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The Cambridge Introduction to
Robert Frost
Robert Frost is one of the most popular of American poets and remains
widely read. His work is deceptively simple, but reveals its complexities
upon close reading. This Introduction provides a comprehensive but
intensive look at his remarkable oeuvre. The poetry is discussed in detail
in relation to ancient and modern traditions as well as to Frost’s
particular interests in language and sound, metaphor, science, religion,
and politics. Faggen looks back to the literary traditions that shape
Frost’s use of form and language, and forward to examine his influence
on poets writing today. The recent controversies in Frost criticism and in
particular in Frost biography are brought into sharp focus as they have
shaped the poet’s legacy and legend. The most accessible overview
available, this book will be invaluable to students, readers, and admirers
of Frost.
Robert Faggen is Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of
Literature at Claremont McKenna College.
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The Cambridge Introduction to
Robert Frost
RO B E RT FAG G E N
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521854115
© Robert Faggen 2008
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2008
ISBN-13
978-0-511-42901-9
eBook (EBL)
ISBN-13 978-0-521-85411-5
hardback
ISBN-13 978-0-521-67006-7
paperback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
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Contents
Preface
page vii
Acknowledgments
viii
List of abbreviations
ix
1 Life
1
2 Contexts
13
3 Works
25
Frost’s poetics
25
The sound of sense
26
Poetry and metaphor
36
Pastoral
49
“Men work together”
64
Labor and beauty
83
Women, nature, and home
92
The dialogue of home
98
Frost and the poetry of nature
109
Frost and believing-in
133
Journeys into matter
136
Sacrifice
149
Belief and truth
154
Justice, mercy, and passionate preference
158
4 Reception
162
1920s–1940s
165
1947–1963
167
Frost and the postmodern
173
Notes
175
Guide to further reading
179
Index
185
v
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Preface
Robert Frost became an American sage. His public popularity as well as the
approachability and renown of a few of his justly brilliant lyrics – “The Road Not Taken,” “Fire and Ice,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” – have
obscured the immense range of his achievement and subtlety as an artist and
his complexity as a thinker. This was partly Frost’s own doing as he enjoyed
the evasions strangely made possible by the great fame in his later years that had eluded him in his early decades. At first a shy performer, Frost became a
charming reader of his own work. The sound of a poem was so important to
him that he insisted on “saying” a poem, never “reading” it. Each performance
could become a slightly new interpretation. He was also a masterful talker, and he cultivated a brilliant way of sounding off-handed while being incisive and
profound. For many, Frost the figure of the genial farmer-poet and prophet
of American individualism became one of the great acts of American literary
culture; the real Frost was a far more elusive shapeshifter and trickster, a learned and trenchant intellect with a sometimes terrifyingly bleak vision of human
existence.
This Introduction will focus on Frost’s major poetry, from his earliest lyrics to the complex dramatic narratives rarely discussed but which are part of his most important work. Frost’s ideas about prosody and metaphor will be considered
in terms of both the poems themselves and how they developed in relation to
some of the thinking of his contemporaries. His major thematic concerns –
labor, democracy, home, nature, and belief – will be considered in the context of ancient poetic traditions such as the pastoral, and modern intellectual and political questions such as science, immigration, and the New Deal.
The Frost that is still to be discovered is a consummate craftsman and maker
of some of the most psychologically engaging and artistically beguiling poetry of his or any time.
vii
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Acknowledgments
For years of ongoing fruitful discussion and collaboration, I am grateful to Mark Richardson, Don Sheehy, Lisa Seale, Jonathan Barron, Tim Steele
, and Paul
Muldoon. The fellowship and kindness of John Lancaster, Jack Hagstrom, John
Ridland, Philip Cronenwett, Lesley Francis, Peter Gilbert, and Edward Lathem
have been invaluable. Connie Bartling and Tim Geaghan were of great help in
completing this project. I am particularly indebted to Barton Evans, Andrea
Neves, Perry Lerner, and Claremont McKenna College for their appreciation
and support.
The author gratefully acknowledges the Estate of Robert Lee Frost for permis-
sion to quote from Frost’s poetry and prose.
viii
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Abbreviations
CP
The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
CPPP
Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier
and Mark Richardson. New York: Library of America, 1997.
LU
The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
I
Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New
York: Holt Rinehart, and Winston, 1968.
N
The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. Robert Faggen. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.
SL
Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964.
ix
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Chapter 1
Life
Robert Frost became a legend in his own long lifetime and participated in the
shaping of the legend of his life’s story. In addition to the dozens of inter-
views conducted from his return to the United States in 1915, we have Robert
Newdick’s incomplete Season of Frost (1939; published in 1976) and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant’s A Swinger of Birches (1960), which was intended mostly as a critical study though Frost cooperated and provided a variety of information.
