Politics, Prayer, and Poetry

"There is an old proverb that says a man who doesn’t love poetry when he is young will not know how to pray when he is old." Frost's poetry, prayer, and politics.

From Crisis

By Sean Fitzpatrick

Prayer and poetry are mysteriously similar, though: words seeking wisdom, spiritual interaction, and renewal; both springing from man’s desire to live forever.

When the world gets quarrelsome, many turn to prayer—which is fortunate; but not many turn to poetry—which is unfortunate. Prayer and poetry are mysteriously similar, though: words seeking wisdom, spiritual interaction, and renewal; both springing from man’s desire to live forever. There is an old proverb that says a man who doesn’t love poetry when he is young will not know how to pray when he is old.

There is a clarity that poetry can bring to the quarrels of the political sphere that can be conducive to peace—or, at least, peace of mind. Robert Frost, born on March 26, 1874, is among the preeminent American poets. Though he was born 151 years ago, certain of his poems have a prophetic ring regarding America’s position today on the world stage and the quarrels that constantly threaten peace.

Before tempers flared in the now-infamous Oval Office argument between embattled Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and President Donald Trump, Trump said, “I am allied with the world.” And, given his track record, Trump does want peace. But the world always fights back against the alliances that strive for peace. Whether liberal or conservative, whether Republican or Democrat, whether democratic or socialist, there is no diplomacy that can silence or settle the ongoing quarrel with the world. 

And that’s where Robert Frost comes in. The quarrels of the world, and they are everywhere, resonate with one of Frost’s most famous lines from one of his most political poems, “The Lesson for Today,” where he writes:

I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

Frost had a lover’s quarrel with the world, and so do we all. As much as we would be allied to it, as Trump said, as much as we love the world, that love is only ever partially requited. But the world is all we have for now, and as Frost put it in “Birches,” “Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” But no political system or national leader or economic model can fully satisfy our dissatisfaction with the human condition. We will always be disappointed and sad at the shortcomings of the political world.

There’s always something to be sorry for,
A sordid peace or an outrageous war.

Robert Frost was a politically-minded poet, calling himself a lifelong Democrat who had been “a little unhappy since 1896,” when Grover Cleveland ended his second term and Democrats, according to Frost, began a descent into what he called “sentimental international pacifism.” But for all his political leanings or opinions, Frost believed in a time to talk, in mending walls and good neighbors, in the American Republic and Constitution, in freedom of originality and initiative, and in the expectation that the world will leave us unsatisfied. 

In his unsystematic yet sophisticated way, Frost thought America should be humbler in its global dealings, as seen in a politically-meditative poem written to his friend Louis Untermeyer in 1944:

…Talk is our ally.
Don’t bother me: I have no pull with Arabs.
I am no Lawrence of Arabia.
I am so sick of all the vexing questions
This war has raised about our duty to resist
With force of armament on our allies
Being as just as we expect to be
To small fry nations and minorities, 
I wouldn’t much care if we never had
Another war. I vow I wouldn’t care.
By way of bidding politics farewell,
And speaking of great nations, look at us (US)
The mighty upstart, full of upstart people
Or Shoe-string Starters as I like to call them.
Where have we come from in these hundred years
Up to a place beside the mightiest?
By what traits—virtues and propensities?
All the democracy in me demands
Is that I get surprised at where men come from.
I am not susceptible to stories
Of princes of democracy like Lee
And the two Roosevelts who were never forced
To pay their way through school by mowing lawns.

We can only imagine what Frost would have thought of the upstart Trump, who never mowed lawns either. Frost’s view of politics was as nuanced as his view of human nature. He was skeptical of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” as a maudlin economic solution out of the Great Depression, and he no doubt would have been skeptical of Trump’s “America First” approach as well. 

Trump is more than likely the bull our china shop needs (and deserves). But discerning Americans, or “Old Testament Christians” like Frost, see beyond strong-arm posturing—like the spat that took place in the Oval Office or the “trade war” that drove Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to resign—to show forcibly that the liberal days of Biden are over (thank God) with the dawn of DOGE. Frost hoped to see America “make a personality of our nationality” and that it might be to the country’s credit. Trump certainly is a personality.

A New Englander, Robert Frost appreciated the “the liberal ease of democracy” and thought “democracy with all its faults is the world’s best bet till the people’s virtue all leaches out of them.” And leach out they do, as with liberals whom Frost considered hypocrites who never took their own side in a quarrel. 

Though no Republican, Frost believed that conservatism was a political attitude that transcended Right and Left ideology—that being a conservative meant acknowledging the limitations of human systems and human nature. No administration, no system of government, no political party can sweep away the aberrations of humanity and society.

Frost’s poetry reflects that vital conservative objectivity, that courage to be obedient to the real. As Catholic professor R.V. Young wrote, “Robert Frost’s poetry is conservative not because of his voting record or party affiliation but because it offers an honest vision of the reality of human experience that all politics must respect.” 

From another Catholic academic, Peter J. Stanlis: “[Frost’s] poetry and prose expresses a characteristically American sensibility, a conservative synthesis of faith in individuals and people at large with a belief in self-government under constitutional law and limited power in government.” And part of that respect and that faith is the acknowledgment that there is no solution to war and death. Or as Frost put it, “The groundwork of all faith is human woe.”

Like President Trump, Catholics want peace; but, as Frost reminds us through poetry, there will never be peace. We want security, but there will never be security on this side of God’s grace. We want prosperity, but all we will ever have is the question of “what to make of a diminished thing,” from Frost’s “The Oven Bird.”

The political power plays, the invasions and rebuttals, the quarrels of Congress will never cease. Russia’s double-dealing, Ukraine’s vulnerability, Israel’s offensive, Palestine’s outrage, and America’s power has ever framed the fraught story of the modern political animal, and it always will. We love the world, but it will quarrel with us to the day we die, as those very words on Frost’s tombstone in Vermont say of him. 

But nothing weathers a quarrel like humility. When Robert Frost was asked to present a poem at JFK’s inauguration in 1961, he wrote a long, rather grandiloquent poem about a bright new America. It closes with:

It makes the prophet in us all presage 
The glory of a next Augustan age 
Of a power leading from its strength and pride, 
Of young ambition eager to be tried, 
Firm in our free beliefs without dismay, 
In any game the nations want to play. 
A golden age of poetry and power 
Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.

But when the 86-year-old Frost was unable to read the poem he wrote for the occasion on Capitol Hill due to the glare of the winter sun, he recited his (far better) poem “The Gift Outright” from memory instead—which is about the profound surrender and humility of nation-makers. 

Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

While to some “The Gift Outright” chimes with resurfacing ideas of manifest destiny or theories of systemic racism, it also praises the history and hardship of immigrants and the sacrifice of those who made America brave and free. It is solemn and salient—all dispositions we the people should assume at this tense and turbulent moment in American diplomacy. 

The quarrels that are tearing the world apart leave a bitter, overwrought mood. We are all having a lover’s quarrel with the world. And in that quarrel, America should do its utmost to avoid bloodshed and prevent injustice, and do so with gift-giving dignity, diplomacy, and prayer—and a little poetry too, for soul-quieting perspective for those who put not their trust in princes. Giving Frost the last word:

Earth’s a hard place in which to save the soul,
And could it be brought under state control,
So automatically we all were saved,
Its separateness from Heaven could be waived;
It might as well at once be kingdom-come.
(Perhaps it will be next millennium.)