A boy is out doing a man’s work with a chainsaw, when his sister comes to call him in for supper. Suddenly, the chainsaw leaps and cuts deep into his hand. The boy looks at the bleeding gash and begs his sister, “Don’t let him cut my hand off— / The doctor when he comes.” But before long the boy’s pulse begins to drop: “Little, less,” soon “nothing.” And the boy is dead. There’s “no more to build on there,” so his family turns away: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” That is the narrative that Robert Frost unfolds in “Out, Out —” and it is, I believe, emblematic of his understanding of life. Danger is everywhere; the darkness is always crowding in. You cannot rely on others to sustain you. They have their own lives to live, and they return to them readily, no matter what sorrows might befall you. You have only one pillar of sustenance in this world: yourself. Frost elaborates his view of the world with considerable art. In the long run, I think that Frost will prove to be our most consequential and most read twentieth-century poet. Though interest in poetry overall is dwindling and rather rapidly, Frost continues to draw readers and top-flight critics. Adam Plunkett’s recently published Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost, for example, is a deeply thoughtful blending of reflections on Frost’s life and his work. It testifies eloquently to our culture’s need to continue reading and brooding on the poems of this profound and often misunderstood man. Born one hundred and fifty years ago, Frost writes the poetry of the isolated and often threatened individual. He is our prophet of post-Emersonian self-reliance, our most inspired chronicler of its joys and of its costs. Whitman, the greatest of democratic poets, writes memorably about the joys of being in groups. He loves the collective, the mass, the everyday. Frost doubts all groups. In “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” he describes people looking blankly out to sea: they cannot look out far or in deep, “But when was that ever a bar / To any watch they keep?” Most people and most crowds are numbly uncomprehending; they offer little or nothing to the individual. But the individual does have the power to go his own way and sculpt a life worth living outside the rule of the majority. In his best poetry, Frost shows how to live a self-reliant life far from the noise of the crowd. He also is committed to showing what self-reliance can cost. Nothing is got for nothing in Frost’s world, and though self-reliance has its joys, it also comes at a price. We know Frost as a New England poet and a poet of rural life, though he was born in San Francisco and lived for some time in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Eventually he moved north to farm in New Hampshire and Vermont. Frost had a difficult time getting his early work published. When he was nearly forty he finally found an appreciative editor, and a group of literary allies (including the very unlikely Ezra Pound) in England. Frost returned to America in 1915 and thrived. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times, and was poet in residence at Amherst, Michigan, Harvard, and Dartmouth. He read — or tried to read: the glare of the bright winter sun defeated him — at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. He went to Russia as a goodwill ambassador for the United States, and apparently charmed Nikita Khrushchev. Frost died in 1963 at the age of eighty-eight, having written well into his final years, and reigned consistently as the best loved poet in America. He could also be what Lionel Trilling, in a revisionist speech delivered in the presence of the poet, called a “terrifying poet.” 
Frost is a poet for all seasons, but he is especially apt now for those of us who are weary of the current forms of collective identity. We look around and see that the joy that Whitman found in groups is no longer readily had: groups now are acrimonious, conflict-ridden, nasty. The happiness that Whitman found in collective life is hard to locate, if you can find it at all. But we do have another path. Enough of the romance of community, which can curdle quickly: the freedom that democracy dispenses to the individual can also be vitalizing if we know how to use it. Whitman taught the way to general happiness: it is free, unguarded. Its emblem is the open road. Emerson, whom Frost greatly admired, launched the discourse of the free if beleaguered democratic individual. In essays and addresses such as “Self-Reliance” and “The American Scholar,” he wrote the prose of the independent man or woman, though he could not, despite his efforts, write the poetry. That had to await the next century. A hundred years and more after Emerson’s great period in the 1830s, Frost came along to do precisely that. Frost can teach us what it might feel like day to day, to follow one’s own path, go one’s own way. For those who do not care for the present-day pressure to join, profess, represent, and conform, Frost can be a resource and an inspiration. Frost’s world is constantly dangerous; rarely does anyone in it care about you and yours. “Out, Out — ” is an allusive title. It refers to Macbeth’s famous speech after his wife dies of guilt and grief: Out, out brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing. Obvious allusion is not common in Frost, though his work is drenched in the English poetic tradition, as Plunkett demonstrates; and so an open allusion to Shakespeare, and to what may be his darkest speech,
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