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Title: Robert Frost
A study in sensibility and good sense
Author: Gorham B. Munson
Release date: March 1, 2026 [eBook #78076]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: George H. Doran Company, 1927
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78076
Credits: Sean – @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT FROST ***
THE MURRAY HILL BIOGRAPHIES
ROBERT FROST
[Illustration: _Photo by Doris Ulmann_
Robert Frost]
ROBERT FROST
_A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense_
By
GORHAM B. MUNSON
_Author of_ “WALDO FRANK: A STUDY”
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ON MURRAY HILL : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ROBERT FROST
--A--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
HART CRANE
in memory of many
enthusiastic conversations
about poetry
CONTENTS
I “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN” 11
II “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC” 21
III “A BOY’S WILL” 27
IV “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” 32
V “NEW HAMPSHIRE” 36
VI “PAN WITH US” 58
VII “INTO MY OWN” 69
VIII “A SENSIBILITIST” 87
IX “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL” 99
APPENDIX A [Selected British Opinion
on Robert Frost] 117
APPENDIX B [Bibliographical] 125
APPENDIX C [Robert Frost on Education] 127
[Index] 131
I. “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN”
_“But don’t you think we sometimes make too much
Of the old stock? What counts is the ideals
And those will bear some keeping still about.”_
New England is our association with the name of Frost, and we are no
doubt surprised when told that it is a Scandinavian name. Yet there
are today many persons in Denmark who hearing this sound uttered
behind their backs would turn with that sudden interest aroused by the
unexpected pronouncing of one’s name. Certain of the remote ancestors
of these Danish Frosts may have roved into England in the ninth century
A.D., or it may have been Saxons bearing the name of Forst, which is
the Saxon form of Frost, who invaded England in the fifth century A.D.
and founded the line of English Frosts. In either case, the Frosts were
settled there before the Norman Conquest and the name had begun to
accrete sturdy Anglo-Saxon associations about its slightly harsh sound.
In 1135 Henry Frost, the probable ancestor of the American progenitor
of one line of Frosts,[1] founded the Hospital of the Brothers of St.
John the Evangelist at Cambridge, England, and this foundation became
in 1509 St. John’s College, for which reason it is said that “Henry
Frost ought never to be forgot, who gave birth to so noted a seat of
religion, and afterwards to one of the most renouned seats of learning
in Europe.”
The son of Henry Frost bore the name of the subject of this Study and
wore a coat of arms which reads like a prophetic curio of the poetry of
his namesake. “Argent. A chevron azure between two thistles slipped in
chief, and a hind’s head erased in base proper. Crest: a grey squirrel
sejant, semée of estoiles sable, collared and chained or, and holding
between the paws a hazel branch fructed also proper.”
Until the early seventeenth century the Frost family spread deeper and
deeper into the sub-soil of English life. Then came the migrations of
the Puritans, crowded by unfavorable forces at home and drawn from afar
by the promises of New England. In an old piece of writing one can
read:
“Nicholas, Marride Bertha Cadwalla,
Jan’y 1630 ffrom Tavistock, Devon
Bertha Cadwalla, Borne ffeb’y ye 14th, 1610
Aprill Arrived in
Sailed for America June, 1634, in ye year
In ye Shipp Wulfrana, Alwin Wellborn, Master
ffrom Plimouth, Devon.”
It was this Nicholas Frost who founded the line of which Robert Frost
is a representative of the ninth generation. In the interval New
England incorporated itself into the tissue, blood and bone of these
“generations of men” ultimately to become song from the lips of Robert
Frost.
The history of the early generations of this line is threaded into
the history of certain old villages in Maine--Kittery, Eliot, Wells,
York--located close to the present New Hampshire border, and today
there is an inscription on Ambush Rock where Major Charles Frost was
slain, Frost’s Hill is still known as such, and the Frost Garrison
House, erected in 1733, is the only garrison house that remains in Old
Kittery. Everett S. Stackpole, the patient chronicler of _Old Kittery
and Her Families_, hints that a little mythological moss may have
gathered about the early Frost settlers, and believes that Nicholas
Frost was on the coast of Maine as early as 1632. He surmises that he
returned to Tiverton, Devonshire, England, collected his wife and two
sons, John and Charles, and came back to America in 1634.
Nicholas Frost appears to have landed at Little Harbor, now Rye, New
Hampshire, and to have lived there for at least a year, since there is
record of a daughter Anna being born there in April, 1635. Within the
next two years he removed to the head of Sturgeon Creek, in what is now
Eliot, Maine, where he made his home until his death in 1663.
His vicissitudes and achievements were of a typical pioneer character.
He acquired a fairly large acreage of land, served as one of the first
selectmen of Kittery, signed with his son a petition to Oliver Cromwell
(signed with his mark, a combination of N and F, for this ancestor of
a distinguished poet was illiterate), and lost his wife and fifteen
year old daughter, Anna, to the Indians. It is said that they were
captured on July 4, 1650 “and taken to a camp at the mouth of Sturgeon
Creek. Nicholas and his son Charles were at York at the time, and on
their return attempted to rescue them but were unsuccessful; Charles,
however, killed a chief and a brave. The next day Charles, his father
and some of the neighbors went back to the camp but were too late. The
camp was deserted, only the bodies of Bertha and Anna were found there.
They were buried near the old Garrison.”[2] Stackpole finds some of the
details of this story scarcely credible, but it seems clearly a fact
that Bertha Frost and her daughter were killed by the Indians.
Charles Frost, already mentioned several times in this narrative,
became locally celebrated and until _North of Boston_ was imported from
England in 1915 was probably the most famous of the American Frosts.
He was noted as an Indian fighter, and bitterly hated by his foes who
finally killed him from an ambush on July 4, 1697. The hatred of the
Indians for him went to greater lengths: they opened his grave the
night after the burial and carried the body to the top of Frost’s hill
where it was suspended upon a stake. The reason for this vengeance lay
in an incident that occurred in September, 1676, following the close
of King Philip’s War, an incident that is sometimes described in the
colonial and border war histories of our early settlers.
The Pennacooks, some of the neighboring Abenakis, and a number of
“strange Indians” (alleged to be King Philip’s men) assembled, having
been given an express pledge of safety, at Dover, New Hampshire, for
a friendly conference with the whites. A sham fight was instituted
and using this as a pretext the whites seized four hundred Indians.
Of these three hundred were sent to Boston where a few were hanged
and the rest sold into slavery. It is said that Major Waldron and
Captain (later Major) Frost joined this stratagem with reluctance,
but the Indians held them responsible for what they reasonably deemed
an atrocious and treacherous deed, bided their time and killed Major
Waldron thirteen years later and Major Frost twenty-one years after,
causing one Joseph Storer in Wells to write: “It hath pleased God to
take a way; Major Frost, the Indians waylad him Last Sabbath day as he
was cominge whom from meeting at night; and killed him and John Heards
wife and Denes Downing ... it is a Great Loss to the Whole Province;
and Espesely to his fameley ... mistress Frost is very full of sory;
and all her Children.”
His death is said to have been the last English blood shed in New
England in King William’s War and inspired a memento in verse which
runs:
The last of that grand triumvirate,
Unflinching martyrs of a common fate,
Waldron and Plaisted and Frost, these three,
The flower of New England chivalry.
The descendants of this component of the flower of New England
chivalry occupied themselves in divers ways but kept their home-roots
within a radius of fifty miles of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His son,
the Hon. John Frost, married a sister of Sir William Pepperell who
captured Louisburg in 1745 and himself served His Majesty for a time
as Commander of the man-of-war _Edward_. Later he became a merchant
of Newcastle, New Hampshire, and a member of the Governor’s Council.
His son, William, was also a merchant of Newcastle, but apparently
not as conspicuous as his grandfather or father. The line recovers
its warlike tinge in his son, Lieutenant William Frost, an officer in
the Continental Army during the American Revolution and a resident
of Andover, Massachusetts. The sixth generation gives us Samuel
Abbot Frost, who remained in New Hampshire most of his life and was
the father of four children, among them William Prescott Frost, the
grandfather of Robert, who moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts.
For a time William Prescott Frost aspired to be a well-dressed
young blood, but New England thrift and respectability erased these
fashionable yearnings and he became instead a saver of the margins
of his income and a local pillar of respectability. He wrested a
competency from his job as overseer in a Lawrence mill and was
naturally somewhat baffled by the drifting and poetic tendencies of his
young grandson, probably never more than when he proposed to Robert,
then aged eighteen, that he should take one year to try out his poetry
and then, if that did not meet with success, why, there were plenty of
other worthy pursuits. The reply was: “Give me twenty years!” And it
was to be exactly twenty years before _A Boy’s Will_ was published in
London.
But for all his respectability there was a liberal vein in William
Prescott Frost: otherwise he could not have tolerated the notions and
conduct of his wife. For she was one of the earliest feminists in
America. This lady, remembered as one whose stateliness was enhanced
by an habitual nodding of the head as if with dignified resentment
against the ascendency of the male, decided one day that house-work
was not exclusively the business of women and called for a division of
household tasks. And her husband acquiesced, so that, turn and turn
about, one performed the services of the establishment whilst the
other enjoyed leisure.
This couple had a son and a daughter, and named the boy William
Prescott after the father. He was sent to Harvard, the first of the
line to receive college training, and it was hoped that he would become
a lawyer, a hope that his grandparents later cherished for Robert
Frost. But William Prescott Frost, Jr., revolted against what seven
generations of Frosts had assisted in forming: he revolted so strongly
against New England that his flight ended only when he reached San
Francisco.
But before recording that grimly energetic career, a pause is due,
since “what counts is the ideals and those will bear some keeping
still about,” to ask concerning the congruity of Robert Frost with
his ancestry. What is noticeable first of all in this stock is
its closeness to the soil. It was given, not to wandering, but to
settling, to making a sturdy fight with local conditions, to seeing
matters through on the terms of the environment. That environment
happened to be, in its wider sense, successively colonial America,
the consolidation and growth of the United States, and the beginnings
of the industrial era. In a smaller sense, it was New England and
the family is dyed in the older qualities of both America and its
small northeastern corner--hardihood, resistance, decency and kinship
to the soil, to mention a few. One is tempted to make a second
generalization. The way the Frosts trod was the middle road. In their
family there is no touch of the eccentric or extravagant or fanatic.
They were church-going, but not zealots of puritanism. They served in
the army and navy when occasion pressed, but they were not soldiers
of fortune. They were small business men and local officeholders, but
made no unusual motions in either rôle. What stands out seems to be
a temperamental conservatism, adapting itself to changes in history
and environment, but never reactionary or radical--until we come upon
a variant in the father of Robert Frost. But Robert Frost is heir to
the progressive conservatism and the closeness to the locality of the
forebears of his father.
II. “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC”
Shortly after the Civil War an immigrant ship from Scotland was coming
up the Schuylkill River. It had taken weeks to cross the Atlantic and
now it was close enough to be gaily bombarded by peaches thrown from
the shore. The passengers caught the strange fruit in their hands and
learned to eat it and the taste was welcome after so protracted a spell
of ship’s provisions.
There was a fifteen year old girl passenger from Edinburgh who did not
take part in the pastime. She came of a lowland Scotch family, a family
of seafarers: her father, a sea captain, had been lost at sea and so
also had her brother. Bred to patience, she now sat quietly watching.
But one of the men came over and dropped the peach he had caught into
her lap. “You should eat it,” he explained, and she replied, gazing at
the fruit, “It’s too bonnie to eat.”
This Scotch girl was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, to live with an
uncle in business there. A few years later she came to Lewiston,
Pennsylvania, to teach school. And here it was that Isabelle Moody
encountered William Prescott Frost, Jr., on his rebound from New
England. Young Frost had his eye on other projects of ambition, but for
the time he too was a school teacher in Lewiston. They were married,
and the husband went on to San Francisco to work on a Democratic
newspaper, the _Bulletin_. A little later he wrote his wife that the
windows of the newspaper office had been shot out but he was unharmed.
The paper had, it seems, printed derogatory statements about some stock
and those who were interested in it had resorted to gun play. Into this
smoldering and sometimes violent community Isabelle Moody followed
her husband and there on March 26, 1875, a son, christened Robert Lee
Frost, was born.
The christening tells the story of the father’s political sympathies.
Too young to fight in the Civil War, the boy had been an intense
copperhead and had meditated on somehow slipping South to join the
Confederates. Now he was a States’ Rights man and once he showed Robert
a map of the United States and divided it into five nations into which
he predicted the country would sometime split.
The father liked San Francisco. He liked the spirit of plunging which
diffused through the community and he was himself always playing the
stock market. He liked to spend money liberally. And he liked the
threat of grimness which one experienced by simply observing that men
wore revolvers with the frequency New Yorkers today wear sticks.
One Sunday afternoon Robert and several other children were permitted
to walk along the beach with his father and a few associates. A bottle
was found and stopped up and tossed into the waves. Out came the
revolvers of all the men and they fired at the floating target. It was
no more uncommon than throwing stones.
One Christmas Eve Robert, his sister and his mother returned to their
house quite late. They were about to prepare for bed when his mother
asked Robert if he had locked the door. He answered that he had, but
it at once became indisputable that he had not, for the door was heard
to open without benefit of key and someone, to their consternation,
entered. Mrs. Frost rushed her children into a room, locked its door,
shooed them under a table, and extracted a revolver from a drawer.
“I’ll shoot if you come further!” she spoke with a quaver. There was no
answer, and she repeated her threat. Then Mr. Frost’s laugh was heard,
relieving a tension that was likely often to seize San Franciscans of
that period.
On the Fourth of July the plunging editor broke loose. It was his day
and it was neither safe nor sane. An old fashioned celebrator, he made
the greatest racket possible, set fire to outhouses and destroyed minor
properties. He went to the limit on political celebrations, too. In
politics or the stock market he would soon make a lucky stroke if he
played hard enough. Then after success had burgeoned, he would take
care of that consumption that threatened him. He would take a trip to
“the Islands”; that is, to Hawaii, the favored resort of that time for
consumptives. In the meantime he drank liquor to keep up his pace, he
drank warm blood at the stockyards to alleviate the disease, and he
did all the celebrating possible when his party triumphed. Robert was
a celebrant too, riding, costumed, on floats in the big parades or
trudging in torchlight processions until he was sent home to bed from
weariness.
But the political ambitions yielded only small fruits. Mr. Frost did
go as a delegate to one Democratic National Convention and he was
city campaign manager in 1884 when Cleveland was elected President.
He was defeated, however, when he ran for election as tax collector
of San Francisco. In that campaign the boy Robert was his constant
companion--his job was to visit the saloons with his father’s campaign
cards and to impale these on the ceiling by flinging upwards a card
with a tack through it and a silver dollar beneath the tack which
worked as a sort of flying mallet--and this, one fancies, remains to
this day the most active participation in politics of Robert Frost.
