ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
Sometimes things live up to their name. Take Robert Frost. The four-time-Pulitzer-winning poet is known for his wintry poem "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening."
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBERT FROST: Whose woods these are, I think I know. His house is in the village, though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.
LIMBONG: But sometimes things don't live up to their name at all, because Robert Frost has a poem called "Nothing New," and it is, in fact, new - to us, at least. It was originally written in 1918 but recently discovered and now published in The New Yorker for the first time. Jay Parini is a poet, novelist and Robert Frost biographer. He wrote about the poem "Nothing New" for The New Yorker, and he joins us now. Welcome, Jay.
JAY PARINI: Andrew, thank you for having me on.
LIMBONG: All right. So what's the backstory here? Where was this poem, "Nothing New," discovered?
PARINI: Well, it was hiding in somebody's book. Somebody recently opened the book, and there it was written out in perfect Robert Frostian handwriting, dated 1918. And it was elegant. And, my God, it had not been seen before. It was called "Nothing New," but it was really something new. It had been hiding all these years. And suddenly, after such a long time, it sort of winks into being.
LIMBONG: Yeah. And as a Frost scholar - right? - were you skeptical that this was actually a new thing?
PARINI: Well, I was. You know, I've seen this kind of thing happen before as a writer on poets and novelist, you could, oh, here comes some undiscovered manuscript, and it's often something either that I've seen before, we've all seen versions of - or actually, my worst fear was that it was one of Frost's late, terrible poems. You know, there's a whole bunch of little poems like "Quandary," "A Reflex" or "In A Glass Of Cider," which - you know, I cringe when I read them. You know, Frost was a hugely productive, as well as brilliant, poet. But as with all prolific poets, not everyone...
LIMBONG: He had his misses.
PARINI: Yeah. He missed. So I thought, oh, it's going to be pretty horrible. I will read it. And I opened my laptop with some trepidation, and actually, I'd say my mental jaw fell open to the floor. I thought, oh, wow, this is actually a good Robert Frost poem.
LIMBONG: All right. Well, can you read it for us?
PARINI: Yeah. Here it goes. It's called "Nothing New."
(Reading) One moment when the dust today against my face was turned to spray, I dreamed the winter dream again. I dreamed when I was young at play yet, strangely, not more sad than then. Nothing new, though I am further upon my way. The same dream again.
LIMBONG: I'm getting nostalgia. I'm getting yearning. What are you getting from this poem?
PARINI: Well, first of all, let me say - you had a clip from "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" - Frost is really the great American poet of winter. And winter for Frost is a psychological landscape, an interior place of nostalgia, beauty, fear, death. All of these things pile in on poems about winter written by Frost.
What I'm getting here is both nostalgia for childhood, you know, a time when I was a kid and the spray of dust hit my face, and suddenly I'm wakened into the winter dream again. And then he imagines that he's young at play. I mean, what kids - my four grandchildren like nothing better - I live in Vermont - but to go out with me and play in the snow and throw snowballs and kick the dust of snow up in the air.
This is the winter dream that children all have who live in these snowy climates. And yet he says, yet I dreamed that I was young at play, but yet, strangely, not more sad than then. Uh-oh, that's Frost. He was actually both happy playing in the snow, but also sad. But the spray of snow in his face today somehow wakens the memories of those childhood days. And frankly, we're all sad about those days that are gone by. And he says, nothing new - clamps it down - though I am further upon my way.
Frost is a wonderfully ambiguous writer. And he's further upon his way on the same dream, the dream of his childhood, but the same regrets are coming back, the same sense of loss. I mean, that's what - I'm hearing both of these things here.
Frost was, first of all, writing on his farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, right on the Vermont border, And he was suddenly reawakened to the magic of snow, winter in Vermont. And he wrote a whole series of wonderfully short, aphoristic poems. They're very brief. They're tight. They're rueful, full of sadness, and they're tremendously focused. I mean, the best of them would appear in 1923 in his first Pulitzer Prize-winning volume, just simply called "New Hampshire." Came out in 1923. Brilliant book.
But it's got wonderful winter poems in it. One of them is the "Dust Of Snow." And I always - as soon as I read this new poem, "Nothing New," by Frost, I thought it's essentially a version of "Dust Of Snow," which I think he wrote the following year. That poem stays in my brain. I say it to myself over and over throughout the last 50, 60 years.
LIMBONG: Well, give us a little bit of it.
PARINI: Oh, it's very short. The way a crow shook down on me the dust of snow from a hemlock tree has given my heart a change of mood and saved some part of a day I had rued.
LIMBONG: Why do you think he published that poem and not "Nothing New"?
PARINI: Well, he went on to write a sequence of wonderful, short, aphoristic poems in from about 1917 till 1923. I mean, these are really superb, landmark poems in the American language, in American literature. And he probably looked over this poem and said, let's just do the best of them, and he pushed this one to aside, and he probably just forgot about it. That's what I'm guessing.
LIMBONG: Do you think - if you could go back and - if you were like, his adviser back then, would you push him, be like, no, this one's worth it? You should...
PARINI: No, I would say, actually - I would say, Robert, please reconsider. This poem, yes, it's not quite as fierce and as focused as "Dust Of Snow." But look, it's talking about winter as play and pain. It's talking about memory. It's got its own beautiful ruefulness, and it's about a dream. And so I'm very happy that we have the poem now. I would really miss it.
LIMBONG: Is there anything new you've learned about Frost from this poem, or do you have any other questions that now arise because of it?
PARINI: I think I didn't realize quite how vexed Frost was about his childhood and his past and how he mixed memory and desire in a curious way. He's remembering the snow and playfulness, but it's also very painful to him. And I think when - back to Frost's boyhood. You know, he grew up in very sad circumstances, with his father dying at the age of 11 and his sister being very mentally unwell, his mother struggling to make a living. And I think that there was a lot of sadness in Frost. And I think this poem is suffused with a certain amount of ruefulness, a certain amount of regret and a mixing of nostalgia with regret. And I think those mixed emotions bleed through this poem a little more clearly and vividly than in the other poems in the book "New Hampshire."
LIMBONG: Jay Parini is a poet, novelist and Robert Frost biographer. Thank you so much for your time.
PARINI: Thank you, Andrew. It's been good to be here.
LIMBONG: Happy Winter.
PARINI: Happy Winter to you, too. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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