A defensive eye: anxiety, fear and form in the poetry of Robert Frost.

This essay argues that Robert Frost's poems enact a poetic and psychic process of displacing and managing generalized anxiety through converting it into object-specific fear. Drawing upon the psychoanalytical work of Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra and Eric Santner, this essay analyzes how and why Robert Frost's poems display a "defensive eye": a self-protective relationship to the world dependent upon a continual switching of visual and linguistic perspectives that diffuses the pressures interior to the poem and creates a "momentary stay against confusion." Through close readings of "The Vantage Point," "The Mending Wall," "The Wood-Pile," "The Fear," "An Old Man's Winter Night" and "A Considerable Speck," the essay traces Frost's visual preoccupation with boundaries, walls, doors, and frames that demarcate spatial limits, and describes how the poem negotiates the psychological and linguistic tension between containment and catharsis.

Keywords: Robert Frost / anxiety / fear / Eric Santner / Sigmund Freud

My whole anxiety is for myself as a performer. Am I any good? That's what I'd like to know and all I need to know.

--ROBERT FROST LETTER To KIMBALL FLACCUS, OCTOBER 26, 1930)

The problem of anxiety," wrote Sigmund Freud in his 1917 Introductory Lectures, "is a nodal point at which the most various and important questions converge, a riddle whose solution would be bound to throw a flood of light on our own mental existence" (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 393). Psychoanalytic critics have long noted literature's power to process psychic experience: Suzanne Henke, for example, notes the way in which narrative offers a kind of talking cure--what she calls "scriptotherapy"--through the process of confronting and verbalizing experience (Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Woman's Life Writing, 1998). Yet anxiety, by definition, is nebulous: an affect more sensed than sensible, indefinite in its origins and ends, psychically and spatially dislocated, and linguistically difficult to describe. If modernism was, as W.H. Auden famously wrote, the age of anxiety, an account of how the felt structure of anxiety is registered in modern writing needs to be articulated. How do literary texts register, reshape, and release anxiety?

Robert Frost is not the first literary figure one thinks of in conjunction with the subject of anxiety, nor even with a tradition of particularly psychological readings. As "the ordinary man's modernist" (51), according to Frank Lentricchia, Frost was long classified as a genteel poet fit for middle-class enjoyment and solidly American public prominence. Frost has been characterized as a poet of order, control, and management, "afraid even of his own poetry unless he can supervise just when, where, and how it is to appear" (Poirier 76). Yet beneath his work's controlled pastoral veneer we can reread him as consistently struggling to transmute and sublimate threatening, disorderly anxieties. Titles such as "Storm Fear," "The Fear," "Misgiving," "Bereft," "Too Anxious for Rivers," "the Fear of God," and "the Fear of Man" self-consciously broadcast the troubling anxieties and trepidations that characterize Frost's efforts at poetic mastery. His structural self-reflexivity can thus be seen not merely as a formal means of linguistic play but as a technique by which he explored and expressed emotional disturbances, creating via the formal and rhetorical structure of his poems a "momentary stay against confusion" ("The Figure a Poem Makes" 777). The resulting carefully structured poems, as Richard Poirier writes in Robert Frost. The Work of Knowing, "include terror without being [themselves] terrified" and leave us "more rather than less confident about our capacities" (7). If Frost's poetry can be said to include terror without being terrified, how then is terror contained and safely registered within the space of the poem?

My interest in turning to Frost's poems is to explore how they respond to anxiety through a series of imaginative crossings and affective displacements that enable the poem itself to provide an opportunity for the ritualistic discharge of anxieties through a process that binds these energies into determinate forms that then seal these anxieties from sight. Whereas Paul Giles (2000) and Jeff Westover (2004) have recently concentrated their critical efforts on demonstrating how Frost's poetry reflects issues of national and historical importance, this essay focuses on the psychological rather than the historical dimensions of Frost's work, detailing the formal means by which the poem itself binds and contains the psychological tensions of an age of anxiety, and making claims about the work of writing and representation rather than historical influence. Specifically, I examine how Frost's poems enact a poetic process of displacement and binding that is given particularly visual dimensions: his work displays what I call here a "defensive eye"--a protective relationship to the world dependent upon a continual switching of visual and linguistic perspectives that diffuses the pressures interior to the poem. This visual and linguistic movement, which often takes the form of the speaker alternating between panoramic vistas and localized objects, is a key poetic and psychic strategy for containing and binding generalized anxiety through converting it into object-specific fear.