Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense

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