In 1885 consumption won the contest for the body of William Prescott
Frost and silenced its teeming hopes and plans, its explosive moods
and tense restraints. His wife who had suffered for weeks at a time
from his gloomy silences and his son who had suffered from his grim
severities mourned for him--and found that his extravagance had led
to letting his insurance lapse. It was necessary to return to the
New England the dead man had hated, to seek refuge with Robert’s
grandparents in Lawrence.
So the little boy relinquished the tiny chicken farm he had started
in the backyard at San Francisco and on the long ride sat beside his
surviving parent, both sunk in memories of the grim dignity of the
deceased, he who had never worn anything but a top hat, who had always
been drily polite without the least ingratiation, and yet had been
pathetic, too, since he had been _terrible_ to himself. If anything
planted tragedy in Robert Frost, it must have been, one surmises, the
vision of his father, friend on the one hand of Buckley, the notorious
blind boss of San Francisco, and on the other of Henry George with whom
for a brief time he managed a single tax newspaper.
Perhaps from his father he acquired a certain recklessness of
temperament, less extreme, but discernible in the drifting ways of his
life: his father was energetically imprudent and the world, one knows,
judges the son gently imprudent in the affairs of practical living. But
the presence of the mother is also implied in the poetry. Her Scotch
blood, transmitted, courses perhaps in the canny good sense, in the
slightly oblique humor, and above all in the thriftiness of the poetic
productions. She was herself an occasional versifier and reviewed books
for her husband’s newspaper. In religion she was a Swedenborgian, and
these facts are sufficient to suggest that she probably awakened an
emotional area in her son that the father left untouched, that area
that was later to fructify into a new contribution to American poetry.
III. “A BOY’S WILL”
Robert and his sister had been trained by their father to no love
of New England. Circumstance, however, had now deposited them among
the despised children of this section, and for the first time they
saw pennies. They made up a little game. First, they would hold up
a nickel and say, “San Francisco!” Then they would exhibit a penny
and scornfully pronounce, “Boston!” But this childish snobbism soon
vanished as they became more at home in the East.
Robert received the usual schooling and in high school clearly
outstripped his class. He was apparently in full possession of
valedictorian honors as graduation neared when a rival emerged coming
rapidly forward from a lower class. The rival was a Lawrence girl,
a descendant of the Whites of Acton who fought at Concord and of
Peregrine White on the _Mayflower_. Elinor White was completing her
high school course in two and a half years, thus catching up with
Robert’s class, and when the averages were computed it was found that
she had tied him for the honor of valedictorian. It was decided,
nevertheless, that Robert Frost should deliver the address, while on
the graduation program the names of Elinor Miriam White and Robert
Frost should appear together as holders of the office. This happened
to forecast the future, for the boy and girl, already friends, were
married in October of 1895 and their names have ever since been joined
in a union of singular idyllic beauty.
Another courtship was developing during the same phase of Robert
Frost’s life which was also to ripen into a lifelong devotion, and that
was the courting of the Muse of Poetry. Before he left San Francisco,
he had begun a serial story. It concerned the doings of a lost and
forgotten tribe living in a ravine no one of the outside world knew
about. After he came east, he continued this serial from time to time,
filling in the details of scenery and inhabitants.
Here we strike a master-image, one that constantly recurs in Frost’s
life, for aside from the varieties of it to be found in his poems--for
example, in such lines as “Me for the hills where I don’t have to
choose” and the first two stanzas of _Into My Own_--the poet has
confessed that often he puts himself to sleep by dreaming of this
inaccessible and sometimes happy tribe defending its canyon. One hopes
that this recurrent and dominant image will not be subjected to the
ingenious but suspect leaps to conclusions of the psycho-analysts.
Better far the slower method of the behaviorist who is in closer accord
with the commonsense of man which tells us that we do not thoroughly
know people until we have seen them in many situations over a lengthy
span of seasons.
When fourteen Robert Frost began to open books with a new zest.
Hitherto he had been content to have his mother read to him and
his favorite story had been _Tom Brown’s School Days_ which
characteristically he had never finished--because he could not bear
the thought that he had completed the tale. But now he adventured for
himself among books. He read with eager responsiveness all of William
Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to Shelley’s _Alastor_
and Keats’ _Endymion_ but found them too much at the time for his
interests and resources. Edward Rowland Sill and his Emersonianism was
better adapted to his requirements, and Frost still preserves a mild
respect for this obscured Connecticut poet who in his day carried the
fruitage of New England culture to the far West.
The following year at the age of fifteen Frost was himself trying out
his hand at writing verse, and two years later composed _My Butterfly_
which is one of the pieces in _A Boy’s Will_ and the earliest poem he
has kept. The first stanza is quoted not only to reveal its superiority
to the poetry of adolescence at large but to explain what followed its
publication.
Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Save only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.
The tentative submission of _My Butterfly_ to the _Independent_ had
brought a prompt note of acceptance and a check for fifteen dollars.
It happened that William Hays Ward, the editor, was a devout student
of Sidney Lanier, a fact that explains his liking for the musical
dexterity of this poem, but though he printed some of the subsequent
poems Frost mailed him, he never liked another as well. They were not
in the Lanier vein, and that was where a young poet should be working.
But Frost was obdurate then as now in these concerns, and Ward gave him
up.
So at seventeen Robert Frost was looking very much like the Frost
of today. He was dipping into literature apparently without system
but really reading for his own purposes as a nascent poet. He was
assimilating New England and coming close to an essence of its oldest
settlers in a girl who was to prove an ideal helpmate through the years
of unrecognition that lay ahead. He was displaying literary talent
well above the merely good for those of his years. And he was showing
a certain “set” character and pertinacity in finding out his own
direction in poetry. William Hays Ward tried to divert him and failed.
Twenty odd years later in London Ezra Pound at once recognized this
“set-ness” and did not try to instigate any changes.
IV. “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN”
From 1892 to 1900 life offered Robert Frost a variety of prospective
roads to travel. He refused them all after short reflection and
continued to be drawn toward the road he had already peered at as a
youth in high school. It was the road on which he should have Love and
Poetry as presiding deities.
At the age of twenty he married Elinor White. Her father was a retired
Universalist clergyman and she had attended a Universalist college, St.
Lawrence University. But in deference to the faith of Robert Frost’s
mother, they were married by a Swedenborgian minister.
Robert, too, had been away to college in 1892. It was Dartmouth: he
went at his grandfather’s behest: and he stayed only a few months.
Interests in him were beginning to ripen and somehow the college did
not touch these interests. That was all, and quietly he withdrew to
become for a time a bobbin boy in a Lawrence mill.
But he had no ambition to work up in a mill. That, like college, was a
road not taken. In his pocket he carried a volume of Shakespeare which
he read during rest intervals in the mill.
Somewhat restless, undecided and drifting those days were for him, and
perhaps they are best symbolized by a brief tramping tour which he made
down South.
His mother was taking pupils in her little school in Lawrence and
Robert instructed there for a while in Latin. Previously he had had
a spell of making shoes. Finally, he was the reporter-editor of the
Lawrence _Sentinel_, a weekly paper. Reporting, however, was against
his temperament. One had to be active to get the news, active and
prying into the reticences of people. Robert Frost, respecting his own
reticences, respected those of others, and the occupation was extremely
distasteful. More to his liking was a germinal “column” he inaugurated,
one into which he could insert vignettes he had written: the picture of
a ragged child coal-picker in a railroad yard, the picture of the stray
eagle who lit on the top of the American flag-pole of the Lawrence Post
Office until some hours later it was shot down to Frost’s indignation.
Marriage did not precipitate the problem of making a living. Making
a living merely continued to be a sort of hazy actuality about which
eventually something would be done. But as another preparatory step
to meeting this problem, Robert again tried college, again backed up
by his uncomprehending but sympathetic grandfather. This time it was
Harvard in the year 1897, and in the same class was another poet whose
work Frost was to like years later but whom he did not know at the
time. The other poet was Wallace Stevens.
Frost picked up something for himself during the two years he stayed
at Harvard. He improved his acquaintance with Latin and Greek and
particularly enjoyed reading Greek with a young instructor named
Babbitt who later went to Trinity College. The ancient classics were
much to his liking and it was about this time that he found in Virgil’s
_Eclogues_ and _Georgics_ the nourishment his emotional constitution
most craved. Philosophy lured him in a general way as it continues to
lure him. Santayana gave a course which he recalls with pleasure in the
“golden speech” and the “deliberate speed, majestic instancy” of the
exposition of this brilliant thinker.
But despite all this, college could not hold him to the end. There was
a man in Windham, New Hampshire, he had known in the interval between
Dartmouth and Harvard, a man named Charley Hall, whose speech had a
racy commonness, and the stimulus of this man’s talks was greater than
the correct speech of college instructors. On the basis of this homely,
shrewd and living talk, could not poetry be written by a good listener?
Frost deserted academic halls for his own peculiar university, a life
close to the soil among soil-tinged folk, listening to their turns of
thought and feeling and phrase.
Journalism, handicraft, teaching, factory work, college, all were to
be roads not taken, and in 1900 his grandfather was still pondering,
perhaps more than Robert, on what was to be the career of his grandson.
V. “NEW HAMPSHIRE”
Grandfather Frost reached a decision that to American poetry at any
rate was fortunate. With $1800 he purchased a farm at Derry, New
Hampshire, for his grandson and thither Robert Frost transported his
family in 1900. The family now numbered four: a son, Eliot, had been
born in 1896, and a daughter, Lesley, in 1899. Eliot, however, died in
the middle of 1900.
Derry, which is in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire almost
on a line northward from Lawrence to Kingston, New Hampshire, an old
birthplace of Frost’s ancestors, was apparently the right locality
for the nurturing of Robert Frost’s bents. Like a true New England
village it had its academy, Pinkerton Academy, standing on a hill
with Derry Village spread out below it. A mile away from that was
the comparatively recent “Depot” where most of the five thousand
inhabitants lived. But there was a breakage of character between the
village proper and the “Depot.” The latter was developing, rapidly
of course, along the lines of present-day industrial New England:
it had several shoe factories and foretold in its little way a new
and confused order of society. But Derry Village was then very much
as it had been in 1880. Its families were conservative and regarded
their religion and inherited culture very stolidly, entrenched in the
feeling that twenty or thirty years ago the satisfactory elevation in
religious thought and education had been achieved and now required only
maintenance. It had its local small scale industries, founded upon
Yankee inventiveness, particularly the Chase mill, a woodworking plant
which among other specialties turned out in large quantities the wooden
tags that nurserymen employ to identify their stock.
All this was right for Robert Frost: a settled rooted community, its
life persisting in the presence of an enveloping alien and noisy
industrialism which has not yet succeeded in totally smothering its
vitality, and the academy on the hill as a sign, however inadequate,
that culture should keep conservatism a little worried about the large
questions of life lest conservatism fall into complacency. “I believe
in tradition and accident and a bit of an idea bothering tradition,”
Frost once remarked years after the Derry period, and Derry itself
appears to have been a living pattern of this traditionalism affected
by accident and ideas.
Frost’s small farm was a couple of miles “down the turnpike.” Like
scores of other farms in Rockingham county it was a farm out of which
even a very experienced farmer would have had difficulty in extracting
a living. For Frost it was a downhill dogged battle. The unprolific
character of the soil was unfairly aided in its resistance to success
on the tiller’s part by the hay-fever which attacked Frost in the
middle of August each year and made him wretched for two months. In
addition, it was the child-bearing and rearing phase of his married
life. A son, Carol, born in 1902, a daughter, Irma, in 1903, and
another daughter, Marjorie, in 1905 naturally increased the strain of
his struggle.[3] In spite of all that, there was a good deal of play,
too: botanizing, making wood paths, inducting the children into outdoor
life. His farming neighbors, probably correctly, did not approve of
Frost’s methods (he could be caught milking the cows at ten at night in
order to sleep later in the morning) and the end of this venture came
in 1905 when he drove up to the butcher’s to make further purchases
on credit. The fattish butcher came brusquely out on the porch of his
store, cocked an appraising eye at Frost’s horse and inquired, none too
delicately, if anyone had a lien on it. Then Frost, with four children,
a rundown farm, and a bundle of unpublished poems (including _Black
Cottage_ which he had just written) on his hands, decided to apply for
a position at Pinkerton Academy.
If the farm had not grudgingly yielded him a living, it had done
something else; it had toughened his respect for nature, it had
disciplined him by its immalleability to aught but extremely hard
labor. It put, in short, a fibrous quality in his living which has been
expressed in the poetry.
It was almost literally with a poem that Robert Frost secured his
position at Pinkerton. The incident was this: he had been invited to
read a poem before the Men’s Club of the Central Congregational Church
at Derry. The reading aroused the interest of the Pinkerton trustees,
among them, John C. Chase, the head of the mill; and the pastor of the
church, Reverend Charles Merriam, used his influence in crystallizing
this interest into an offer. And so Robert Frost came to worry and
modify the traditional state of affairs at Pinkerton Academy during
the years 1906 to 1911.
The reports of eye-witnesses have a superior validity in biography as
well as in courts of law, and the author of this study is grateful to
Mr. John Bartlett of Boulder, Colorado, for the privilege of utilizing
portions of his letter on this period in Robert Frost’s life. Mr.
Bartlett wrote:
“I joined the class of 1910 in the fall of 1907, being rated then as
a member of the Junior Middle Class. Pinkerton had a student body of
one hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and its equipment consisted of
a modern brick building on a hill-top and facing to the east, and a
little lower on the hill the ‘old academy’ of wood, well preserved and
painted white.
“There were several fine old teachers, excellent representatives of
the school that believed that thoroughness and hard work were the
beginning and the conclusion of the educational process. Great store
was set by Latin which was taught by George W. Bingham, the stern and
aged principal, and by Greek in which Mary Parsons, maiden member of
a distinguished Derry Village (and New Hampshire, too) family, gave
instruction.
“The faculty was true to the good old Pinkerton tradition. The Academy
had been founded in the first years of the nineteenth century and
dedicated to the development of cultured Christian character. Old
rules governing the student body were still in effect. Card playing,
for example, was forbidden, and for a boy to escort a girl to and from
an entertainment was still a technical violation of ‘requirements.’
There were compulsory study hours and compulsory attendance at church.
Students must be in their homes at seven p.m. and not leave thereafter
except on Friday evening when grace was extended to ten p.m. and Sunday
evening when the students were expected to attend church services.
Once a week the principal called the roll of the assembled student
body and each student reported his record of the week, thus: ‘All the
requirements,’ ‘One exception, excused,’ ‘Two exceptions.’
