on Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry by Adam Plunkett
Love and Need takes its title from Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time” which first appeared in The Saturday Review of Literature in 1934 and then in A Further Range (1936). Adam Plunkett regards the poem as “a declaration of nothing less than his sense of purpose, arrived at by way of a conversation with himself after a pair of tramps come upon him chopping wood and one of them lingers to watch.” In the stare of the tramp, Frost sees “He wanted to take my job for pay.” Plunkett suggests that the demand of the stare “calls to Frost’s mind the moral claims of Roosevelt’s welfare state,” policies Frost mainly disparaged (though he claimed to have supported FDR).
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right – agreed.
Readers and critics bickered about the poem for years – asserting that it proves Frost’s lack of charity (especially during the Depression), or, Frost’s respect for self-reliance, or, his insensitivity to suffering, or, the poem suggests he hired the tramp, or, the poem portrays Frost’s selfishness. Acknowledging these readings, Plunkett indicates some of the conflicting responses Frost heard in his lifetime.
But in the final stanza, Frost puts aside his own sturdy moral argument for the dual, enmeshed pleasures – what he does for love (the gratifications of nature, routine and gratifying results) and for need (sustenance and heat afforded by wood) – that are embodied in the poem’s shape, sound and sense. Plunkett shows us how some of Frost’s remarks, made during a visit in 1934 to Billings, Montana with his wife Elinor, align with the poem and clarify his intentions, especially its final lines, which Frost attributed to Elinor’s values:
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
for Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Reflecting on Robert Frost, Czesław Miłosz wrote in Miłosz’s ABC’s, “It is impossible to grasp who he really was, aside from his unswerving striving toward his goal of fame, in an attempt to exact revenge for his own defeats in life.” The figure of Frost may trigger our severity when we’re cagey about our own conflicted impulses. But without disregarding Frost’s pride, Jay Parini in Robert Frost: A Life (1998), still my favorite of the biographies, offered a balanced and nuanced portrait and intuited the shape of Frost’s psyche in the poems. Parini wrote, “He regarded his poems as fierce gestures in the direction of sanity, as attempts to wrest a ‘momentary stay against confusion’ from the chaos of life. For him personally, each poem was a victory over depression, anxiety, fear, and sloth.” In Love and Need, Adam Plunkett peers at several poems to track the drift – some would say sublimation — of Frost’s character into the verse. He also reveals many of Frost’s rhetorical influences and borrowings from Shakespeare, Herrick, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Emerson and Browning. The book’s subtitle tells us that this isn’t a conventional biography, though there is plenty of Frost’s life therein, even if not always presented in linear fashion.
Over the past 75 years or so, many poets have lived – and many now aspire to — a roving life that includes teaching at different schools, showing up at writers’ conferences, traveling for readings, keeping a residence, and spending sabbaticals away from home. Robert Frost was the first American poet to do so. Allen Ginsberg called him “the original entrepreneur of poetry.” But while Frost may have initiated an itinerant model for enterprising poets, his poems are rarely mentioned by them as influential or inspirational. Of the several friends I queried who teach creative writing, only one said they had taught a Frost poem recently and that was “Home Burial” for a session on extended narrative.
The question of how Frost’s work pertains to the making of today’s poetry was not part of Plunkett’s scope of work, but it was on my mind while reading. A poet today, perched atop dark certainties, is more likely to suggest the need for (or to demand) a reader’s self-assessment more than their own. With emergencies and devastations all around, does one have the patience for listening to someone weighing this and that side of what may seem like a purely personal issue? I find that Plunkett’s discernment of the agonized and conflicting forces of Frost’s psyche reinforces the connection between inner disturbance and the making of an artful form that can manage and contain it. And that pertains to poetry and poets in general. If we agree that poetry isn’t op-ed or lineated memoir, then we may also agree that a poem can be a locus for auditing and not just repeating one’s memories, and for vetting the usual expressions of one’s convictions.
