Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense

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