“Most of the students came from homes within a radius of fifteen miles.
A great many were from farm families, while Derry ‘Depot’ sent the
children of factory workers. An Academy-owned dormitory housed the
majority of the few boarding students.
“I am sure that when I entered the Academy there was much faculty
hostility to Frost, and even among the older students there was some
also. I recall that the submission to Frost as the English teacher of
all prepared papers in an inter-class debate between Junior Middlers
and Seniors was objected to by the Senior team, a grossly offensive act
meriting disciplinary rebuke, but such did not follow. And I believe
that there were certain members of the faculty who had toward the new
English teacher almost a personal animosity.
“Frost came as the representative of new things, and there was
collision. He did not arrive at the Academy in time to participate
in the morning chapel exercises; he had no classroom; he defied
the Pinkerton tradition in the informality of his presence and the
free-and-easy way he handled his classes. The fact that he had no
college degree would, for a portion of the faculty, keep him forever
outside the circle. He was younger than nearly all the others. A dozen
things made him an ‘outsider.’ He looked it and acted it.
“The old order of things at Pinkerton went quickly. A new principal,
Ernest L. Silver (later principal of the New Hampshire State
Normal School), came in 1909. There were new teachers and new
subjects--agriculture, domestic science, and this and that. Pinkerton
in brief time was doing a lot of catching up. I believe that Frost’s
success with his English classes had a great deal to do with the
rapidity and completeness of this change.
“No greater departure from traditional Pinkerton teaching methods could
be conceived than those of Robert Frost. A boy of sixteen or seventeen
isn’t aware in respect to much of a teacher’s pedagogy beyond knowing
whether it pleases him or not. But, looking back, I believe I know the
first great difference between Frost and the other teachers. He had far
greater interest in the individual student. He had a way of manifesting
this, of asking questions and of making observations in a few words,
all the while getting closer to the boy in question. It was not a
professional self-conscious thing, but a desire from Frost’s heart to
get closer and learn more.
“A new member of one of his classes, I had handed in a single short
theme. Late one afternoon as a group of boys were passing a football
about on the athletic field, Frost came up. He was a frequent figure
on the athletic field and sometimes he would take off his coat and
‘make a bluff,’ as the boys put it, at playing. This afternoon he
happened to come near me. He asked several questions concerning
the Pawtuckaway Mountains where the ‘Devil’s Den’ about which I had
written was located. I answered them awkwardly: I was a shy boy. In a
matter-of-fact way he observed that I was a fellow who had ideas.
“That was all there was to the conversation, for a spinning ball came
my way, but I can still see Frost and the fall mud and the football
bucking machine and the boys on that afternoon. He seemed to show in
this conversation several hundred times the interest in me that other
teachers had.
“He really had this interest, I am sure, and it was not directed
toward me alone, but toward all his students. He asked them personal
questions, drew them out.
“In those days Frost was always asking questions of people. Not the
mechanical questions of politeness, but questions that would get at
things Frost was interested in ... and he was interested in a great
deal. If we took a winter walk toward Londonderry and met a logging
team, which stopped as we came abreast, there would be a conversation
right there. Frost would have the teamster talking about logging things
and horses and wood roads and such matters. He talked with his students
in somewhat the same way. There was always something to be learned
from these New Englanders, and Frost learned it.
“And he was interested in the boy’s problems of individuality.
Seemingly, he could like any sort of boy. He might not win a boy in the
first few months of his contact with him, but nearly always he won him
in the end.
“The most excited boy over an English paper I ever saw was Dave
Griffith, the athlete of ’10, a magnificent halfback and sprinter. He
had written on a sport subject and had earned commendation from Frost.
Breaking the study hour rule of the dormitory, Dave stealthily went
from room to room to announce grandly his accomplishment. Dave had a
haughty disregard for scholastic honors in general (few of which he
ever received), but he knew when he had something to be proud of.
“We had a boarding student in the Junior class, Arthur Eastman, who was
neither among the scholars on one hand nor the athletes on the other.
Arthur suddenly was famous for a four-line stanza which Frost was
commending to his classes. I believe the boy never again wrote a verse
which was praised. On the other hand, one of the older students who
turned out verse with great abundance and prided himself on his ability
received no approval whatever. The school knew that Frost considered
this student’s verse of no merit.
“Frost’s English classes were always ‘easy’ classes. Frost had none of
the taskmaster’s attitude, yet his classes did a great deal of work
and covered fully as much ground as any ordinary class. Any feeling
for literature displayed by a student was cultivated: any talent for
writing was nursed along. A few in each class were gradually developed
who could always be counted on for lively discussion. Very frequently
departures from the regular routine were made. Often, for example,
Frost, slumped down in his chair, would read to the class. And every
time a new _Critic_ was out, Frost would discuss it with his classes.
“The _Critic_ was the student publication, and it was better than it
had been for many years before Frost’s engagement. He let the boys and
girls run it largely themselves: faculty supervision of it was much
less than formerly. There was a good deal of comradeship between Frost
and the _Critic_ staff. Unconventional things occurred ... the _Critic_
files may contain at least one poem the distinguished authorship
of which is not generally known. I believe the _Critic_ sometimes
contained, because of his ‘hands off’ policy, things that he would not
have passed for publication. But he knew that his policy was right and
held to it.
“He was philosophical, too, when one of the honor members of the Senior
class, given liberty in connection with his Commencement essay not in
keeping with Pinkerton practice, read a paper at Graduation which was
a wretched failure. This boy had not been required to submit his essay
for faculty approval. And he messed the job, actually writing the final
paragraphs two hours before he was due on the platform. Frost remarked
later, ‘It sounded as though you had read one book or article and then
written your essay.’ That was all that was ever said between us, and it
was enough! Frost had divined the fact.
“Out of the English classes came during those years several plays
coached by Frost. In one year I remember we had Marlowe’s _Dr.
Faustus_, Milton’s _Comus_ and Yeats’ _The Land of Heart’s Desire_.
The plays were a success on both sides of the footlights. Frost liked
to have his fun as much as any of the students, and the rehearsals
brought us all together in a fine way. These plays were a new thing at
Pinkerton. The Academy had presented several of Shakespeare’s plays
since the century came in but no cognizance of other drama had been
taken.
“In 1909 the state began to be interested in Frost’s classes. He talked
at conventions, booked by Henry Morrison, the New Hampshire State
Superintendent. And from time to time educators visited our classes.
These convention talks were ordeals, and Frost always came back from
them in a condition of exhaustion. Once he made an experiment before
a talk given at Exeter, I believe. He put sharp pebbles in his shoes
and walked about for hours, painfully, hoping that physical pain would
alleviate the mental torture he was in. But it didn’t!
“The student body was with him one hundred per cent as the fall term of
1909 opened. There was a new order of things in the school and Frost
was recognized as a big figure.
“I do not recall just when it was that Frost first wrote a formula,
famous with his classes, upon a Pinkerton blackboard. He put forward
the following kinds of matter used for literary purposes:
Uncommon in experience--uncommon in writing.
Common in experience--common in writing.
Uncommon in experience--common in writing.
Common in experience--uncommon in writing.
The last was the kind of material to search for, he told us.
“We celebrated a football victory over our rival school, Sanborn
Seminary, in November, 1909, with a supper provided by the new domestic
science department. Frost was the hit of the evening with a string of
verses he put on the blackboard. This was one:
In the days of Captain John,
Sanborn Sem had nothing on,
Pinkerton, Pinkerton.
“A few of the boys spent considerable time with Frost out of school
hours. I remember a walk over the turnpike to Manchester twelve miles
away in the late afternoon, an hour spent in a bookstore, an oyster
stew, and then a ride home on the electric railway. Our conversation on
walks touched books only now and then. They might include reminiscences
of Frost’s early life, discussion of school affairs, aspects of farm
life in New Hampshire, some current news happening of importance, and
nearly anything else. If in passing a farmhouse the aroma of fried
doughnuts came out to us, Frost might propose that we buy some. Down
around the corner we might encounter a fern he hadn’t seen since he was
last in the Lake Willoughby region. And if darkness overtook us and
it was a favorable night for observation, Frost would be sure to take
at least five minutes to study the heavens and attempt to start our
astronomical education.
“There was always an abundance of conversation, but almost never any
argument. Frost never argued. He knew what he knew, and never had any
interest in arguing about it. In the same way he was always willing to
let others think what they wanted to think.
“He had a Woodrow Wilson sense of loyalty. I never knew a person who
was more sensitive to slights, rebuffs and acts of unfriendliness than
Frost or who seemed to carry the scar of them longer, and I have never
met one whose loyalty was more thoroughly of the lasting kind.
“I remember how I came back to Derry late in 1910, having left college
‘between two days,’ defeated and defiant, meeting disapproval and
condemnation. I was a boy getting hit by life and receiving no friendly
overtures when I needed them most. Frost heard I was back and walked
miles to see me and take me over the country roads for a talk. I
remember how a few months later he speeded me on my way to British
Columbia with a handshake and a look in the eye. There was a book at
that parting, Chesterton’s _Heretics_. I read it three times on the
way out. I remember letter after letter as I sought a way to fit in at
Vancouver, and the frequent letters as I finally started in newspaper
work. Letters all about me, my problems. That was what friendship meant
to Robert Frost, help to the maximum when a boy needed it.”
One year after John Bartlett graduated, the teacher who had impressed
him so strongly also left Pinkerton. The principal, Mr. Silver, had
been appointed head of the New Hampshire State Normal School at
Plymouth, New Hampshire, and as often happens in such cases he wished
to take the pick of his faculty with him. Frost went to Plymouth for
the school year 1911-1912, and while there formed a friendship with
a teacher in the high school, Sidney Cox, now assistant professor of
English at Dartmouth and editor of various texts. Professor Cox has
furnished certain notes on his memory of this year which, like those of
Mr. Bartlett, merit first hand presentation and thanks.
“I met Robert Frost,” says Professor Cox, “in the fall of 1911 at
a Normal School dance where both of us were against the wall. The
next day he came to the high school to ask me to go for a walk. I
went, and when I reached home I had felt from that one talk, as I had
never done before, what the real nature of poetry is. Scales had been
gently lifted off my eyes. After that came many walks, and long casual
whole-souled talks. Mr. Frost had no congenial colleagues with whom to
walk, and for both of us it was the first, and as it turned out, the
only year in Plymouth.
“I found that Mr. Frost was having exciting times teaching psychology,
that he wasn’t following any chart, but improvising his own courses,
and having the girls read real books. He made me interested in Plato’s
_Republic_ and Rousseau’s _Emile_ when he was in the midst of them
with one of his classes. He sometimes mentioned a student who seemed
exceptional, but he didn’t suppose he was making any great discoveries.
“Perhaps it was on the walk at the end of which Mr. Frost treated me
at the drug store to the delectable beverage of white grape juice
that he first made me realize the absurdity of letting students write
compositions on the adventures of a penny, and gave me a realizing
sense of the distinction between unconditioned speculation and creative
imagination. He didn’t put it in any such deadly abstract terms as
that. He told me that at Derry he had directed his students to write
about what was ‘common to experience but uncommon to expression.’
“Sometimes we talked incidentally about things I was likely to take up
in class. I remember his praising Matthew Arnold’s _Sohrab and Rustum_,
and critically admiring the craftsmanship in Mark Twain’s _The Jumping
Frog_, Stevenson’s _The Bottle Imp_, Hawthorne’s _Mr. Higginbotham’s
Catastrophe_, and H. G. Wells’ _The Country of the Blind_. He
invariably made me see something new. I first learned of Whitman from
him, and at the same time found out that he was what I should formerly
have considered objectionable and, without the point being formulated,
that it wouldn’t do to dismiss him because my taboo was infringed.
“One particularly beautiful snowy walk took us through an evergreen
aisle for miles, down to the Interval and so to the turnpike from
Boston. On the way up that state road to Plymouth I remember something
started us talking about sex behavior and instruction in sex hygiene.
Mr. Frost was skeptical about the latter and said he thought perhaps
reading Shakespeare was more likely to avert catastrophe than any
amount of scientific talk. Another time I told him about the jumpiness
and over-earnestness of one of the woman teachers in high school who
boarded where I did, and I was permanently convinced of the wisdom of
his remark that what she needed was an emotional education through
poetry. He was always interested in people and never spoke of anyone
slightingly. On the other hand, he was keenly aware of shams and
stupidities, and he was not tender toward them.
“Besides the walks, there were a number of unqualifiedly delightful
evenings at his home in the little white house, which he shared with
the temporarily bachelor principal. His was a poor man’s living room,
but there was a bookcase with a lot of attractive books, many of
them thin volumes of poetry,--I remember his drawing my attention to
the exquisite Mosher books,--and there were two or three comfortable
chairs. On such evenings the children went to bed and we older ones
got comfortable, and Mr. Frost read aloud, or we talked. I suppose two
of my favorite plays will always be _Arms and the Man_ by Shaw and
the _Playboy of the Western World_ by Synge because of hearing Mr.
Frost read them. I don’t know anyone who can do the Irish so well. One
evening he read from Mr. Dooley.
“He had supervised a triumphant production of one of Sheridan’s plays
at Derry, and he scorned the notion that good things were too exacting
for school children. The State Superintendent had discovered that he
was the best of the English teachers under his administration soon
after Mr. Frost had been invited away from his farm. And the Principal
of Pinkerton had found that he was wrong in assuming that this teacher
was hardly the man to address a farmers’ institute. Regardless of the
effort it was to overcome his nervousness before a crowd, Mr. Frost had
showed that he had something to say, and could say it well. He took
a sly pleasure in surprising people who automatically underrated him
because he didn’t have a college degree.
“In early spring Mr. Frost, the principal of the Normal School, one of
my fellow teachers in the high school and I went a little way north to
a farm for a week-end. Our host and hostess seemed rather flashy and
hard people, New Yorkers I think they were. The woman was particularly
metallic and thick, like a successful vaudeville performer; and I
was much impressed with the considerateness and attention with which
Mr. Frost kept up a two-sided conversation with her. They agreed, I
remember, on admiring the New York skyline from the harbor. We talked
until late that night, and the next morning after breakfast we walked
over the snow to a large maple sugar camp. The religious and other
metaphorical use of the lamb has always, since that time, been affected
by the memory of Mr. Frost’s waving his hand back and forth within
an inch of the eyes of the lady’s cosset, and pointing out that it
never batted its eyes. I was unaccountably downcast on the way back to
Plymouth and mentioned my mood. Mr. Frost commented, ‘It’s well to have
all kinds of feelings, for it’s all kinds of a world.’
“Not long after that I had to assume the duties of baseball coach, and
Mr. Frost’s lifelong interest in baseball helped me. He often talked of
players and teams, and once he taught me how to work the short throw to
shortstop when there were runners on first and third, and so catch the
man stealing home. He was interested in tennis, too, and taught me very
clearly what he had recently learned about three different cuts to use
in serving.