Paul Celan translated Frost into German. Seamus Heaney said Frost was a major influence – and added, “Frost believed that individual venture and vision arose as a creative defense against emptiness, and that it was therefore always possible that a relapse into emptiness would be the ultimate destiny of consciousness. If good fences make good neighbors, a certain callousness of self-assertion was part of the price of adjusting to reality … Frost was prepared to look without self-deception into the crystal of indifference in himself where his moral and artistic improvisations were both prefigured and scrutinized.”
Plunkett’s lively narrative may not add anything significant to evaluations like Heaney’s and similar others, but he is in accord with such analyes, and moves dexterously between the life, Frost’s relationships, the progression of the books, and Frost’s inspirational sources to limn Frost’s turbulent psyche and its interplay with the poems.
[Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux on February 18, 2025, 500 pages, $35.00US]
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on Hypochondria by Will Rees
A tour of Key West, Florida’s sites brings us to the city’s cemetery where the guide directs our attention to the stone memorializing B. P. “Pearl” Roberts, “the town hypochrondriac.” Everyone chuckles at the inscription; the hypochondriac is a figure of derision, someone not like us. But maybe we laugh because we are precisely like Pearl – ever wondering about what’s going on inside our bodies, checking our Apple watches for bodily “insights,” worrying about that persistent pain in the lower back – didn’t Uncle Bernie die from renal cancer? Diagnoses of our most serious illnesses usually come belatedly. Can we ever be certain that we’re healthy?
Will Rees, a veteran hypochondriac, initially set out to write a scholarly study of hypochrondria. Apparently at some point, the project morphed into a different form – speculative essays considering the evolution of the term’s meaning, the relation between hypochondria and creativity, shifting medical perspectives, and the views of psychologists and psychiatrists. In Rees’ hands, the fearful unknowingness of hypochondria extends vectors to many aspects of daily existence. Unlike most illness narratives (not that this book fully qualifies as one, though Rees as ex-sufferer appears here and there), Hypochondria has no interest in eliciting our sympathy or indicting antagonists. The hypochondriac’s desire is a wish to know, to gather knowledge about the unreadable – and as a provisional procedure, it speaks to our anxiety about and taste for the mysterious.
“The position of hypochondria has never been less certain,” Rees writes. “Perhaps we can simply say that hypochondria appears destined to trouble the medical imagination: neither fully mental nor physical, not quite disease and yet hardly ‘health.’” The hypochondriac, as Rees experienced, wants to know what that persistent headache “means.” There is a wish for definitive understanding – but the desire undermines its own wish. Rees sees it as “a two-faced condition. On the one hand it names a long-standing medical diagnosis, an object of positivist medical knowledge. Yet at some point it also started to name something else, harder to pin down – a form of doubt, a style of interpretation.” The doctor says your test results confirm your health, but the evidence doesn’t convince you. There is the pervasive “sense” that the body, or a pang in the body, is both potentially decipherable and distressingly elusive.
Through research on his uncompleted study, Rees collected a broad and rich inventory of literary, philosophical and psychological allusions to hypochondria – as a sample, on page 28, there’s Freud, Deleuze, Kant and Melville. The immediacy of Rees’ writing draws one into the churning contemplation of this uneasy, cerebral condition – which aligns with an everyday life that “is subjected to doubt, interpretation, and an overriding compulsion to know.” At times one hears a sardonic or comical note. Reflecting on his five years of worry (2010-15) about vague symptoms, he says, “as the months passed I came to doubt whether the headache was really there at all – if what I was experiencing wasn’t really just the typically overlooked baseline weird feeling of having a head.”
In 1600, life expectancy from birth was 35-40 years. Rees’ engrossing historical sub-narratives bring us closer to those generations that faced such grim and mysterious incursions of illness and sudden death (and caused me to ask: is there a relation between classic hypochondria and today’s trauma narratives?) Among the most striking remarks quoted here are from John Donne (b. 1532) and his Devotions – “… our health is a long and regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, over throws all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.” This was part of the anxiety of melancholia which “increasingly went by the name of hypochondria, now recast as a disease of the nervous system, a network of vanishingly slight vessels that suffused the body with animal spirits.” The melancholic, artistic genius, brooding on personal and communal frailty, became a cultural staple – and so, for Charlotte Brontë was burdened by “Hypochondria – A most dreadful doom” and E. A. Poe’s “sickly aristocrat” Roderick Usher suffered from “a morbid acuteness of the senses.” There is Moliere’s Le malade imaginaire, Marcel Proust’s “bizarre rigmarole of his care,” and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain where one finds “the fullest expression of hypochondria’s covert privileges.” And Kafka, of course.
