Personal best...and worst!

Common ground—and grounding—on the Robert Frost Trail

Sometimes there’s no distance between our favorite works of art and the artists who made them. When I was at the peak of my High School Film Club era, I found out that Terrence Malick got ready for filming The Thin Red Line by spending a few weeks walking across the American Southwest. Of course he did. More surprising were the essays and letters which revealed that Robert Frost—the godfather of toasty poetry set against the backdrop of rural New England—could sometimes be kind of a prick.

Frost was instrumental in turning Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference into a religious institution for scriveners. As an instructor, he could be eviscerating in his appraisals of his peers’ work—to such an extent that one time, after an especially brutal humiliation of some poor soul who shared their work at a poetry reading, one of Frost’s colleagues said to him, “You’re a good poet, Robert, but you’re a bad man.”

This apparent contradiction, as far as I can tell, is much more common than some of us would like to believe. Among artists alone, the list of people whose works we have to separate from the imperfections of their personal lives is a well-rounded one. The definition of “imperfection” can range from “being an asshole” to doing unspeakable things. What we can each stomach—in separating the person from their work—is a highly subjective question. And what I’ve often asked myself, when revisiting the short stories of Alice Munro, films with Mel Gibson, or songs by Crystal Castles, is, “What remains?” What are we left with, after our conception of the artist has disintegrated?

For me, it comes down to this: if the artist has created something which speaks to a foundational human experience or need, I can usually hold onto that. Robert Frost’s poetry had such an impact on readers that he’s inspired different genres of fans, who often have competing interpretations of his work. There are those who see “The Road Not Taken” as this soulful meditation on following your own path, and those who read it as a darker reflection on how we drive ourselves crazy by coming up with reasons to regret the choices we’ve made—imagining the possibilities we’ve lost, by making those choices. That people are still arguing about this poem, a century after it was published in a 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, speaks to what Frost tapped into.

Then, there’s the way in which Frost mythologized the New England landscape; as the stage upon which people experience life’s anguishes, ambiguities, and the occasional moments of ecstasy. When a lot of us read “The Road Not Taken,” we imagine a road in the hills of the Pioneer Valley, blanketed in damp yellowy leaves and flanked by a potpourri of birches and oak trees. This specific region was an important place for Frost. He was a regular visitor to Amherst College, where he offered readings and taught classes. And in 1982—on the 20th anniversary of Frost’s death—the Town of Amherst decided to pay homage to the late literary juggernaut in a rather fitting way.

They would build a new path acoss the countryside and call it The Robert Frost Trail.