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In Robert Frost's poem "New Hampshire," published during the heyday of William Jennings Bryan's crusade against the theory of evolution, a friendly farmer reports that "The matter with the Mid-Victorians / Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin."
Frost's little joke is as much on Charles Darwin as it is on the state of New Hampshire: the farmer's conflation of Darwin and the prizefighter John L. Sullivan is the poet's wry comment on Darwin's violent universe. In fact, as we learn from Lawrance Thompson's massive biography of the poet, Frost's sympathies during the Scopes Monkey Trial lay with Bryan; he thought Clarence Darrow lacked the imagination necessary to solve the riddle of human existence.
Yet Frost, as Robert Faggen demonstrates, was more troubled by Darwin than such mockery might suggest. Critics have made much of Frost's interest in the theories of spiritual evolution offered by William James and Henri Bergson. But it was Darwin's own bleak naturalism, Faggen insists, that cast the longest shadow on Frost's poetry. As Faggen reminds us, one of Frost's favorite books was The Voyage of the Beagle, which, along with The Origin of Species, he first read while studying geology at Harvard with Nathaniel Shaler, one of many turn-of-the-century modernists who attempted to harmonize evolutionary theory with Christian faith in a grand vision of human progress. But Frost would have none of Shaler's utopianism, finding in Darwin, Faggen suggests, the same ancient wisdom he found in Job: the wisdom of meaningless suffering, of necessary limitation, of human ignorance.
Critics who read Frost as a religious poet—notably Dorothy Judd Hall and, more recently, Ed Ingebretsen, SJ - -also acknowledge these themes as part of Frost's "grammar of belief." As far as Faggen is concerned, however, reading Darwin made it all but impossible for Frost to believe in a benevolent deity. In his concluding paragraph, Faggen quotes Frost's famous couplet "Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee / And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me," commenting that "the little jokes are the poems, which mock or question God's power or morality; the big joke is that a creature came to exist that torments itself about a God that either doesn't exist or is the demiurge in a wilderness of matter." Talk about a Hobson's choice.
The problem with Faggen's grim conclusion is that it doesn't square with his own account of Frost's sense of the limits of human intelligence. As a student at Harvard, Faggen reminds us, Frost heard the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce lecture on the "paradox of evolution," namely, that a creature evolved from matter should develop the capacity for knowledge in the first place. (Recently, the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has developed Royce's paradox into an "evolutionary argument against naturalism": if evolution is true, then naturalism is improbable, since our survival as a species can be explained without the assumption that we form true beliefs—including true belief in naturalism.) If Darwin taught Frost to be skeptical about human intelligence, as Faggen insists, wouldn't Frost have kept the door to religious faith open?
Of course, one might question Faggen's conclusion and still agree that "much of the tension and power of Frost's poetry derives from his lifelong engagement with implications of science in general and of Darwin in particular." The question is, How much? How much of Frost's oeuvre is illuminated by reference to Darwin?
There are, to begin with, a few poems in which Darwinism is the explicit subject, notably "Accidentally on Purpose":
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