The Existential Themes of Frost’s “A Question”

This paper addresses the question of why poetry remains relatively insignificant in the American tradition. Perhaps it has something to do with its poets. I can honestly say I’ve never met a poet that I liked. In all fairness, I’ve only met two, but neither fit into my fantasy. I always thought poets were supposed to be kind and gentle souls, more like saints or angels without wings. I met the first in graduate school at Stony Brook. He was this well-known poet in the English Department, and I innocently asked him to write a poem about one of my family’s best thoroughbreds. I was quick to add that I was willing to pay him for his efforts. His response was, “I only write poems about things I’m interested in,

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and I’m not interested in horses.” Okay, scratch that idea.

The next one I met was a poet laureate from Long Island. I had invited her to lunch to do a feature on her work for a newspaper I was working for at the time. My first big mistake was to show up five minutes late. This started us off on the wrong foot. In the middle of the interview, I asked her if she would like to try to write a quick poem about the town we were in since the name of the paper I worked for had its name on the masthead. She looked at me as if I were insane and said she certainly could not and would not write a poem about the town. I should have thanked her for that response because it forced me to flex my weak creative bones and write one myself, which I included in the column. Perhaps the hostility I experienced with these two poets reflects the fact that, in America at least, poets are devalued and essentially ignored.

There is one great American poem that I want to discuss. It’s short but not sweet. The poem was written by Robert Frost and is titled “A Question.” It reads:

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
(Frost, 1942, p. 69)

Frost is asking the ultimate existential question, “Is life worth living?” Many a philosopher and playwright has grappled with this question. In Waiting for Godot (1953), Beckett concluded that life is so painful that we ought to find a rope and a hanging tree. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Nietzsche concluded that since god died a while ago, the best we could hope for was to try to become some sort of superman. That’s a tough one. Sartre felt life was basically meaningless and wrote Nausea (1938) in response, a novel about anguish, shame, and longing. Then there was Dante, who wrote the 895-page epic poem The Divine Comedy (1320), which consisted of three sections (hell, heaven, and purgatory) comprised of 33 cantos each. Hell is a horror, purgatory is not much better, and the cantos leading up to heaven even have disappointment. He never even gets to kiss his one true love, Beatrice. All in all, Dante’s vision of life’s “soul-and-body scars” outweighed the joy of heaven by a two-to-one ratio. That seems about right. We all have five days of hellish work and then only two days of blissful weekends.

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I suspect that the best poets, like Frost, Yeats, or Dante, are cherished because they were the ones brave enough to take the heroic plunge into the spiritus mundi (“world spirit”), see what goes on down there, and resurface to tell us all about it. Yeats summed up childhood nicely with his poem “The Stolen Child,” suggesting that even the young suffer:

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand
(Yeats, 1889, p. 112)

So, let us return to the questions asked by Robert Frost: Does suffering outweigh joy? Is life worth living? D. H. Lawrence came up with a good response in his little poem called “Self-Pity,” which is often repeated in the film G.I. Jane (1997) starring Demi Moore. Viggo Mortensen plays the Master Sergeant in charge of training Navy Seal recruits. He instructs them on how to deal with suffering by reciting the D. H. Lawrence poem to them:

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.
(Lawrence, 2009, p. 140)

So, the answer to the question Frost poses could relate to pain tolerance. The way to manage life’s inevitable suffering is to suck it up and grit your way through the pain.

Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, addressed the question of “soul-and-body scars” and the inevitability of suffering with his theory of defense mechanisms. Denial, reaction formation, repression, sublimation, altruism, and humor are but a few of the defenses we use to cope with internal or external pain. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Freud suggested that the price we must pay for living in a civilized world is control over our passions and desires, which produces both frustration and depression.

America remains by and large optimistic, which explains why most Americans ignore, abhor, and avoid poetry. The American flag is red, white, and blue. It’s cheerful and hopeful. America still clings to hope and optimism, which is one reason why Donald

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Trump, with his blond hair and orange face, still holds an appeal for many Americans and remains a Presidential frontrunner in 2024. He provides the appeal of the blond-haired winner. “Make America Great Again” is a slogan taken directly from Ronald Reagan, a President who also capitalized on hope, optimism, and denial. Ignore the homeless; don’t worry, be happy. The wildly popular summer blockbuster film Barbie (2023) was another expression of America’s fingers crossed, smiling blond-haired optimism and denial of the darker side of reality.

It is no surprise that the entire edifice of modern-day cognitive behavioral psychology is in a state of denial about the unconscious and its darkness. Positive psychology dominates our nation, as do Barbie dolls, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump. Just under the surface of America’s shiny, glossy exterior is the darkness that must, at all times and all costs, be denied. The perfect embodiment of America’s empty soul is seen in nearly every work by American artist Jeff Koons. He created those seven-foot-tall stainless steel balloon dogs that sell for about $56 million each. They are remarkably infantile in nature, perfect for a three-and-a-half-year-old who finds hope and happiness in his balloon dog. I dare you to try to write a poem about one of these shiny stainless-steel objects.

Denial is a primitive, immature defense that reflects the American character. Perhaps we are not fully equipped to look beyond our own denial to see what is buried within our history. America is a young nation but one that has a very bloody, victorious history. Another current film that reflects the underbelly of America’s nature is Oppenheimer (2023). Toward the middle of the film, after the first nuclear device explodes in the desert of Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer utters the scriptural phrase, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Now, that’s a truly great line of poetry if I ever heard one. Needless to say, Robert Oppenheimer was then ostracized and decimated by the government that hired him to produce this bomb—yet another example of denial and repression in action.

The American mind uses denial to avoid seeing things like guilt, pain, and loss. Poetry traffics in the pain and suffering that swim about in our unconscious. It therefore should be no surprise that poetry is not a favored form of literature for Americans. Pulp fiction, newspapers, and action films are more closely aligned with the American psyche and its defenses.

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