Not surprisingly for “one acquainted with the night,” Robert
Frost cultivated a lifelong penchant for dark sayings. These
sayings included aphorisms and maxims, apothegms and
proverbs, wise saws and the occasional bon mot, alongside
interjections, exclamations, and guffaws, interrupted
thoughts and broken utterances. They were dark because they
riddled, sometimes as much by their sound as by their
content. Many, of course, made their way into his finest
poems. “Good fences make good neighbors” is the obvious
example, but the closer you look the more you find. So strong
is this tendency in Frost’s poetry that even his less
aphoristic lines have taken on a lapidary sheen. “And miles
to go before I sleep,” though hardly an aphorism, is often
intoned as though it were. These dark sayings of our own
Heraclitus of New Hampshire have by now become so familiar
as to appear immemorial folk wisdom. And yet, clad in
cunning homespun though they are, they conceal contradictory
flashes of wit as well as mischief. Like the milkweed pod
with its “bitter milk,” of which he wrote so memorably,
their rough husks hold hidden, and sometimes ticklish,
silks.

Now, with the publication of his Notebooks, we can gauge
just how fundamental such fragmented wisdom was to Frost’s
own peculiar cast of mind.[1]
The effect, over hundreds of
pages and decade after decade of a very long life, is one of
scattered profusion. The present volume, edited by Robert
Faggen, reproduces, in “facsimile transcription,” all