Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
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,