Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
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THE MURRAY HILL BIOGRAPHIES
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