such questions and often pose extremes as answers. So that everyone feels the need, at the outset, either to like him or to dislike him. There are other writers who produce a similar effect (one thinks, for example, of Lawrence's contemporaries, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), but there are many more who do not. For we are talking, clearly, about more than just a literary judgement, though it may be partly that. We are talking about a judgement of the man, or rather of the man's effect on our life, and of a reaction that is almost visceral.

Aesthetic autonomy versus biography: the 1930s and after

T. S. Eliot famously argued in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919) for a perfect division between 'the man who suffers and the mind which creates'. Only thus could artists find the appropriate form for dealing with the problem or issue with which they were tussling; only thus would the necessary impersonality be achieved. In taking a very different path, D. H. Lawrence would pay a price but also find a rewarding freedom. Appreciating the implications of this changes one's understanding of virtually everything he wrote.

Eliot’s desideratum articulated what would become a widely held cultural position. Contemporary reviewers and critics found indifference to Lawrence’s flouting of it impossible. Trenchant, occasionally vitriolic, disagreements resulted; and the dispute gave rise to nearly a dozen biographical studies in the decade after Lawrence’s death in 1930. In addition, many of the reviews of Lawrence’s posthumous publications, and essays and books about his whole oeuvre, took a biographical turn. John Middleton Murry staked out one side of the argument, and Catherine Carswell the other.

Imagining-and its difficulty

For Doris Lessing, racism is an 'atrophy of the imagination'. Many factors combine to block our responsiveness to people of other races and cultures: attitudes imbibed unconsciously at our mother's knee and from fathers and elders, peer-group pressure, the limitations of our education and of what we read, the conditionings of our post-colonial and still largely racist societies. If, however, as Lessing implies, imagination is antipathetic to racism, can a writer (sometimes) decolonise his vision? It would seem so; and no Englishborn author of the early twentieth century went further in this than D. H. Lawrence, through his encounter with the native peoples of North America. However, in tracing this process, we must not fail in imagination ourselves, by condescending to the past. We need to see just how hard it could be (and is) to unscale one's eyes from the prejudices of the time, and how easy therefore to relapse into a conventional self. Imagination could prove intermittent.