National forgetting and remembering in the Poetry of Robert Frost.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-JUN-04

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"Forgetting," wrote the French historian Ernest Renan, "is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation." "Indeed," he continues, "historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality" (11). In the case of the United States, the conquest of Native Americans exemplifies the violence that according to Renan must always be forgotten in the formation of a nation. A number of Robert Frost's poems reflect the necessary forgetting that Renan describes, but many of them engage in acts of remembering that honor the past without subverting any particular ideology. As a poet, Frost is both settled and unsettling, a writer who composes without resorting to simplistic moral categories or the easy romanticization of Indians as noble savages. At the same time that his poems testify to their conflicting positions within the Joycean nightmare of history, Frost himself "distrusted progressive models ... and was apt to see certain of his inheritances as natural and unchangeable" (Rotella, 242). In his thinking about national history and empire, Frost adopts a Virgilian perspective, assuming that tears are in the nature of things and that in the long-term perspective of human history, the European conquest of the Americas merely gave rise to the world's most recent empire, which in its turn, too, would someday fall. In particular, Frost's treatment of the theme of the American Indian shows that despite the willed forgetting entailed by national narratives, the memory of the brutality that founds the nation persists in the imagination of European Americans. Many of Frost's poems show the ways in which that memory can haunt otherwise confident expressions of patriotism, troubling complacent formulations of American history as a straightforward progress toward freedom and equality.

Benedict Anderson explicates a particular passage from Renan's essay in order to convey the odd temporality of the process of "national forgetting." "The essence of a nation," writes Renan,

is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. (11)

Anderson zeroes in on the French phrase that is rendered in this translation as "has to have forgotten," pointing out that Renan wrote "obliged already to have forgotten" instead of "obliged to forget." To him, the phrase "suggests ... that 'already having forgotten' ancient tragedies is a prime contemporary civic duty. In effect, Renan's readers were being told to 'have already forgotten' what Renan's own words assumed that they naturally remembered!" (200). Anderson accounts for this paradox by arguing that the citizens of modern nations must undergo "a deep reshaping of the imagination of which the state was barely conscious, and over which it had, and still has, only exiguous control" (201). This reshaping exacts a forgetting in order to reconfigure the bloody events of the past as disputes between common members of a nation--as fratricidal or civil conflicts instead of wars between enemies unrelated by blood. This remembering-through-forgetting gives birth to a conception of the nation as an extended family. In his effort to account for the necessity of already having forgotten something one may be expected to know, Anderson writes that

the creole nationalisms of the Americas are especially instructive. For on the one hand, the American states were for many decades weak, effectively decentralized, and rather modest in their educational ambitions. On the other hand, the American societies, in which "white" settlers were counterposed to "black" slaves and half- exterminated "natives," were internally riven to a degree quite unmatched in Europe. Yet the imagining of that fraternity, without which the reassurance of fratricide cannot be born, shows up remarkably early, and not without a curious authentic popularity. In the United States of America this paradox is particularly well exemplified. (202)

Forgetting past events in order to reconfigure the nation as a family, the citizens of the United States nonetheless confront themselves (as the plural name of their country suggests) as a diverse population that is anything but a family. Despite American society's being more gesellschaft than gemeinschaft, Anderson suggests, the need for a sense of national unity is so great that it overcomes (or seeks to overcome) fragmentation by figuring the social contract (gesellschaft) of the U.S. Constitution in the kinship terms of family or tribe (gemeinschaft). The conflict between these two views of social relations may inform the conflict in Frost's poetry between the dutiful forgetting that accepts the metaphor of the nation as a family and the sometimes less sociable act of remembering that troubles that metaphor. However, unlike Anderson's examples of fraternal partnerships from nineteenth-century American literature (Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Ishmael and Queequeg, or Jim and Huck Finn), Frost's poems offer no soothing view of American history as "reassuring fratricide" or a peacefully fraternal companionship (199-203). Frost's speakers might at times sympathize with Native Americans, but they ultimately avoid the sentimentality of transfiguring them from threatening "others" into comforting brothers.

As Frost insisted in his reflection upon his practice as a poet, the category of the nation was fundamental to his identity as a writer. "'Nationality,'" he told an audience at Middlebury College in 1943, "is something I couldn't live without'" (Cook, 34). For Frost, nationality and individual personality were parallel terms. In "Education by Poetry," he explains what he means:

Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please. We can pull each other's noses--do all sorts of things. But, first of all, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please with each other. (Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, 727) (1)

Similarly, in a letter to Regis Michaud, Frost wrote that

I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art. It may shoot up as high as you please and flourish as widely abroad in the air, if only the roots are what and where they should be (Selected Letters, 228).

Such comments suggest that the matter of knowing one's national and metaphysical bearings--knowing who and where one is, as "A Cabin in the Clearing" puts it--intimately informs Frost's practice as a poet. This knowledge, as Frost's work also shows, emerges from the dialectic between remembering and forgetting the circumstances of one's country's origins.