“I think his one time of attendance at church in Plymouth was so
disturbing to his sensibilities that he had a religious motive for
staying away.”
It is clear from the notes of these two friends that this was the
crystallizing period in Robert Frost’s life. He became during it
certain of what he knew as a youth and as a matter of fact a great
deal of his published verse was written during these years. He had
formulated his central article for his private _ars poetica_--to give
an uncommon expression to what was common in experience--and he was
not to deviate from that in his future course. By adhering to this, he
was very soon after the year at Plymouth destined to be discovered and
recognized by the literary public, but essentially the rest of his life
has been a prolongation of the Derry-Plymouth phase. The enthusiasm
of his friends, Sidney Cox and John Bartlett, when multiplied to the
enthusiasms of critics, poets and readers at large did not, that is
to say, alter his habits or his aims or his quality. He has continued
to do a little farming, some teaching and some writing just as he did
between 1900 and 1912.
VI. “PAN WITH US”
_“Pan came out of the woods one day.”_
It is difficult to overestimate the aridity of the minds and feelings
of poetry editors in the United States during those years when Robert
Frost was writing and teaching and farming in New Hampshire. Not by
his own wish did he remain practically unpublished, for once a year at
least he made up packets of his verses and sent them to the editors of
_Scribner’s_, _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and one or two others.
Almost uniformly they came back: the few exceptions were the _Forum_
and _Youth’s Companion_ whose editor, Mark de Wolfe Howe, stretched a
point or two of his editorial policy to include them. But the market
for poetry was extremely limited, and the story of the insensibility
of those who ruled the market has already been sufficiently told. Yet
looking back, one still is mildly surprised that their taste did not
welcome Robert Frost’s work. It _was_ fresh work, but yet not too far
beyond their canons, not like the verses of Ezra Pound, for instance,
who had impetuously denounced Hamilton Wright Mabie and voyaged to
Spain.
Certainly, Frost was not a persistent and resourceful salesman for his
poems, and perhaps the fault lay partly in him for his lateness in
publication.
No wonder poets sometimes have to _seem_
So much more business-like than business men.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
Occasionally, he admits, he looked at the poetry printed in the
magazines, felt distaste for its mediocrity and lack of tang, and felt
likewise jealousy and envy of the author because after all he had been
published. Yet his own pride prevented him from making any energetic
plan for breaking through the editorial attitude toward his scripts.
After the year at Plymouth he concluded that it was to be “now or
never” with him so far as the Muse was concerned. The ten year
conditions on his farm had elapsed and he succeeded in selling it. Now
he would set aside the next three or four years for complete devotion
to poetry. But where?
John Bartlett was getting on well at Vancouver, B. C., and in
September, 1912, planned to marry a Pinkerton girl out there. Frost
hesitated between going to Vancouver and going to England, and
corresponded with his former student on the problem. But in August he
wrote that it was to be England for him. A letter about the cost of
living from the British Consul in New York and certain talk in the
family about living under a thatched roof had decided the matter: he
would spend his free time abroad. So he sailed in September, 1912,
and, as has been noted before, Harriet Monroe’s _Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse_ first appeared in October, 1912. Frost left his country just
one month before the event which is usually taken as the beginning
of a new, more enlivened and more extensive interest in contemporary
American verse, and he stepped into England during a particularly
hopeful and exciting season in the arts.
England just before the war of 1914-1918 was full of idealistic
movements and a new era seemed about to open its buds. There was
an upper crust of writers--Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Conrad, Hudson,
Carpenter, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Cunninghame Grahame, Max
Beerbohm--that was distinguished enough or respected enough to make
it worth while to continue their work or to resist it or to try to
supplant them. There were coming up such figures as D. H. Lawrence,
Compton Mackenzie, and Gilbert Cannan for Henry James to cast a keenly
appraising eye upon. There were at least two brilliantly edited
reviews--Ford Madox Hueffer’s (now Ford) _English Review_ and A. R.
Orage’s _The New Age_--which sought for new work and instigated new
literary developments. There were the Irishmen across their Channel
working up a little re-birth on their own. Ezra Pound was everywhere,
fighting, initiating, infusing fresh vitality into poetry and poetry
discussions. Wyndham Lewis was breaking bonds in painting and prose.
Imagism and vorticism, the Bloomsbury groupings and the reactionary
schools, all made the scene stirring and great things were expected.
Then the war crashed in and the fragility of all the movements became
sooner or later apparent. But that was two years after Frost arrived.
At first Frost was not aware of this metropolitan ferment. He repaired
to _T. P.’s Weekly_ which conducted a department of country walks and
inquired for quiet places in the countryside where he wished to live.
The conductor of this department was an ex-policeman (and therefore as
becomes a London “bobbie” intelligent in giving directions) and Frost
took a fancy to him. On his advice he settled in the little suburban
town of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.
One night Frost sat before his fire spreading out before him his
poems and reading them over. As was his custom, a certain number were
discarded. Of those that remained he pondered on making a selection
that might form some sort of coherent book. He shuffled through them,
arranged and rearranged, and gradually _A Boy’s Will_ came to birth. He
had a book of manuscript but no publisher in mind.
In this pass he recalled his friend, the ex-policeman, and determined
to ask his advice on a publisher for poetry! The former policeman was
equal to the call. He suggested Elkin Matthews, but said that as a rule
he required subsidized manuscripts. Frost objected to that, and his
counsellor brought up the name of David Nutt. This appealed to Frost:
he remembered that David Nutt had been Henley’s publisher: and thither
he went one afternoon only to be told that he could not see David
Nutt that day, but if he called the next day he would be able to do
so. Coming at the time directed, he was ushered into a private office
for an interview with a lady in dark clothes who informed him she
would speak for David Nutt. Later he learned that David Nutt had been
deceased for several years, and the lady was his widow, but at this
time the whole proceeding impressed him as mysterious.
Three days afterward he received a letter stating that the firm of
David Nutt would publish _A Boy’s Will_. The long period of twenty
years of frustrated publication was almost closed, and the first drops
of the exhilaration England was to give him had touched his lips.
More were to follow presently. Walking in London one day he noticed
that Harold Munro’s Poetry Book Shop was opening its doors that
very evening with a reception and reading. Although uninvited, he
walked in with the crowd that night and sat on the stairs during the
festivities. A man sitting below remarked, “I see by your shoes you are
an American,” and introduced himself as F. S. Flint. Frost confided to
him his engagement in writing poetry, and Flint asked if he knew his
countryman, Ezra Pound. Frost had never heard of Pound and was promptly
cautioned not to betray that fact to Pound himself.
Flint must have spoken to Pound about the new arrival, for shortly
there came to Frost’s suburban home a post card bearing an address,
the name of Ezra Pound, and beneath it: “At home sometimes.”
Some months later Frost called at Pound’s address and happened to find
him at home. Piqued at first because Frost had been so leisurely in
responding to his card, Pound soon warmed to his rugged caller with the
boyish face and when he learned that possibly proof sheets of _A Boy’s
Will_ might now be secured at David Nutt’s he insisted on going at once
to the office. The proof sheets were ready, and the pair returned to
Pound’s studio. Frost was directed to occupy himself in some way while
Pound turned immediately to reading the poems. Satisfied that here was
sound poetry, Pound then dismissed his guest with the remark that he
had a review to write, and in a short time the first salutation to _A
Boy’s Will_ appeared in type over the distinguished name of Ezra Pound.
_A Boy’s Will_ was received quickly and warmly by the literary press:
the general tenor can be felt from a quotation from the notice in the
_Academy_. It said: “We have read every line with the amazement and
delight which are too seldom evoked by books of modern verse.” The
poetry-reading public was lured.
Pound had a new “find” and he began to take Frost here and there to
luncheons, studios and parties, and among the most delightful of the
last were the Tuesday evenings at T. E. Hulme’s. Frost was pleased and
interested, but did not change his stripe.
All the time his capital was decreasing, for although he was now a
“success”[4] in a moderate way, he never succeeded in winning any
royalty statements from David Nutt. _A Boy’s Will_ had appeared in
1913 and the following year the same firm gladly brought out _North
of Boston_ which was greeted by the _Times Literary Supplement_ with
the statement that “poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind
breathes upon smoldering embers,” and there were more buyers. But only
a success of estimation for Frost. To eke out his capital, he fell
back upon farming and in the winter of 1914 leased a small farm called
Little Iddens near Leadbury in Gloucestershire. His near neighbors were
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie.
Gibson enjoyed joshing Frost about America. It appeared that Gibson’s
poetry aroused various people in America to write him letters of
gratitude that sometimes began, “Dear Bro.,” and proceeded to give
other signs in orthography and grammar of semi-literacy and raw taste.
Frost himself now received his first letter from an American admirer.
It was on stationery of high quality from a farm in Stowe, Vermont,
called Four Winds Farm. The neat script merely informed him that the
writer and her mother had enjoyed his poetry, and the signature was
that of a lady named Holt. It was a publisher’s wife, though Frost
did not suspect the fact. But the letter did enable him to return
triumphantly Gibson’s joshing: he displayed it to him as an example of
the way farmer’s wives wrote in America as well as evidence of the kind
of people who read _his_ books.
Gibson has commemorated this delightful time in a poem entitled _The
Golden Room_ printed some time ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and for
the sake of the picture the first two stanzas may well be quoted here.
Do you remember the still summer evening
When in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of the Old Nailshop we all talked and laughed--
Our neighbors from the Gallows, Catherine
And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Elinor and Robert Frost, living awhile
At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight
We talked and laughed, but for the most part listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on
In his slow New England fashion for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes.
We sat there in the lamplight while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers
Called over the low meadows till the owls
Answered them from the elms; we sat and talked--
Now a quick flash from Abercrombie, now
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas,
Now a clear, laughing word from Brooke, and then
Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider
And poured as clear a stream.
Meanwhile the war was increasing its diabolical momentum and the arts
in England were going under. Poets went to the front instead of to
studios and review offices, and among them was Edward Thomas with whom
Frost formed his most congenial friendship on English soil. Thomas had
been a critic and author of several biographical studies and travel
books. Frost fanned the critic’s hitherto latent talent for writing
poetry to a quiet blaze and the outcome was the volume, _Poems_, by
Thomas in 1917, a volume that was gratefully dedicated to Robert Frost.
Thomas was killed on Easter Monday in 1917 and Frost has commemorated
both the poetry and his friend.
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you--the other way.
Two years before the death of Thomas, in March of 1915, Frost had left
England for America, bringing with him the fifteen year old son of his
friend.
He had gone through years of non-recognition: in a foreign land he
had been exhilarated with a modest success and the sympathetic praise
of fellow poets: all had been engulfed in the horror and sadness
of the greatest war in our history: and now Frost faced again the
uncertainties of America. There was a surprise awaiting him.
VII. “INTO MY OWN”
Passing down a side street in New York as he came away from the steamer
which had brought him back from England, Robert Frost’s eyes saw
propped on a stand a magazine he had never heard of. From curiosity he
purchased it at once: it was called _The New Republic_. Inside he came
upon a page appreciation of _North of Boston_ which was signed by Amy
Lowell. But more arresting still, the book appeared to be published by
Henry Holt and Co. An American publisher! He did not know he had one.
This seemed a good omen, and the following day Frost called on the Holt
company.
Yes, they had imported the sheets for three hundred bound copies from
David Nutt, and this small order had been very quickly exhausted.
Now they would like to publish _North of Boston_ and _A Boy’s Will_
themselves, but David Nutt had reserved all rights. It soon appeared,
though, that David Nutt had violated the agreement, and Henry Holt
won the legal right to bring out Frost’s books in America. In quick
succession they published _North of Boston_ and _A Boy’s Will_ within
that year, 1915.
Rapid sales followed. _North of Boston_ eventually ran around twenty
thousand copies, and the other books have done well, considering the
market for poetry, though not nearly so well as the first.[5] The
critics were exuberant: among them was Edward Garnett who contributed
an influential article on Frost, since included in _Friday Nights_, to
the _Atlantic Monthly_. Furthermore, public taste for a time appeared
to have crystallized about such work as Frost’s. The hour was right,
for there was ripening a new interest in contemporary American verse:
the critics were enthusiastic: and the character of Frost’s writing,
at once novel and conservative, pleased all camps. A great many people
agreed with Edward Garnett’s opinions: “It seemed to me that this poet
was destined to take a permanent place in American literature....
Surely a genuine New England voice, whatever be its literary debt to
old-world English ancestry.”
Recognition, long deferred, now heaped itself upon the quiet poet. A
chapter in Amy Lowell’s _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ was
given over to him and his work, Louis Untermeyer wrote a chapter on his
verse in _A New Era in American Poetry_, Llewellyn Jones did likewise
in _First Impressions_, Clement Wood in _Poets of America_, and it very
shortly came to pass that no survey of the poetry of our decades was
complete without a considerable discussion of this author. Waldo Frank
in _Our America_ introduced his passage on Frost by saying: “The poetry
of Frost is of that excellent sort which it is hard to catalogue. It is
lyrical. It is dramatic, since his books are--as he says--‘of people.’
It is philosophic, since the tales he tells trace conscious lines about
the boundaries of life. Fully, it is poetry--and of New England.”
Frost found himself an advisory board member of the _Seven Arts_ in
1916 and 1917, that gallant venture in behalf of our national arts
directed by Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks and James Oppenheim. And
in the file of the _Seven Arts_ there rests _The Way Out_, the one
published play by Frost. Truly, he had scarcely tapped and all the
doors of literary America suddenly opened to him.
He had come into his own, so far as eminence counts. In 1916 he was Phi
Beta Kappa poet at one of the colleges he had neglected to graduate
from, and he read at Harvard for the occasion the poem called _The
Axe-Helve_. Since then there has been a shower of honors. In the early
part of 1922 he was elected an honorary member of the International
P.E.N. Club in the company of Thomas Hardy, Anatole France, Romain
Rolland, Selma Lagerlof, and others of western world fame. This
international honor was seconded in the same year by the local action
of the Women’s Clubs of Vermont in conferring on him the title of
Poet Laureate of that state. Very quickly, too, his work has been
incorporated in the English literature courses of foreign universities:
at the Sorbonne study of Robert Frost’s books is a requirement in the
English teacher’s course and from the University of Montpellier, Jean
Catel has written, “We are going to study Frost as a poet together with
such recognized writers as Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, etc.” Lately
critical estimates of his poetry have appeared in Italy.
