Modernism 1901-1950: Robert Frost A further range

A Further Range, which earned Frost another Pulitzer Prize and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, contains two groups of poems subtitled “Taken Doubly” and “Taken Singly.” In the first, and more interesting, of these groups, the poems are somewhat didactic, though there are humorous and satiric pieces as well. Included here is “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which opens with the story of two itinerant lumbermen who offer to cut the speaker’s wood for pay; the poem then develops into a sermon on the relationship between work and play, vocation and avocation, preaching the necessity to unite them. Of the entire volume, William Rose Benet wrote, “It is better worth reading than nine-tenths of the books that will come your way this year. In a time when all kinds of insanity are assailing the nations it is good to listen to this quiet humor, even about a hen, a hornet, or Square Matthew.... And if anybody should ask me why I still believe in my land, I have only to put this book in his hand and answer, ‘Well-here is a man of my country.’” 

Most critics acknowledge that Frost’s poetry in the forties and fifties grew more and more abstract, cryptic, and even sententious, so it is generally on the basis of his earlier work that he is judged. His politics and religious faith, hitherto informed by skepticism and local color, became more and more the guiding principles of his work. He had been, as Randall Jarrellpoints out, “a very odd and very radical radical when young” yet became “sometimes callously and unimaginatively conservative” in his old age. He had become a public figure, and in the years before his death, much of his poetry was written from this stance. 



A further range

• Taken doubly. A lone striker, or, Without prejudice to industry
• Two tramps in mud time, or, A full-time interest
• The white-tailed hornet, or, The revision of theories
• A blue ribbon at Amesbury, or, Small plans gratefully heard of
• A drumlin woodchuck, or, Be sure to locate
• The Gold hesperidee, or, How to take a loss
• In time of cloudburst, or, The long view
• A roadside stand, or, On being put out of our misery
• Departmental, or, The end of my ant Jerry
• The old barn at the bottom of the fogs, or, Class prejudice afoot
• On the heart's beginning to cloud the mind, or, From sight to insight
• The figure in the doorway, or, On being looked at in a train
• At Woodward's gardens, or, Resourcefulness is more than understanding
• A record stride, or, The United States stated
• Taken singly. Lost in heaven
• Desert places
• Leaves compared with flowers
• A leaf treader
• On taking from the top to broaden the base
• They were welcome to their belief
• The strong are saying nothing
• The master speed
• Moon compasses
• Neither out far nor in deep
• Voice ways
• Design
• On a bird singing in its sleep
• After-flakes
• Clear and colder
• Unharvested
• There are roughly zones
• A trial run
• Not quite social
• Provide provide
• Ten mills. Precaution
• The span of life
• The Wrights' biplane
• Assertive
• Evil tendencies cancel
• Pertinax
• Waspish
• One guess
• The hardship of accounting
• Not all there
• In Divés' dive
• The outlands. The vindictives : the Andes
• The bearer of evil tidings : the Himalayas
• Iris by night : the Malverns (but these are only hills)
• Build soil
• To a thinker
• Afterthought. A missive missile.