Acquainted with the Night

Frost expatriated into the London literary scene, and he responded to its aesthetic freedoms both during and after World War I. He understood, and responded to, the poetry the younger writers were rejecting outright in ways they did not comprehend. Rhyme and rhythms were projected as hobgoblins that tied the poet to predetermined patterns of expression and dismissed entirely the concept that metered verse was an art unto itself. Frost, then in his forties, had grown up seeing the comfort that the wisdom poetry of the Gilded Age/Victorian writers brought to an emerging generation of readers. He understood the reach of prosody and the ease with which it brought its themes to a mass market of readers who appreciated the clever turns of language and the intricate mastery of sounds and rhythms. One of Frost’s own favorite poems, the Gilded Age classic “Casey at the Bat,” recounted the dangers of pride and the foolishness of ego using a galloping beat that created urgency and, in turn, a clever rhyme scheme that made recitation and even memorization easy. These were poets of the people—hardly the young, scruffy bohemian poets who crowded the taverns and coffee houses of London’s West End, youngsters who dismissed such conventional poetry as sentimental doggerel. In their valiant manifestoes that sought to reclaim daring and innovation for poetry, Modernists sought to liberate poetry into the stunning surprises of open verse, which Frost famously dismissed as playing tennis without the net.

Born nine years after Lincoln’s assassination, Frost grew up studying the techniques, aural effects, and disciplined expression of these massively popular public poets—his New England contemporaries Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Russell Lowell; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Matthew Arnold in England. Their sculpted lines, defined by tightly anticipated rhythms and rhyme patterns, offered inspiration and advice to middle-class readers with the leisure time to page through newspapers or magazines. If Frost was a Gilded Age poet by calling, he was a Modernist by temperament. Although he was a generation older than the rebel-poets he met when he expatriated to England (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, for instance, were born when Frost was nearly 20), if Frost disdained as juvenile their uncompromising moxie and their delight in dynamiting poetic forms, he understood their embrace of irony as wisdom. He also understood their ennui and uncertainty over the drift from God and the loss of Western civilization’s spiritual invigoration, and their decided lack of faith in humanity’s chances, given the ruinous evidence of the pointless brutalities of World War I and the grasping covetousness of capitalism.

“Acquainted with the Night” reflects that threshold position. It is at once a tightly crafted homage to a particularly demanding Renaissance form. The meter is clean, the rhyme scheme is maintained, and the lines are precise and designed. Yet that conventional and very classical form reveals a particularly ironic vision typical of the Modernist casting a caustic, scathing eye on the soulless sprawl of the city and struggling to affirm within its claustrophobic confines emotional and spiritual resilience.