But Robert Frost was not to be hurried. _Mountain Interval_ came out in
1916 and absorbed most of the balance of his unpublished poems. Then a
wait until 1923 when a _Selected Poems_ was brought out, and then _New
Hampshire_, the first new book in seven years. It is now four years
since _New Hampshire_ and Frost is still unwilling to release another
collection. “In a year or two I suppose I’ll have another book ready,”
he says.
The tables have been changed since Derry days, but he continues the
pattern. Therefore, in 1915 he purchased a farm on a hill just outside
of Franconia, New Hampshire. In 1920 he moved to Vermont where he had
purchased a large farm at South Shaftsbury in the district presided
over by that ardent Vermonter, Dorothy Canfield. He is still the
farmer and poet. And teacher, too, for that element in him retains its
energy. From 1916 to 1919 he was a member of the faculty of Amherst
College, this poet without a scholarly eminence in the orthodox sense,
without a college diploma even (though now he holds honorary degrees
from three institutions of higher learning), but he was encouraged to
conduct classes in literature and philosophy in his own freehand way.
In teaching literature he assumed that the conspicuous landmarks would
be seen in other courses. He could therefore ramble in the lesser known
regions of good writing, dwelling always in his informal presentation
on the enjoyment of books and slyly encouraging honesty of initiative
in writing.
Then President Burton of the University of Michigan called Frost to
fill the new Fellowship in the Arts which he established in 1921. The
appointment was for one year, but was extended to two, at the close of
which Robert Bridges, the British Poet Laureate, was appointed Fellow
for the following year. But in 1925, so welcome had Frost been on
the Michigan campus, he was called back to Ann Arbor to hold a life
fellowship in poetry founded entirely for him.
It was not long, however, before the magnetic pull of New England soil
and the fact that two of his children had made their homes in the east
drew him away from the attractive post at Michigan. He resigned and
came back to the ruggedly lyrical Green Mountains of Vermont in 1926,
with the plan of distributing his “teaching” efforts among several
colleges.
Thus during the academic year, 1926-1927, Frost was “boarded around”
by the various colleges who competed for his residence on the campus.
He traveled about, to Wesleyan University for two weeks, to Amherst
for ten, to Michigan for a few weeks, to Dartmouth for a visit, and so
on, mingling in each place with students and faculty, giving lectures
and readings, consulting with literary aspirants, imparting a fresh
emotional quality to the collegiate routine that is too usually strange
to it. But it is unlikely that he will “tramp about” so much in another
year, as Amherst claims his _presence_ (Frost does his teaching by
simply being what he is) for an entire term during the next collegiate
year.
* * * * *
Imagine that you have been invited to be the guest of Robert Frost
for a few days. Let the place be Amherst. He is staying there for a
month or two in a house rented from a professor now on his sabbatical
year. As you alight from your taxicab late in the afternoon, a well
filled out man of good height steps on to the porch, and you are
aware that the note this waiting personality strikes is quiet yet
vivid. A large boned rugged frame, a strong neck, and poised on its
full column a head so modeled that it gives the strength of the body
a lyrical accentuation. This head has been described as a faun’s and
the eyes and mouth are sometimes said to have an elfin quality, and
indeed it is true that one might think of faunishness and sly flitting
elves in glancing at it. That is fanciful, though, and not really in
correspondence with the sensitivity, the fluent gravity, the friendly
lines of the countenance now welcoming you. The words and manner are
simple: there is a trace of shyness which attests that the simplicity
is not an affectation and yet there is also ease.
You enter and Mrs. Frost, quiet, sweet, intelligent and devoted,
greets you. Talk begins, dinner is served. Mr. Frost has been out of
touch with the centers of literary life. He asks questions, about the
_Dial_, about William Carlos Williams, about that and this eddy in the
literature of the day. Patently, he is out of it, he doesn’t follow
the magazines and supplements and current books with any assiduity,
apparently he prefers to hear--in country fashion--from the lips of the
people he meets what is going on.
After coffee, you settle down in the living room for a long evening’s
talk, you playing alternately the crisp rôle of questioner and the
respectful one of listener, and Frost “in his dry, sly, halting
way,” as Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant puts it in her vivid portrait of
Frost, talks and ruminates, tells stories, offers critical notes, and
speculates. The speculative note in his conversation is important, for
it signifies that the growing ends of his mind and feelings still carry
him on. There is no impending death here of sensibility or thinking, no
dogmatism, in short, that closes off further possibilities of enlarging
his experience.
Perhaps he speaks of his Indian-fighting ancestor, Major Charles Frost,
and how for years he looked on him with a little disapproval as a black
sheep in the family whom other people honored for his treacherous
conduct at the Indian conference. Frost, you perceive, sympathizes with
the Indians: he doesn’t like unfair play. But lately he has learned
that Major Frost objected to the stratagem and entered into it with
great reluctance: he is glad to think a little better of the early
settler.
He drifts into reminiscence of San Francisco days and that grim father
of his. Sometimes his father would give him some change and commission
him to bring back cigarettes. But on one awful occasion the quarter
slipped from his hand as he was running to the store and fell into one
of the cracks of the board sidewalk then the prevalent style in San
Francisco. In vain did his small hands try to recover it, and passersby
were able to do no better. Frantic, he went to the store, fearfully
explained he had dropped his money, and begged for a package of
cigarettes. Laughter from the clerk and the men standing about. Nothing
to do but return home in trepidation and tell his mother. Father was
working in his study and by now no doubt impatient for a smoke. His
mother also stood in fear of father’s anger, but in the present case
she decided that Robert must go in and tell of the loss. Only first let
them pray, mother and son, that Robert should be let off easily. Then
Robert went in and reported. His father glanced up for a moment from
something he was writing, said brusquely, “Never mind,” and turned back
to complete his sentence.
There was something deep between Frost and his father. The man was
mentally alert: he had stood second in his class at Harvard and he had
been an associate of Henry George. He was ambitious, as his political
activity reveals. And he was, despite his consumption, strenuous,
engaging in long swims and once in a six day walking race with the
champion, Dan O’Leary. He won that, too. O’Leary had sworn that he
could give him a liberal handicap and then walk him down. When O’Leary
failed to do so, he claimed that Frost’s father had violated walking
rules, but afterwards he became his friend. But above all--and this is
the really deep bond--his father seems to have planted tragedy into his
son’s view of the world: so deeply did he do this that to this day his
father’s character excites a species of awesome regard in the son.
And now, in reply to a question, Frost is speaking of school days in
Lawrence, of first adventures in reading poets, of meeting Elinor
White who tied him for scholarship honors. And he points out how his
grandfather, according to his light, loyally stood by him, how he sent
him twice to college, backed him patiently in various endeavors to
make a living, and finally gave him a farm--which he didn’t succeed in
managing expertly. “Never earned a cent, save from and through verse.
But for my first twenty years at it I earned a total of two hundred
dollars,”[6] he remarks without bitterness.
The poem that he read before the Men’s Club of the Central
Congregational Church at Derry, the poem that was so instrumental in
landing for him his job at Pinkerton Academy, was, he tells you, _The
Tuft of Flowers_ in _A Boy’s Will_, “Yes,” he says with a smile to
interpret the remark, “_The Tuft of Flowers_ got me my first real job.
Whole family owe their life to this poem and they’d better believe
it.”[7] _The Black Cottage_, _The House-Keeper_, and _The Death of the
Hired Man_ all date, he goes on to inform you, from 1905 before he
joined the Pinkerton faculty, and he adds that “Virgil’s _Eclogues_ may
have had something to do with them.... I first heard the voice from a
printed page in a Virgilian _Eclogue_ and _Hamlet_.”[7]
The talk shifts the scene to London ... the fooleries of Skipwith
Cannéll and Ezra Pound ... the jiu jitsu demonstration Pound made on
Frost’s person in a restaurant..... Pound and Frost invited to luncheon
by two ladies, Pound disgusted by their shallow flow of talk on art,
Pound rising, knocking his chair over as he did so, saying haughtily,
“I leave these ladies to you,” departing to Frost’s consternation....
Pound’s challenge to Lascelles Abercrombie to fight a duel on the score
that Abercrombie’s articles were a public offense--and the amusing
aftermath.
We return to America and Frost tells how editors now snatched for the
opportunity to print the poems which previously for many years had
been vainly offered to their magazines. And you lead him on to tell
how liberal the colleges have been in their attitude toward his way of
conducting classes--a curious chapter in modern education.
Frost goes on to speak of the people he knows: of Lincoln MacVeagh and
Alfred Harcourt when they worked at Holt’s, of Carl Sandburg’s work
and Louis Untermeyer’s visits, of a professor at Amherst he admires
because “he loves the classics and he is a _field_ scientist.” He
expresses his doubts of the “bunko-sciences” (mostly sociological and
psychological in character). He tells of a night spent with Paul Elmer
More at Princeton. He inserts somewhere one of Padraic Colum’s Irish
stories. He relates an experience at Vassar College. He supplied his
audience with broadsheets on which were printed several of the poems he
would read during his lecture. At the close of the talk the roomful of
girls avalanched upon him to autograph the broadsheets. After that he
no longer considered it a good idea to furnish his audiences with the
poems he intended to recite.
The family is mentioned. His son, Carol, and one daughter, Irma, are
married: the oldest daughter, Lesley, runs a book-shop in Pittsfield
but now she is going around the world, managing a bookstall on the
liner: Marjorie has not been well for some time.
It is past two now. One studies Frost’s face in the lamplight. His
“skin and his rebellious hair have now a fine harmony of tone, ‘the
grey of the moss of walls,’ a young and living greyness that, like a
delicate lichen, softens without hiding the hard and eternal shape of
the rock beneath.”[8] And while one studies him, he is perhaps telling
you of the friendship that existed between him and Thomas Bird Mosher.
Mosher early picked out one of Frost’s poems for affection and printed
it in his catalogue, and Frost saw him every so often, saw the sad
decline of this epicure who drolly mourned the loss of his sense of
taste and in desperation had beefsteaks specially sent from Boston to
Portland and specially prepared by the best cooks he could engage only
to find them tasteless for him. But never to the end, Frost reminds
you, did Mosher lose his fine taste for the blue china poetry of the
nineties. Or perhaps he tells you of Aroldo Du Chêne who sculpted his
head, or of J. J. Lankes whose woodcuts so appropriately join in mood
with the text of _New Hampshire_. Frost had admired the feeling for New
England landscape Lankes had revealed in some woodcuts reproduced in
the _Masses_ and the _Liberator_. And Lankes had admired Frost’s poetry
and illustrated several of the poems for his own enjoyment. Then poet
and artist were brought together by Carl Van Doren, then an editor of
the _Century_, in a fortunate collaboration for which each, unknown to
the other, was already prepared.
Somehow the talk shifts again. “I believe,” Frost is saying, “in what
the Greeks called synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole;
touching the hem of the goddess. All that an artist needs is samples.
Enough success to know what money is like; enough love to know what
women are like.”[9] Nature, he explains, does not complete things. She
is chaotic. Man must finish and he does so by making a garden and
building a wall. That garden is art. Wallace Stevens, he says, has made
a formal garden with his poetry.
[10]“One of the real American poets of yesterday,” he goes on to
say, “was Longfellow. No, I am not being sarcastic. I mean it. It is
the fashion nowadays to make fun of him. I come across this pose and
attitude with people I meet socially, with men and women I meet in the
classrooms of colleges. They laugh at his gentleness, at his lack of
worldliness, at his detachment from the world and the meaning thereof.
When and where has it been written that a poet must be a club-swinging
warrior, a teller of barroom tales, a participant of unspeakable
experiences? That, today, apparently is the stamp of poetic integrity.
I hear people speak of men who are writing today, and their eyes
light up with a deep glow of satisfaction when they can mention some
putrid bit of gossip about them. ‘He writes such lovely things,’ they
say, and in the next breath add, half worshipfully, ‘He leads such a
terrible life.’ I can’t see it. I can’t see that a man must needs have
his feet plowing through unhealthy mud in order to appreciate more
fully the glowing splendor of the clouds. I can’t see that a man must
fill his soul with sick and miserable experiences, self-imposed and
self-inflicted, and greatly enjoyed, before he can sit down and write a
lyric of strange and compelling beauty. Inspiration doesn’t lie in the
mud; it lies in the clean and wholesome life of the ordinary man. Maybe
I am wrong. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I haven’t the
power to feel, to appreciate and live the extremes of dank living and
beautiful inspiration.
“Men have told me, and perhaps they are right, that I have no
‘straddle.’ That is the term they use. I have no straddle. That means
that I cannot spread out far enough to live in filth and write in the
treetops. I can’t. Perhaps it is because I am so ordinary. I like the
middle way, as I like to talk to the man who walks the middle way with
me. I have given thought to this business of straddling, and there’s
always seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something tricky.
I see a man riding two horses, one foot on the back of one horse, one
foot on the other. One horse pulls one way, the other a second. His
straddle is wide. Heaven help him, but it seems to me that before long
it’s going to hurt him. It isn’t the natural way, the normal way, the
powerful way to ride. It’s a trick.
“I am an ordinary man, I guess. That’s what’s the trouble with me. I
like my school and I like my farm and I like people. Just ordinary, you
see.”
He pauses. “What I have said,” he reflects, “sounds a little too moral.
My point always is that a poet may live as vile a life as he pleases,
but then his poetry ought to be of a vile beauty. I hate dis-integrity.
I hope I have some range in the appreciation of beauty. I can see it
all the way from exquisite through homely and mean even to vile. What I
am unsympathetic with is a wide discrepancy between life and art.”
The college clock strikes three. It is Frost’s usual bedtime. Tomorrow
he will be up around eleven, a student or two will call with some
writings for him to read, at one o’clock we are to be driven to a farm
house for a “real New England luncheon,” later there will be a walk.
“Frost,” Waldo Frank has remarked, “is not only a beautiful poet. He is
a beautiful person.”
VIII. “A SENSIBILITIST”
_“I’m what is called a sensibilitist,
Or otherwise an environmentalist.”_
The poetry of Robert Frost is of one piece with his life and even with
his physical appearance. Like the latter, it makes the impression
of solid substance from which mounts a lyric flame whose light
confers meaning on the mass. And it resembles his life in that the
extraordinary in the shape of event or experience is usually quite
absent: the materials are restricted and common. “Common in experience:
uncommon in writing” is the true formula for practically all of Frost’s
poetry.
Whence arises his distinction in expression? The answer must first be
made in terms of sensibility. The art of Robert Frost is built upon
the foundation of observation: it is the poetry of observation, an
emotional response, lyrical, dramatic, humorous, tragic, to what he has
seen and heard.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter, darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
This is the type of sheer observation that abounds in Frost’s works,
and one reads line after line that requires no help for vividness from
specially constructed images or even from simile and metaphor which are
in their turn composed of other definitely observed things.