Frost reflects his interest in national matters in a number of poems throughout his career. For example, some of his juvenilia ("La Noche Triste," "The Sachem of the Clouds") as well as a few of his mature poems ("The Vanishing Red" and "A Cabin in the Clearing") and one unpublished poem ("Genealogical") deal with the subject of Native Americans, while one of his most famous poems, "The Gift Outright," addresses the matter of the nation's origins, demonstrating the way in which key elements of colonial history are obliged to be forgotten in the process of constructing a grand narrative of national development. In Frost's poetry, remembering becomes a way of both articulating national responsibilities and critiquing forms of patriotism he found too easy.

Frost "once remarked" to Sidney. Cox that "one of his passions in boyhood was angry sympathy with the American Indians" (Cox, 21). Two poems among Frost's juvenilia reflect this early interest in Native Americans. "La Noche Triste" (1890), his first published poem, recounts the attack on the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan by Cortez and the rout of his army by Montezuma's army. The other poem, "The Sachem of the Clouds" (1891), clearly evinces the sympathy for American Indians that Frost also articulated in a class debate the same year he published the poem in a local newspaper. In that debate, Frost defended "a bill for removing the Indians from Indian Territory to more fertile districts and ceding said districts to the tribes forever; and for giving them some compensation for the losses already suffered," drawing on "extensive factual information from Helen Hunt Jackson's impassioned indictment, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes" (Francis, 10). Subtitled "A Thanksgiving Legend," "The Sachem of the Clouds" acts out a gothic fantasy of revenge on behalf of the Indians. Its commemoration of American aboriginals reflects the white speaker's mournful regret concerning their defeat at the hands of his ancestors. The poem communicates this mourning through the voice and behavior of the sachem, who commands the elements and calls upon them to enact his vengeance on behalf of his people:

"Come, O come, with storm, come darkness! Speed my clouds on Winter's breath. All my race is gone before me, all my race is low in death! Ever, as I ruled a people, shall this smoke arise in cloud; Ever shall it freight the tempest for the ocean of the proud. 'Thanks!' I hear their cities thanking that my race is low in death. Come, O come, with storm, come darkness! Speed my clouds on Winter's breath!" (CPPP, 494-95)

As in later poems by Frost (and in such nineteenth-century poems as Lydia Sigourney's "The Cherokee Mother" and "The Indians Welcome to the Pilgrim Fathers"), the voice of the Indian haunts the Poe-like landscape of "The Sachem of the Clouds," unsettling the complacency of his white usurpers: "Thus his voice keeps ringing, till appears the dreary dawn" (CPPP, 495). (2) Yet the enthusiasm for warfare and the awareness of the injustices of the Aztec empire evident in "La Noche Triste" also reappear in Frost's later work, so that contradictory perspectives on Indians and European colonization persist throughout his writing.

Assuming the perspective of "The Sachem of the Clouds" in the later "Genealogical" (1908), a poem he included in a letter but never published, Frost demonstrates something of this "boyhood" passion by writing about his ancestor, the "Indian killer" Charles Frost. In a letter dated January 1908 to Susan Hayes Ward, Frost ironically refers to his forebear as "my bad ancestor the Indian killer" and calls the poem "some Whitmanism of mine" (Selected Letters, 42). In addition, in a letter dated December 19, 1911, Frost refers to the poem again, calling it "that authentic bit of family history I once promised you" (Selected Letters, 43). The poem links Frost's national and family history in a comic and ironic bond that evokes without resolving the tensions between Native Americans and European settlers:

It was my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather's Great-great-grandfather or thereabouts I think-- One cannot be too precise in a matter like this. He was hanged the story goes. Yet not for grief Have I vowed a pilgrimage to the place where he lies Under a notable bowlder in Eliot, Maine, But for pride if for aught at this distance of time. Yearly a chosen few of his many descendants At solemn dinner assembled tell over the story Of how in his greatness of heart he aspired To wipe out the whole of an Indian tribe to order, As in those extravagant days they wasted the woods With fire to clear the land for tillage. It seems he was rather pointedly not instructed To proceed in the matter with any particular Regard to the laws of civilized warfare. He wasted no precious time in casting about For means he could call his own. He simply seized Upon any unprotected idea that came to hand. (CPPP, 514)

The clearing of land here, extravagant though it is, corresponds to the title and theme of the later "A Cabin in the Clearing." Like that poem, it also subtly implies a connection between the cutting down of trees and the mowing down of men. (3) "Genealogical" contemplates a "pilgrimage" "for pride" to the "notable bowlder" marking the tomb of the ancestor and articulates at the same time a mock repudiation of the colonial ancestor's deeds. The poet's imagined pilgrimage instead turns out to be an account of the ancestor's grim pillage of the Indians and their land. His already ironic pride turns into an amused chagrin.

With his joking repetition of ancestral grandfathers, his admission that "One cannot be too precise in a matter like this," and his colloquial aside ("He was hanged the story goes"), Frost suggests the legendary character of the narrative that follows. Given the vagaries of oral transmission resulting from the changes that creep into a story as it gets passed from generation to generation, Frost's casually dropped remark turns out to be more significant than it may first appear. It hints at the fictive quality of the entire narrative, evoking (or provoking)...

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