POETRY FOR THESE TIMES
Poetry For These Times A MASQUE OF REASON, by Robert Frost. Henry Holt. $2. ROBERT FROST has celebrated his 70th birthday with a challenging poem. It is a dramatic conversation about the nature of...
...It takes place in the bosom of the family, so to speak, in the purest desert and relaxed atmosphere of eternity...
...Job asks the questions in the everyday language and with the country common sense that Frost has used before in his dramatic poems about New Englanders...
...It is a dramatic conversation about the nature of God and the universe...
...A combination of Frost's talent and insight has made this a rare poem...
...God answers with the rather stuffy annoyance of a Harvard professor who is asked a question that has been definitely answered a long time ago by the best authorities, so why should he be troubled again...
...Humor is combined with a great learning and humanity...
...Job's wife has her predecessors in Frost's poetry too...
...But he brings back the riddles to the human beings who first posed them...
...Job, his wife, God, and Satan are the participants in the discussion...
...A resume of what is said sounds heavy going...
...Her feminist impatience with the men's inconclusive "general ideas and abstract principles'' makes her the most quotable woman of the year...
...Frost handles an incredible amount of complicated religious and philosophical enigmas...
...It is a book to be offered hopefully to these times deadened long by a narrow political and economic consideration of human beings.—M.R.B...
Vol. 9 • June 1945 • No. 25