The temperament of Frost, as befits an observer, is passive and
plastic, and his impressionability depends in the first place for its
intensity upon the keenness of his ear and his eye. In fact, his style
can almost be entirely explained by saying that he is a remarkably
close listener and a very sharp see-er.
Take his versification. What is it but a disciplined and ingrained
habit of listening to the tones of speech in New England from the
time he was fascinated by Charley Hall’s talk back in Windham to
the present? The poems, although they adhere to the molds of blank
verse and rhymed lyrics, are “talk poems.” The feat has been that of
conforming living speech to metrical forms by taking advantage of the
flexibility inherent in all metrical forms, so that Llewellyn Jones, a
conservative student of versification, is right when he says:
“Technically, it is the outstanding feature of all Mr. Frost’s verse
that he makes it speak in human tones. He has never written a line of
free verse that does not scan--if the reader knows how to scan English
verse as it should be scanned and not as Latin or Greek verse should
be scanned. The reason some people have thought Mr. Frost’s verse
very licentiate and why others have said that he writes free verse
is because he subordinates his metrical pattern to the cadences of
human speech. His metrical ictus is always there but it is not always
emphasized, and he is never afraid to let a logical or word accent come
in a weak place metrically. His verse is at the opposite pole from
that of Swinburne, who gallops to an anapaestic tune in a manner which
is quite alien to human speech. On the other hand: ‘I shan’t be gone
long.--You come too’ is pure and unadulterated human speech which just
happens to fit into the metrical scheme of the poem. Only, such a thing
‘just happens’ so often in Mr. Frost’s work that we know that it does
not just happen at all but is the work of an exceptionally sensitive
and gifted poet. And indeed Mr. Frost is so sure of the natural
speech-tones in his work that he says that no one who reads his verse
naturally can read it wrong. But on the other hand those who read it
with a preconceived notion in their minds of how a verse should scan
often find it a little difficult.”
Frost himself settled the matter when he said to Miss Sergeant:
“They call me a dialect poet.... Not so you’d notice it. It was never
my aim to keep to any special speech unliterary, vernacular or slang.
I lay down no law to myself there. What I have been after from the
first, consciously and unconsciously, is tones of voice. I’ve wanted to
write down certain brute throat noises so that no one could miss them
in my sentences. I have been guilty of speaking of sentences as a mere
notation for indicating them. I have counted on doubling the meaning of
my sentences with them. They have been my observation and my subject
matter.
“I know what I want to do most. I don’t do it often enough. In _The
Runaway_ I added the moral at the end just for the pleasure of the
aggrieved tone of voice. There are high spots in respect of vocal image
in _Blueberries_:
There _had_ been some berries--but those were all gone.
He didn’t say where they had been. He went on:
‘I’m sure--I’m sure--as polite as could be.’”
It is plain to see why Frost calls himself an “anti-vocabularian,” for
the speech materials he attends to are limited in number of words. But
there is a gain here: the right limitation of vocabulary will produce
honesty of vocabulary, will insure, that is, some personal content in
experience for the words one employs, and this matching of vocabulary
and personal experience gives force.
If Frost’s ear gives a natural life to his verse, his eye gives it a
clarity, a definiteness, a firmness of outline that produces a strong
feeling of actuality. Edward Garnett in his essay on Frost lifted out
from his better known poems a number of images and held them toward
the reader for inspection of their purity and hardness. We may take
a recently published poem, _Once by the Pacific_,[11] with the same
purpose in mind, the more so as this poem lies on Frost’s usual plane
of excellence and is not quite among his best.
The shattered water made a misty din,
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The sand was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent.
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was spoken.
Here we _see_ rows of waves growing taller as we gaze out from the
shore, and beyond above the fitfully glowing horizon the strands of
clouds disordered by the wind. (“Great waves _looked over others_
coming in.... The clouds were low and _hairy_ Like _locks blown
forward in the gleam of eyes_.”) Already the scene is massive, and we
are being prepared for the introduction of a cosmic word in the last
line. The rest of the poem is devoted to heightening this anticipatory
mood. We stand on the sand which is backed by a cliff which is backed
by a continent: thus the scale of the struggle is enlarged to huge
dimensions. The falling darkness of one night is similarly magnified:
“not only a night, an age.” And then the poem is ready to leave its
symbolic frame altogether in the last two lines. “There would be more
than ocean water broken Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was
spoken.”
It is this simplicity and coherence of imagery that creates the
concreteness of Frost’s vision. At the same time, grandiose though the
theme is, the language is utterly like talk: the waves “thought of
doing something to the shore that water never did to land before ...
you could not tell, and yet it looked as if the sand was lucky” ... God
will say, “Put out the light.”
If Frost is thus faithful in the use of his own eyes and his own ears,
it follows, since they cannot be universal in scope, that he will write
about his own locality. He will be obliged to be American, New England,
indigenous, to be an “environmentalist,” to do things with the “native
touch” Edward Garnett spoke of, because the very process of his writing
poetry commits him to it.
But this is not all the story. The third conspicuous element in his
style is his sense of situation, his sense of drama. This, too, has
been often illustrated by the critics of Frost, and Edward Garnett has
quoted in connection with it one of Goethe’s offhand remarks: “A lively
feeling of situations and an aptitude to describe them makes the poet.”
Frost has qualified in this way many times--in _The Death of the Hired
Man_, in _Fear_, in _The Witch of Coos_, among many others. And he has
given us one “straight” example of drama in the one act play, _A Way
Out_, printed in the _Seven Arts_.
The scene is “a bachelor’s kitchen bedroom in a farmhouse with a table
spread for supper. Someone rattles the door-latch from outside. Asa
Gorrill, in loose slippers, shuffles directly to the door and unbolts
it. A stranger opens the door for himself and walks in” and takes a
survey. “Huh,” he says. “So this is what it’s like. Seems to me you
lock up early. What you afraid of?” And Asa replies in a piping drawl:
“’Fraid of nothing, because I ain’t got nothing--nothing’t anybody
wants.”
The situation has taken form at once: Asa Gorrill, the queer hermit,
on the defensive, and the intruder, hurried, rudely questioning and
commanding, mysterious. The dialog quickly develops both the characters
and the situation. The stranger investigates the room and the old
man’s means as though perhaps his motive might be robbery--in case his
suspicion of miserly hoardings finds evidence to go upon. He hints of
violent action, of a necessity for hurry. He is aggressive, reckless,
a factory hand in some sort of trouble. Asa trembles, wishes he were
off, doesn’t dare to resist, unwillingly answers the questions that
build up a picture of his daily life--when he goes to market and what
for, how he carries in his logs, what he believes in, what his history
has been.
Then the stranger reveals he has committed a murder and is in flight.
He was seen once during the day by a wagonload of women. He insists on
donning some of the hermit’s extra clothes and mimicking his behavior.
The proposal is apparently that he hide here in the house and take
turns with the hermit in “stretching his legs” abroad.
Dressed to resemble the old man, the murderer then drags Asa round and
round in a game to get themselves dizzy. “And then when we’re down,”
he says, “I want you should wait till you can see straight before you
speak and try to tell which is which and which is t’other.”
This is the high dramatic moment of the play as they fall moaning from
their whirling and each accuses the other of the crime. The weak old
man faints from terror in the excitement, the stranger clubs him with
his fist and drags him out. The room is empty for a time.
A posse calls and the sham hermit fools it. Its members pass on. It is
“a way out.”
It will be noted that this play has both literary and theatrical form.
The two are not the same: for instance, Eugene O’Neill, generally rated
the best American playwright, often fails to produce a coincidence
of what is visually effective with what is psychologically and
dramatically determined. That Frost has done; the form stands up on the
printed page as well as on the boards: the psychological springs of
action are revealed: the writing is terse and necessary.
Needless to say, these elements of his style--the gift for tones
of voice, the aptitude for concrete images, and the sense of the
dramatic--would not suffice if they did not give rise to full-bodied,
vital and corresponding emotions. Robert Frost is the type--the pure
poet. The outline of his life has shown that he has all of the poet’s
traditional impracticality, though in his case there is no indulgence
in utopian flights. Now, on the basis of his poems, we can add that he
is emotionally centered, and the world is to him predominantly a source
of emotion. It is his _sensibility_, and not ideas and his actions,
that mostly strikes at his emotions, and the result is song inspired
by _natural_ objects which include, of course, people. Yet though his
poetry is clearly not cerebral, neither is it thumpingly emotional.
His personal make-up gives it its flavor--the humor and slyness, the
sense of rural retreat, the friendliness. But to his intelligence goes
the credit for its economy and restraint, its solidity and subtlety,
for its bounding lines. Frost knows sufficiently what he is about in
writing poetry to compose his own _ars poetica_.
“Imagery and after-imagery are about all there is to poetry. Synecdoche
and synecdoche--My motto is that something must be left to God.
“In making a poem you have no right to think of anything but the
subject matter. After making it, no right to boast of anything but the
form.
“A poem must at least be as good as the prose it might have been. A
poem is a box with a _set_ or assortment of sentences that just fit
together to fill it. You are rhyming sentences and phrases, not just
words. They must go into it as unchanged in size and shape as the words.
“A straight crookedness is most to be desired in a stick or a line.
Or a crooked straightness. An absolutely abandoned zig-zag that goes
straight to the mark.
“Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether and I ask myself
what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they
can do something, unless they amount to deeds as in ultimatums or
battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker,
from which there is no appeal. My definition of poetry (if I were
forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.
“All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.
“There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of
dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is
satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second
kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip
it to form.
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a
love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to
find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its
thought and the thought has found the words.
“........ the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work.”
IX. “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL”
_How about being a good Greek, for instance?
That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year._
Some readers,[12] no doubt, were surprised when the poet told them in
his last book, _New Hampshire_:
I may as well confess myself the author
Of several books against the world in general.
There had been no protest, no satire, no revolt to be noticed in his
poetry. On the contrary, here was quietude, good humor and a certain
manly acceptance of circumstance. Yet this author who never whines,
who never seems savagely to resent the present state of affairs, this
author considers himself to have been writing against the world in
general! The surprise was salutary, for the shock directed attention to
the implications of Frost’s confession, the implications of his poetry
_in toto_, and a study of these implications will lead to the quite
sudden realization that the purest classical poet of America today is
Robert Frost.
With Frost in the field as a classicist, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,
conspicuous rivals for the title, begin to look like something else.
Eliot’s poetry, for example, has romantic elements: his sentimental
melancholy and wistfulness, the dandyism and obfuscation that cut him
off from a more general appeal. Pound likewise seems to be hewing no
closer to a norm of thought, feeling and conduct: he does not appear
to be making a bridge from the special to the general experience,
to be achieving the “grandeur of generality”: he is given up to the
irritations and discomforts of a sensitive person. Yet a romanticist
tinge does not make a romanticist and _au fond_ Eliot and Pound are
nearer to classicism than they are to romanticism. Still there is an
important difference in kind between them and Robert Frost.
It is this: Pound and Eliot are in the main loyal to the principle of
authority, whereas Frost depends entirely upon personal discovery.
Pound and Eliot give allegiance to literary tradition as a governing
body, seeking only to produce work that, while molded by tradition,
still has sufficient novelty of conception and style to alter somewhat
the existing body of letters. Frost is unconcerned with such a theory
of dictatorship, adjustment and modification: he does not set up a
literary authority to serve. Like the intelligent Greek, he is simply
by nature rather positive, critical and experimental. If he manifests
the classical virtues, if he achieves a nature, an imitation of it, a
probability and a decorum which can suggest those cultivated by the
classical world, it is because he has discovered them in, through and
by his own direct experience. In comparison with him, Eliot and Pound
appear formalistic, and the distinction between them and Frost is the
distinction between neo-classicism and classicism.
It is important to see that the classicism of Robert Frost has been
evolved in a simplified world, the world of the New England farmer.
Such a farmer has a settled routine of living dependent upon the
seasons. He leads a village life in which most of the human factors
at work have the appearance of being tangible and measurable. The
intricacies of commerce and industry, the distress wrought by machines,
the flow of vast crowds, the diversity of appeals of a great city, do
not reach him. Churches are what they were, intellectual currents do
not disturb, and science, arch-upsetter of former values, finds no
opening to intrude. Frost tells of a hugger-mugger farmer who burnt his
house in order to buy a telescope with the insurance money. He gazed
with an unspoiled wonder at the heavens. But for science at large the
attitude is indifference.
“You hear those hound-dogs sing on Moosilauke?
Well, they remind me of the hue and cry
We’ve heard against the Mid-Victorians
And never rightly understood till Bryan
Retired from politics and joined the chorus.
The matter with the Mid-Victorians
Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”
“Go ’long,” I said to him, he to his horse.
In Frost’s New England then many of the complex tormenting questions
that have arisen since the small city and agrarian communities of old
Greece have been lopped away from the problem of living.
“Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”
With this simplified world given, Frost has built his art, as
was pointed out in the preceding chapter, upon the foundation of
observation, and it is by positive and critical observation of things
conceived as discrete that Frost has discovered his Nature.
The end reached by observation as a method, whether it is a poet or a
scientist who employs it, is dualism,--that is, a set of axioms and
laws founded on distinctions. The distinctions are based on appearances
and both they and appearances are treated as reasonably final data.
Of course, something inscrutable remains beyond, “something must be
left to God,” as Frost says, but the fundamental truth or error of
dualism is not plumbed. At any rate, whether or not the real world is
dualistic, certainly the apparent world is.
So in Frost’s poetry we are consistently struck by his acceptance of
the dualistic world and his actual contentment with his lot of joy
and love “dashed with pain and weariness and fault.” Nature we feel
as a sort of friendly antagonist, dangerously strong sometimes, but
on the whole a fair opponent. In combat with her one cannot laze or
cheat: but honest struggle brings fair returns. Especially is the
line between Nature and Man always present in Frost’s mind, though
never insisted upon. For example, he spends no time dilating on the
aloofness or indifference of nature to man. Such a poem as _The Need
for Being Versed in Country Things_ illustrates very well the sense
of demarcation between man and nature which Frost preserves, his
acceptance of nature as lovely and fair, and his awareness of her
unconcern for man’s disasters. In this poem we hear of the burning of a
farmhouse and the decay of its barn. The birds nest in the latter.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
Frost’s poetry contains no taint of the “pathetic fallacy” of the
romanticist which in these days is almost sufficient ground for
suspecting Frost’s classical tendencies.
The man that Frost treats is situated in a tamed wilderness and is
disciplined by it. In New Hampshire the mountains are not high enough,
there is nothing extravagant or unduly wild about nature, nor are the
people of Frost’s poems grandiose or expansive. Their bodies have been
contracted and hardened by sweating toil, their emotions are rock-like,
and their minds achieve a good dogged horse sense.
For art’s sake one could wish them worse
Rather than better. How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?
