By Jim Kates

The value of On Frost and Eliot is sending the reader spinning out of its own text and back to poems by two of the major poets of the 20th century, each of whom has suffered from the vagaries of fashion, both in popularity and neglect.

On Frost and Eliot by William H. Pritchard. Paul Dry Books, 244 pages, $20.76

William H. Pritchard’s On Frost and Eliot promised enlightenment. I was very much attracted to this book about two eminent poets of their generation, with its stated intention on the first page “to establish their differences even as their respective greatness is acknowledged.”

I “discovered” Robert Frost at the same time Gregory Corso did and, in the same way, through the publication of Frost’s last book in 1962. Corso represented the radical fringe of Beat literature when he wrote “After Reading In the Clearing:” “Old bard I like you more / now that I know you’re / no Saturday Evening Post philosopher / Nay but such who plagiarizes God.” I was in high school, where T.S. Eliot was all the rage for the “moderately intellectual drips and squares,” as my classmates classified ourselves, but at the time didn’t quite get what Pritchard calls “the source of profound wisdom about the chaos of modern civilization.”

In college, I found Eliot’s work much more readable, and actually a lot of fun. The Waste Land became a landmark in my education. Eliot led me in directions I hadn’t thought of going before, and deepened my understanding of poetry. Before seeing Pritchard’s title, I had not considered Frost and Eliot together. Now, perhaps, was the occasion.

Alas, On Frost and Eliot does not deliver on its promise. It is a pasted-together collection of essays written at different times for different audiences; and, as such, with all too much annoying overlap (and I write this as someone who has himself put together a collection of essays written at different times for different audiences and tried hard to minimize the annoying overlap). In this volume, Frost and Eliot are nowhere brought face-to face, or even back-to-back. (The book’s lack of an index is further evidence of having been unfortunately cobbled together.)

The first half is composed of occasional essays about Frost — not just his poems, but also his prose and his letters; then follow occasional essays about Eliot in a similar pattern. Pritchard ends the assemblage of pieces on Frost with his only reference to Eliot, linking “Directive” to “Little Gidding” in a negative way, the goblet that is not the Grail. The second presents essays on Eliot, with only a couple of oblique, incidental references to Frost.

And that is all we get of considering one poet with the other in On Frost and Eliot. Any comparisons, evaluations, and establishment of differences are left completely to the reader. The Eliot essays focus far more on the poet’s prose than on his verse; and, when Pritchard discusses the poems, as in the five-page essay “Prufrock Centennial,” he talks around them rather than into them, referring to or quoting other critics — Reuben Brower, Denis Donoghue, Conrad Aiken — in profusion. I hazard that my high-school classmates read Eliot more closely.

Pritchard thinks little of the poems of In the Clearing, either in themselves or as a gateway to reading Frost. But he does take Frost’s ambiguities, ambivalences, playfulness, and intellectual depth (attributes of any credible god) seriously. He pays special attention to the earlier poetry. The essay “Frost and Edward Thomas” shows Pritchard at his best in supplying sensitive, technical readings and biographical context. He even touches on (although he also draws back from, I think wrongly) one of my favorite delights in Frost, one usually unnoticed by readers: the way a poem implicitly replies in conversation to another poem, in this case Thomas Hardy’s “At Castle Boterel.”

The value of On Frost and Eliot is sending the reader spinning out of its own text and back to poems by two of the major poets of the 20th century, each of whom has suffered from the vagaries of fashion, both in popularity and neglect.

What Eliot and Frost have very much in common — not mentioned directly by Pritchard but explicit in his writing about each separately — is their emphasis on listening, and on the performance of their poems, Frost’s “sound of sense” and Eliot’s ability to “cast a spell over the responsive ear.” I grew up with recordings of both poets reading their own works, and their voices still sound in my own head when I read their verse, Frost’s deceptive folksiness — a fox — and Eliot’s deadpan gravity — a hedgehog. They also shared a keen wit and a very deep conversation with tradition. There are few poets today who care as much for all three of these qualities.

Frost’s expansive body of poetry and Eliot’s relative paucity (English novelist and critic Brigid Brophy famously said that Eliot was the only writer to have parlayed himself into being considered a major poet by titling one small volume Minor Poems), Frost’s rhetoric of doubt and Eliot’s of certainty — these and many other points of comparison and contrast I would like to have seen addressed in On Frost and Eliot. Someday, somewhere, perhaps they will be.

J. Kates is a poet, feature journalist and reviewer, literary translator, and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a nonprofit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia. His latest book of poetry is Places of Permanent Shade (Accents Publishing) and his newest translation is Sixty Years Selected Poems: 1957-2017, the works of the Russian poet Mikhail Yeryomin.