Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
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