There is the pinch from which our only outcry
In literature to date is heard to come.
We get what little misery we can
Out of not having cause for misery.
It makes the guild of novel writers sick
To be expected to be Dostoievskis
On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.
* * * * *
It’s Pollyanna now or death.
This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;
And very sensible. No state can build
A literature that shall at once be sound
And sad on a foundation of well-being.
Out of a settled social framework, an honest necessary struggle
for existence, and a fair amount of well-being, something like a
representative man can emerge. There are balances and checks to trim
down his uniqueness while at the same time there is permitted a
moderate scope for his emotional and reflective life. In such a state
the acquisitive impulse gets no favoring head start and instead of
haste we find reticence and deliberation characteristic.
Thus Frost discovers what Professor Irving Babbitt would call a sound
model for imitation. Professor Babbitt has labored to show that
imitation as the ancients understood it was a fresh and imaginative
process. It is just so with Robert Frost. His choice of words, his
rhymes, always escape the commonplace: we are awakened by the exact
perceptions of a new discoverer. But the more important point is that
this stirring-up is followed by a conviction of the naturalness or the
obviousness of Frost’s statements. Why, we murmur, has this not been
said before? Again we are repeating Poe’s useful test question for the
workings of the imagination.
One cannot be certain just what content the term, the imagination,
contains today. Modern psychology has cleared away some of the rank
underbrush which has cluttered our view of the imagination, though
it has planted other bushes to confuse us at the same time: but at
least we habitually distinguish imagination from fancy. Perhaps by
pure imagination we mean something not far from a total sweeping
flash-like view taken by a human being at unusual moments. At any
rate Frost’s imagination is based on the view of a man who is using
_more_ of his equipment than most of the moderns do. The meaning is
simply that Frost does not seem to write almost exclusively from
one of three centers,--from the intellect or the emotions or the
instinctive center,--but from a sort of rude partnership of all three.
The conditions of his erstwhile livelihood (farming) brought into
at least partially coördinated play his body and his emotions, and
in addition he is capable of thought. In this growth he is again a
parallel, though distant, to the ancient writers, and gives a start to
the speculation as to how far the conditions of modern mechanized life
throw into disuse portions of the necessary equipment of a fully aware
human being. Certainly, Frost’s lines give one more of an impression
that a whole man is writing them than do the sharply intellectualized
or bubbling emotional lines of most of his contemporaries.
The moot interpretation in the doctrine of imitation has always
been the meaning to be attached to universals. One may rightly be
skeptical as to the coincidence of the views of the idealists with the
original meaning of Aristotle. But whether Aristotle is interpreted
idealistically or not, Frost’s use of universals arising from a welter
of particulars is covered in the minimum definition that could be
offered. His poems, _Mending Wall_ and _The Grindstone_, are prime
examples: in these poems the particulars are vividly and concretely
seen and they can stand the most rigid literal interpretation. Yet no
less present and vivid in them is a wider significance or rather there
are wider significances. Thus, among other things conveyed in _The
Grindstone_, we are deeply aware that a sense of the inertia of nature
has been induced. We are aware of the aching strain of making nature
malleable and the tear and wear made on the straining human being
by time. For readers of Frost it is not necessary to add that this
creation of universal significance is accomplished directly without an
atom of didacticism.
Although the doctrines of nature and imitation as exemplified in the
works of Robert Frost have been so briefly dwelt upon, does it seem
requisite to develop the contiguous statement that Frost is an observer
of the law of probability and the law of measure or proportion or
decorum? It is simply stating an easily recognizable fact which any
reader may verify by going through Frost’s writings that it is the
probable sequence and not the improbable but possible sequence that
he develops. He is a poet of the customary in man and nature, not the
exploiter of the remarkably arresting and wonderful. Nor does his
feeling for decorous proportion require argument beyond saying that
he does not commit the mistake of the neo-classicists who have been
properly accused by Professor Babbitt of confusing the language of the
nobility with the nobility of language. Frost’s people are humble, but
they speak a language and utter feelings appropriate to them: they are
restrained by conventions which are inherently worthy of respect, and
the result is decorum in the true sense.
The study of these considerations should explain why Frost declares
that he has written several books against the world in general. For
since Rousseau romanticism has been in the ascendency. A new conception
of nature as impulse and temperament has supplanted the old nature as
a strict model, a “return to nature” has come to mean “letting one’s
self go.” For imitation has been substituted the self-expression of
the spontaneous original genius, for the law of probabilities has
been exchanged the law of wonderful possibilities, and for decorum we
have the doctrine of expansiveness. Science has abetted the growth
of naturalistic emotionalism, and neither humanism nor religion has
been able to stop the tide of writing designed for the expression of
uniqueness rather than of generality.
Against this efflorescence of the interior world, the neo-classicists
have striven in vain, for their position does not rest solidly enough
upon experience and personal discovery. They have been debilitated by
the blight of Scaliger’s rhetorical question, why imitate nature when
Virgil is a second nature?
Frost however quietly takes his place beside the antique Greeks and
against the modern world. He proves that a species of classicism
resting on personal discovery is still possible.
Pictorially, Frost’s apartness from contemporary currents is
striking.... He came on our literary scene, this intensified and
intelligent and subtilized “ordinary man,” in very queer company. There
was Carl Sandburg with his love of the blur, his dreamy slothfulness,
his drifting impressionism, there was Vachel Lindsay, sentimental,
picturesque and declamatory, there was Amy Lowell, shallow and
decorative, there was Edgar Lee Masters, protestant and disillusioned,
and these were the poetic vanguard of Frost’s generation. In the novel
Theodore Dreiser was working up a public appetite for naturalism, and
Sherwood Anderson, recoiling in disgust from American business life,
was starting toward his present trust in objectless wandering and
instinctive laughter. Romantics all, and so were the new critics, J.
E. Spingarn with his gusty estheticism, H. L. Mencken, braying out
his prejudices, and Van Wyck Brooks with his humanitarian approach.
Frost came on with this troop, and they hailed him as a brother. He was
contemporary with them in age and public appearance, and a mistake was
made: it was taken for granted that he belonged in attitude and spirit
and general aim to the so-called “new poetry.”
Today the Middle Generation is beginning to recede whereas Robert Frost
emerges more and more and as a poet differing at the root in substance,
craft and direction from the romantic movement of the last decade.
Where is his kinship in America? Not with that other New England
poet of parts, Edwin Arlington Robinson, for Robinson exemplifies a
withering and retrospective New England and Frost exemplifies the New
England that is still sturdily alive. No, it is rather in the Eldest
Generation in American letters that one finds a similar temper and
approach to Frost’s. One imagines that the elder critics, Paul Elmer
More and Irving Babbitt, casting skeptical eyes over our literary life
today, might single out Frost and say: “Here is a poet who has not
succumbed to the ‘law for thing’: here is a poet who has not bleached
himself with neo-classical dogma: here is a poet who sings afresh in
the great classical tradition.”
Ultimately More and Babbitt diverge, as More seeks to sustain the
religious tradition of classicism and Babbitt to revitalize the
humanistic tradition. It is the latter tradition that includes Robert
Frost.
For speaking in terms of psychology rather than of literature, what
distinguishes Frost is simply good sense. Good sense avoids extremes
both in what it denies and in what it accepts. It does not, for
instance, deny the bulky evidence of the senses and the man of good
sense, therefore, will not accept the lies of idealism. The external
world he will try to see and feel and otherwise sense as clearly and
tangibly as he can: “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”
At the same time the man of good sense will not in his acceptance of
the practical instinctive fact as such fly to an extremely narrow
materialism and atheism. Something inscrutable and ordering very likely
remains: there are overtones in the observer of the fact that he cannot
ignore. Thus, he neither denies God nor the world: he accepts the
latter as demonstrated and the former as probable or at least possible.
What he does trust is his own experience (having good sense he knows
that there is nothing else to trust) and his own experience happens in
Frost’s case to be mediatory in character. Being intelligent, being
deeply emotional, being obliged to make terms with practical life, the
man of good sense casts up a rough balance of the three aspects of his
life and travels, so far as he is permitted so to do, in the center of
the highway.
A fair-minded description of a poet ought to be in itself a placement
and therefore a criticism of that poet. If Frost’s qualities pertain to
good sense, we must not expect him to write on the religious level. In
_The Trial By Existence_, one of the poems in _A Boy’s Will_, he took
up a religious theme, the gathering in heaven of the souls ready for
birth, “the trial by existence named, the obscuration upon earth,” and
the conclusion reached is sensible. As Llewellyn Jones has stated it,
it is “a recognition that suffering is always in terms of what we are,
not an alien something hitting us by chance from without but somehow or
other implicit in our very constitution.” But _The Trial By Existence_
is exceptional in theme and treatment in all of Frost’s range.
Nor must we expect from Frost that rarest and most difficult of
virtues that goes by the prosaic name of commonsense. Commonsense is
a _community_ of judgments, intellectual, emotional and practical,
upon life. It is an exact balance demanding the utmost strenuousness
to achieve and the perfection and harmony of our faculties. Good sense
is a gift: commonsense must be deliberately arrived at, as witness the
efforts of Socrates.
There are certain all-important questions which only the greatest
literature raises and attempts to answer, and these questions it is
not appropriate to ask of every poet. Frost makes no pretense of great
inclusiveness and great profundities. The canniness of good sense
forbids such rash over-reachings of one’s self. But what we have always
a right to demand is that the poet should be skilled in his craft,
alive in his sensibility, and at least sensible in his conclusions.
Robert Frost is all of these, and to those questions that it is proper
to ask of him, those questions, that is, that are covered in his own
experience, he returns always an answer in true currency equal to the
demand.
His comprehensive answer is the _natural_ (not romantic and not
religious) vision of life, and it is natural in the sense that it is
fitting to man _as he is_. “The poetry of a true real natural vision of
life,” said Goethe, “demands descriptive power of the highest degree,
rendering a poet’s pictures so life-like that they become actualities
to every reader,” and that is what Robert Frost, man of good sense and
fine sensibility, has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be
treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the
long and noble course of American literature.
APPENDIX A
SELECTED BRITISH OPINION ON ROBERT FROST
The following quotations are taken from a little leaflet distributed
by David Nutt. Historically, the leaflet is interesting for showing
the quick captivation of English critics by _North of Boston_. But
more than that, the English writers appear to have succeeded better in
stating the emotional character of Frost’s verse than the Americans who
have undertaken the same task.--G. B. M.
* * * * *
... A unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit
that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one
hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so
of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and
relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of
compression and more lightness, unity and breadth. The language ranges
from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and
intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack
of violence make the unaffected verses look like prose, except that the
sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to
the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as _The Death
of the Hired Man_, _Home Burial_, _The Black Cottage_, and _The Wood
Pile_, do we realize that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious
tenderness.--_The English Review._
* * * * *
... To start with, Mr. Frost is an American poet who noticeably stands
out against tradition.... We find very little of the traditional manner
of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work; scarcely anything, indeed, save a
peculiar adaption, in his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse....
It elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation
does. It is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life
much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words--to put them, that
is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected
virtue comes out of them; it is, in fact, poetry composed, as far as
possible, in a language of things.... We have heard a great deal lately
of the desirability of getting back again into touch with the living
vigors of speech. This usually means matters of vocabulary and idiom;
and Mr. Frost certainly makes a racy use of New England vernacular. But
he goes further; he seems trying to capture and hold within metrical
patterns the very tones of speech--the rise and fall, the stressed
pauses and little hurries, of spoken language. The kind of metrical
modulation to which we are most accustomed--the modulations intended
for decorations or purely esthetic expressiveness--will scarcely be
found in his verses. But, instead, we have some novel inflections of
metre which can only be designed to reproduce in verse form the actual
shape of the sound of whole sentences. As a matter of technique, the
attempt is extraordinarily interesting.... Naturally, this technical
preoccupation bears strongly on the general form of Mr. Frost’s poetry.
He uses almost entirely dialogue or soliloquy; he must have somebody
talking. We might call these poems psychological idylls. Within their
downright knowledge, their vivid observation, and (more important)
their rich enjoyment of all kinds of practical life, within their
careful rendering into metre of customary speech, the impulse is always
psychological--to set up, in some significant attitude, a character or
a conflict of characters. The ability to do this can turn a situation
which is not very interesting at first into something attractive,
as when a rather protracted discourse of two distant relations on
genealogy gradually merges into a shy, charming conversation of
lovers; or, in a more striking instance, when the rambling speech of
an overtasked farmer’s wife works up into a dreadful suggestion of
inherited lunacy. If, as we have said, we cannot quarrel with this
deliberate method of exposition, it can scarcely be questioned that
Mr. Frost is at his best when he can dispense with these structural
preliminaries as in the admirable soliloquy of a farmer mending his
wall, or in the exquisite comedy of the professor sharing his bedroom
with a talkative newspaper-agent, or in the stark, formidable tragedy
called _Home Burial_. Though it is difficult to state absolutely
the essential quality of Mr. Frost’s poetry, it is not difficult to
suggest a comparison. When poetry changes by development rather than
by rebellion, it is likely to return on itself. Poetry in Mr. Frost
exhibits almost the identical desires and impulses we see in the
“bucolic” poems of Theocritus.--_The Nation._
* * * * *
... There is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent
instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the
least suggesting that Mr. Frost should write vers libre; I am only
saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman--But
Mr. Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground, and
much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman
gave the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to
shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It
is another form of the New England conscience.... He does give you
a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows
and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of
wildnesses--of an America that really matters far more than the land of
endless trickery, make-believe, and lying and empty loquacity. That is
the face that--Heaven knows why!--America seems to like to present to
these parts of the world; but those are the least desirable features.
Anyhow, Mr. Frost has called in on us to redress the balance of that
particular New World.... He is not a remains of English culture grown
provincial and negligible. He is not, in fact, a sentimentalist. Not to
be a sentimentalist is to be already half-way towards being a poet--and
Mr. Frost goes the other half-way as well, though to describe what
that other half is beats me. Here is the little poem--rhymed for a
change--in which, as it were, he proffers his invitation to read _North
of Boston_.
THE PASTURE
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away--
And wait to watch the water clear, I may;
I shan’t be gone long--You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
He totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long--You come too.
Why is that beautiful and friendly and touching and all sorts
of things? I don’t know. I suppose, just because Mr. Frost is a
poet.--Ford Madox Hueffer in _The Outlook_.
* * * * *
This is an original book which will raise the thrilling question,
What is poetry?... Few that read it through will have been as much
astonished by any American since Whitman.... He has trusted his
conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when
some matter has touched him deeply.... In his first book, _A Boy’s
Will_, there is this piece, entitled _Mowing_:--
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself:
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound,--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
Those last six lines do more to define Mr. Frost than anything I can
say. He never will have “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf”: he can
make fact “the sweetest dream.” Naturally, then, when his writing
crystallizes, it is often in a terse, plain phrase, such as the
proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” or--
Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build;
From the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone;
or
Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.