Ultimately, the behavior of Hypochondria embodies and enacts its own subject matter. This became clear at the moment Rees mentions William Hazlitt’s 1815 essay “The Indian Jugglers.” Rees writes, “Hazlitt’s essay embraces the possibilities opened up by suspending the impulse to distinguish between instruction and entertainment, jest and earnest, the trifling and the miraculous. As if to be caught up in the enthusiasm of performance allows for a pleasurable, if temporary, loosening of the demand to answer what might really be a very tedious question: does it matter?” This sounds to me like an analog of Hypochondria.
[Published by Coach House Books on March 11, 2025, 230 pages, $18.95US/$24.95CAN paperback/
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on The Only Face, a photo book by Hervé Guibert, introduction translated by Christine Pichini
“I think that in my case, photography-wise, what’s interesting is my resistance to photography, the fractious, careful, suspicious way that I practice it,” wrote Hervé Guibert in his brief introduction to The Only Face (Le seul visage), his second and final photo book, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1984. At that time, Guibert, who died at age 36 in 1991 from AIDS, was preparing to leave his post at Le Monde for which he contributed reviews. If Guibert was reluctant, distrustful, and prudent about making photos, it was not because he found the medium itself to be corrupt or slippery in some way, but rather because his eye was alert for “beloved bodies” and beckoning faces – and signs of the transitory nature of his own life as a gay man. His mission as a photographer was “to bear witness to my love” – and his love entailed turbulence, self-criticism, and a trembling wonderment that called for pause.
Commenting on Guibert’s Ghost Image (Univ. of Chicago, 2014), I wrote, “Ghost Image regards the photographic image as a body that will not yield the satisfactions of meaning despite the traces of actuality that seem to reside there.” In his short piece “Photo Souvenir (East Berlin),” he made all of this explicit while looking at an image of “N,” writing, “I examine this face in vain, I can’t bring it any closer to the face I knew, I can’t reconstruct it. Yet I know that that face, the real one, is going to disappear completely from my memory, driven out by the tangible proof of the image.” Despite this dysphoria, Guibert insisted in Ghost Image, “Photograph only those closest to you, your parents, your brothers and sisters, your lover. The emotional antecedent will carry the picture along with it. End of a long day. Cold beer. How can you speak of photography without speaking of desire? The image is the essence of desire and if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory.” As Anthony Huberman has noted, Guibert’s remarks were made concurrently with studies by Barthes and Foucault that regarded the photograph as “the theoretical object par excellence.” Barthes’ philosophy of the image had influenced but couldn’t entirely satisfy Guibert.
In the Magic Hour Press reissue of The Only Face, the 55 photographs, which were taken in Italy, Spain, Poland, Budapest, East Berlin, Prague and New York, are presented in their original order – and from the first image, Guibert’s intentionality is evident. In “The friend,” a forceful hand extends into the space of the image from the left of the lens towards the center of a male chest as if the hand were the viewer’s; the hand seems to be stopping the man in his tracks perhaps in order to feel the lungs respiring, the heart beating – or to halt an advance for contemplation or safety’s sake. But there are also serendipitous images – shadowy figures, domestic interiors, self-referential fragments. Each photo is titled.
The title photo, “The only face,” embodies Guibert’s anticipation and discovery of a sudden connection with a solitary figure. (Magic Hour Press does not make it available to the media.) The camera is situated at the rear of an audience, peering over the heads of darkened heads. The upper half of the shot is a blurry whiteness vaguely sketching the front of the room. And there, between two heads turned away from the lens, is a tiny face, a woman with dark hair.
[Published by Magic Hour Press on May 27, 2025, unpaginated, $30.00 paperback, special edition casebound $75.00, 17x22cm]
To read Ron Slate’s review of Guibert’s Ghost Image (2014), click here.