But even this kind of characteristic detail is very much less important
than the main result, which is a richly homely thing beyond the grasp
of any power except poetry. It is a beautiful achievement, and I think
a unique one, as perfectly Mr. Frost’s own as his vocabulary, the
ordinary English speech of a man accustomed to poetry and philosophy,
more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even
in a letter, almost entirely lacking the emphatic hackneyed forms of
journalists and other rhetoricians, and possessing a kind of healthy,
natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than
that of Keats’.--Edward Thomas in _The New Weekly_.
* * * * *
In its quiet and unsensational way, Mr. Robert Frost’s _North of
Boston_ is the most challenging book of verse that has been published
for some time.... Mr. Frost has turned the living speech of men and
women into poetry.... To me it seems that _Home Burial_ and _The
Fear_ are the most absolute achievements in the book; but that may
only be because they come nearest to the kind of thing I wish to see
done in poetry; and the other pieces in the book all contain notable
qualities, and qualities which have been too long absent from English
verse. Mr. Frost has a keen, humorous sense of character.... Tales
that might be mere anecdotes in the hands of another poet take on a
universal significance, because of their native veracity and truth to
local character.--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson in _The Bookman_.
APPENDIX B
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
BOOKS BY ROBERT FROST
_A Boy’s Will_. London: David Nutt. 1913
_North of Boston._ London: David Nutt. 1914
_North of Boston._ New York: Henry Holt. 1914
_A Boy’s Will._ New York: Henry Holt. 1915
_Mountain Interval._ New York: Henry Holt. 1916
_Selected Poems._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923
_New Hampshire._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923
PRINCIPAL ESSAYS ON ROBERT FROST
Amy Lowell: _Robert Frost_ in _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_.
Waldo Frank: pages 158-162 in _Our America_.
Louis Untermeyer: _Robert Frost_ in _A New Era in American Poetry_.
Edward Garnett: _Robert Frost_ in _Friday Nights_.
Clement Wood: _Robert Frost_ in _Poets of America_.
Llewellyn Jones: _Robert Frost_ in _First Impressions_.
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: _Robert Frost_ in _Fire Under the Andes_.
Percy H. Boynton: _Robert Frost_ in _English Journal_, Oct., 1922.
G. R. Elliott: _The Neighborliness of Robert Frost_ in the _Nation_,
vol. cix, p. 713-715.
Carl Van Doren: _Quintessence and Subsoil_ in the _Century_, February,
1923.
John Freeman: _Frost_ in the _London Mercury_, vol. xiii, pages 176-187.
Charles Cestre: _Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson_
in _Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine_, vol. xiv, pages 363-388.
Jean Catel: _La Poesie americaine d’aujourd’hui_ in the _Mercure de
France_, March 15, 1920.
Albert Feuillerat: _Robert Frost_ in _Revue des Deux Mondes_, tome
xvii, pages 185-210.
APPENDIX C
ROBERT FROST ON EDUCATION
The following extracts are from a talk which Robert Frost gave at
Wesleyan University in December, 1926. They were taken down in
shorthand by a reporter for the _New Student_ and thus preserve the
exact verbal flavor of Frost’s conversation as well as the best direct
statement of his educational aim that I have encountered.--G. B. M.
“The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have. That is
much harder than anything else in the world to get--it’s the freedom
of my material. You might define a school boy as one who could recite
to you, if you started him talking, everything he read last night,
in the order in which he read it. That’s a school boy. That’s just
the opposite of what I mean by a free person. The person who has the
freedom of his material is the person who puts two and two together,
and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time, and brought
together. One little thing mentioned, perhaps, reminds him of something
he couldn’t have thought of for twenty years. That’s the kind of talk
I’d rather give.
“I’d rather be perfectly free of my material--reach down here in time
and off there in space, and here’s my two and two put together. Here’s
my idea, my thought. That’s the freedom I’d like to give.
“It depends so much on the disconnection of things. There’s too much
sequence and logic all the time, of reciting what we learned over
night. There’s an attempt in the honor courses to get toward what I
mean. I don’t know what the honor courses will do toward it.
“I think what I’m after is free meditation. I don’t think anybody gets
to it when he’s in anybody’s company--only when his soul’s alone.
I do it when I wake up in the morning, when I’m starting an idea,
and restarting. Sleep is probably a symbol of the interruption, the
disconnection that I want in life. Your whole life can be so logical
that it seems to me like a ball of hairs in the stomach of an angora
cat. It should be broken up and interrupted, and then be brought
together by likeness, free likeness.
“You might ask me this question: how am I going to find time? I would
so run a course by self-withdrawal. I would begin a course by being
very present, and then slowly disappear. A sort of vanishing act. I’d
rather melt away just as I stood there, and leave a fellow more and
more alone, and let him feel deserted, like a baby in a room alone.
“I know a good story, with a man’s name. I don’t mind using names. A
fellow named Conrad Aiken, one of our very best poets, though not one
of our most read, was once told in school to interpret something from
some French dramatist. He went home and got so much interested in doing
it that he didn’t come back to class for three weeks, but by that time
he had the whole play done in verse. He was sent to the office, on the
matter of cuts. He ran away on that. He came back afterwards to please
an uncle, he told me. We always pleased our uncles. Is that freedom to
do more than you ought to? He’d done more than a man might be asked to
do in his whole college course. If a man did that for me, I’d give him
A in every course.”
INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 65, 81
_Academy_, 64
_Alastor_, 29
Amherst, 73, 75, 81
Anderson, Sherwood, 110
Aristotle, 107
_Arms and the Man_, 54
_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 58, 66, 70
_Axe-Helve, The_, 72
Babbitt, Irving, 34, 106, 109, 111, 112
Bartlett, John, 40, 51, 57, 59
Baseball, interest in, 56
Beerbohm, Max, 60
Bennett, Arnold, 60
_Black Cottage_, 39, 80
_Blueberries, The_, 90
“Bobbie,” the London, 61
_Bottle Imp, The_, 53
_Boy’s Will, A_, 18, 30, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 80, 113
Bridges, Robert, 74
Broadsheets, autographed, 82
Brooks, Van Wyck, 72, 111
Bryant, W. Cullen, 29
Buckley, blind boss, 26
_Bulletin_, 22
Burton, Pres. of Univ. of Michigan, 74
Cadwalla, Bertha, 13
Canfield, Dorothy, 73
Cannan, Gilbert, 61
Cannéll, Skipwith, 80
Carpenter, E., 60
Catel, Jean, 73
_Century, The_, 58, 83
Chapin, James, 70 note
Chesterton, G. K., 60
Chicken farm, 25
College, 32, 34, 72, 75
Colum, Padraic, 81
Columnist, 33
_Comus_, 47
Conrad, Joseph, 60
Convention talks, 48
_Country of the Blind, The_, 53
Cox, Sidney, 51 _et seq._, 57
_Critic_, 46
Dartmouth, 32, 75
_Death of the Hired Man, The_, 80, 94
Derry, 36 _et seq._
_Dial, The_, 76
Dreiser, Theodore, 110
_Dr. Faustus_, 47
Du Chêne, Aroldo, 83
_Eclogues_, 80
Eliot, T. S., 100, 101
England, trip to, 60 _et seq._
_English Review_, 61
_Emile_, 52
_Endymion_, 29
Farming, 36, 38, 65, 73
_Fear_, 94
Fellowship at Michigan University, 74
_Fire Under the Andes_, 79, 80, 82, 83
_First Impressions_, 71
Flint, F. S., 63
Football, interest in, 43
Ford, Ford Madox, 61
Forst, 11
_Forum, The_, 58
France, Anatole, 72
Frank, Waldo, 71, 72, 86
_Friday Nights_, 70
Frost, Bertha, 15
Frost, Carol, 38, 82
Frost, Elinor Bettina, 38
Frost, Elliott, 36
_Frost Genealogy in Five Families_, 15
Frost, Henry, 12
Frost, Irma, 38, 82
Frost, John, 17
Frost, Lesley, 36, 38, 82
Frost, Lt. Wm., 17
Frost, Major Charles, 13, 15, 16, 77
Frost, Marjorie, 38, 82
Frost, Nicholas, 13, 14
Frost’s Garrison House, 13
Galsworthy, John, 60
Garnett, Edward, 70, 71, 91, 93
George, Henry, 26, 78
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, 65, 66
Goethe, 93, 114
_Golden Room, The_, 66
Grahame, Cunninghame, 60
_Grindstone, The_, 107, 108
Hall, Charley, 35, 88
_Hamlet_, 80
Harcourt, Alfred, 81
Hardy, Thomas, 72
Harvard, 34, 72
_Heretics_, 51
Holt, Henry and Co., 69, 81
Holt, Mrs., 66
_House-Keeper, The_, 80
Howe, Mark de Wolfe, 58
Hudson, W. H., 60
Hueffer, Ford Madox, 61
Hulme, T. E., 65
_Independent, The_, 30
International P.E.N. Club, 72
_Into My Own_, 28
James, Henry, 61
Jones, Llewellyn, 71, 89, 113
_Jumping Frog, The_, 53
Lagerlof, Selma, 72
_Land of Heart’s Desire, The_, 47
Lanier, Sidney, 30
Lankes, J. J., 70 note, 83
Lawrence, D. H., 61
Lewis, Wyndham, 61
_Liberator, The_, 83
Lindsay, Vachel, 110
Literary formula, 48
Longfellow, H. W., 84
Lowell, Amy, 69, 71, 110
Mabie, Hamilton W., 59
Mackenzie, Compton, 61
MacVeagh, Lincoln, 81
_Masses, The_, 83
Masters, Edgar Lee, 110
Mencken, H. L., 111
_Mending Wall_, 107
Merriam, Rev. Charles, 39
Michigan University, 74, 75
Mill, worker in, 32
Montpellier University, 73
Moody, Isabelle, 22
More, Paul Elmer, 81, 111, 112
Morrison, Henry, 48
Mosher, Thomas Bird, 82
_Mountain Interval_, 70 note, 73
_Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe_, 53
Munro, Harold, Poetry Book-Shop, 63
_My Butterfly_, 30
_Need for Being Versed in Country Things_, 103
_New Age, The_, 61
_New Era in American Poetry, A_, 71
_New Hampshire_, 70 note, 73, 99
New Hampshire State Normal School, 51
_New Republic, The_, 69, 91
_North of Boston_, 15, 65, 69, 70
Nutt, David, 62, 63, 69
_Old Kittery and Her Families_, 13
O’Leary, Dan, 79
_Once by the Pacific_, 91
O’Neill, Eugene, 96
Oppenheim, James, 72
Orage, A. R., 61
_Our America_, 71
Pebble incident, 48
Pepperell, Sir William, 17
Phi Beta Kappa, 72
Pinkerton Academy, 36, 39, 40-51, 80
Plato’s _Republic_, 52
_Playboy of the Western World_, 54
Poe, Edgar A., 29, 106
Poet Laureate, 72
_Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_, 60, 70 note
_Poets of America_, Politics, 25
Pound, Ezra, 31, 59, 61, 63, 64, 80, 100, 101
Princeton, 81
Production of plays, 47, 54
Pulitzer Prize, 70 note
Quarter, the lost, 78
Reporting, 33
Revolvers in San Francisco, 23
Robinson, Edward A., 111
Rolland, Romain, 72
Rousseau, J. J., 109
_Runaway, The_, 90
Sandburg, Carl, 81, 110
San Francisco, 22, 77, 78
Santayana, G., 34
_Saturday Review of Literature_, 99
Scaliger’s rhetorical question, 110
_Scribner’s_, 58
Sergeant, Elizabeth S., 77, 79, 82, 83
_Selected Poems_, 70 note, 73
_Sentinel_, 33
_Seven Arts, The_, 72, 94
Sex hygiene, 53
Shaw, G. B., 60
Shoe-making, 33
Sill, Edward R., 29
Silver, Ernest L., 42, 51
_Sohrab and Rustum_, 53
Sorbonne, 72
South, tour through, 33
Spingarn, 110
Stackpole, Everett S., 13, 15
Stevens, Wallace, 34, 84
Storer, Joseph, 16
Swedenborgianism, 26, 32
Swinburne, A. C., 89
Teaching, 33, 40-51, 55, 73, 74
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, 71
Tennis, interest in, 56
Thomas, Edward, _Poems_, 67
_Times Literary Supplement_, 65
_Tom Brown’s School Days_, 29
_T. P.’s Weekly_, 61
_Trial by Existence, The_, 113
_Tuft of Flowers, The_, 80
Untermeyer, Louis, 71, 81
Valedictorian, 27, 28
Van Doren, Carl, 83
Vassar College, 81
Virgil, 34, 80
Ward, W. Hays, 30, 31
_Way Out, The_, 72, 94
Week-end party, 55, 56
Wells, H. G., 60
Wesleyan University, 75
White, Elinor, 27, 28, 32, 79
Williams, W. Carlos, 76
_Witch of Coos, The_, 70 note, 94
Wood, Clement, 71
_Youth’s Companion_, 58
FOOTNOTES
[1] That of Elder Edmund Frost of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[2] _Frost Genealogy in Five Families_ by Norman Seaver Frost.
[3] Elinor Bettina was born on June 20, 1907, and died on June 21.
[4] See Appendix A.
[5] Five printings of _North of Boston_ were called for in its first
year, and ten more have been needed since. Its sale has been phenomenal
for a book of poetry, and in 1926 it even led the author’s later books,
though each of them has been steadily in demand ever since it appeared.
_New Hampshire, A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes_, which was issued
in 1923, comes next in popularity to _North of Boston_, requiring
five large printings. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for that year,
while one of the poems included in that volume, namely, _The Witch of
Coos_, won the prize offered by _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_ in 1922.
_Mountain Interval_ has also required five printings, and the _Selected
Poems_ are now in their fourth printing.
In London _New Hampshire_ has appeared under the imprint of Grant
Richards, Ltd., and the _Selected Poems_ under that of William
Heinemann.
In addition to their regular editions, a de luxe volume of _North of
Boston_, illustrated in line by James Chapin, appeared in 1919, and a
de luxe edition of _New Hampshire_, with woodcuts by J. J. Lankes, who
also decorated the regular edition, came out in 1923.
[6] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[7] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[8] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[9] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[10] Quoted from an interview in the New York _Times_, October 21, 1923.
[11] Published in the _New Republic_, December 29, 1926.
[12] Page 99 to 110 appeared originally as part of an essay on Frost
published in _The Saturday Review of Literature_ for March 28, 1925.
The text has now been slightly altered.
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