Lawrance Thompson’s official biography, begun in the 1940s and completed
posthumously in the early 1970s, remains an invaluable source of information,
if a troubling and self-consciously troubled interpretation of its subject and especially of the poetry. Thompson left more than 15,000 pages of notes for yet another book on the writing of a biography, which provide useful material for
anyone wishing to delve deeply into the nuances of Frost’s life. In more recent years, William Pritchard’s Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered and Stanley Burnshaw’s Robert Frost Himself have presented counters to some of the legends created by the Thompson biography. Pritchard’s biography, in particular,
has focused more on Frost’s literary contexts. John Evangelist Walsh’s Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost focused on that period in Frost’s life, while Jay Parini’s Robert Frost has also provided a balanced, comprehensive, one-volume study vision of the poet’s working life.
More than almost any American poet of the twentieth century and even
of the nineteenth century, Robert Frost became an icon in his own time, an
almost granite-like figure worthy of a place on Rushmore or a similar pantheon of poets. To many he came to represent values of individualism, independence,
agrarian New England, country values. The image of his reading a poem at
John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the first poet in American history to do so,
remains etched in the national imagination. However much John F. Kennedy
or Lionel Trilling or Randall Jarrell alluded or flat out pointed to Frost’s darker truths and terrors, Frost himself had managed very well to project an image
of an avuncular, sometimes rambling and witty talker. But not the master of
tragic fate, Sophocles, nor the continental intellectual and prophet of shattered sensibilities, T. S. Eliot. The deep thinking, the immense skill and thought of 1
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2
Life
the poetry, and – above all – the tragedies of his life were matters he kept very close to himself and revealed only to a few friends.
When Thompson’s biography started to appear in the 1970s and depicted
Frost as an egotistical monster to his family and friends, many were either
horrified or all too eager to see this sage of American letters knocked from his pedestal. Yet, Frost’s moods, envies, jealousies in the end could be attributed to the tortured relationship his biographer had with him and in part to Thompson’s inability to interpret Frost’s tone and sense of irony. Frost would hardly be the first or the last artist to have been difficult, moody, or even depressed, and no doubt he was at times all of those. Sentimental expectations about his
personal life or conduct probably went hand in hand with sentimental and
na¨ıve interpretations of his poetry, which persist miraculously despite years of finely tuned and attentive scholarship and criticism. Be that as may be, Frost’s personal story was filled with what will appear to anyone to be a great number of hardships as well as triumphs, though it remains a risky enterprise to read any but a few of the poems biographically. By any measure Frost’s biography
embraces more than an ordinary share of horrors. He lived to see the deaths of four of his children; two suffered severely from mental illness, and one committed suicide. He long outlived his only wife, Elinor, whom he had met at
high school, and then fell into an affair with a married woman who would not
leave her husband. Through it all, Frost – wounded and no doubt tortured –
remained by all accounts devoted to his family and to his art. One should not
be surprised by the darker passions that suffused his life nor by his immense
humor; both and much more are in the poetry as he seemed to face relentlessly
the bleakest questions of existence.
The great farmer-poet of New England actually spent most of his childhood
in two cities. Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, on March 26, 1874,
the first son of William Prescott Frost, Jr. and Isabelle Moodie. Frost’s father had been born in Kingston, New Hampshire, the only son of an old New England
farming family. His mother had been born in Scotland, the daughter of a sea
captain, who died soon after her birth. Frost was named for Robert E. Lee,
the Confederate general, because his father had run away as a teenager during
the Civil War and joined the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under
Lee before he was sent home. Later, he attended Harvard University and was
graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He married Belle Moodie in 1873 and for a while
they were both school teachers in Lewiston, Pennsylvania, before moving to
San Francisco. There he became city editor of the San Francisco Daily Evening Post, edited by the social reformer Henry George.
The first decade of Frost’s life was in part a tempest created by his father
and the extraordinary and eccentric teaching of his mother. His sist
er, Jeanie
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Life
3
Florence, was born during a trip with his mother back east in 1876. Frost did not enjoy his early schooling, often complaining of nervous abdominal pain. His
mother was a conscientious and forceful educational influence, and by second
grade Frost was baptized into her Swedenborgian Church. She also read aloud to him from Emerson, Shakespeare, Poe, the Bible, classical myths, and romantic
poetry. Soon after their return to California, Frost’s father was diagnosed with consumption after being declared champion in a six-day walking race. He also
challenged himself by swimming in San Francisco Bay while young Robert
watched terrified. His father also became deeply involved in politics, first as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Cincinnati in 1880, and
later in 1884 when he resigned his job on the newspaper to run for city tax
collector on the Democratic ticket. Both times, he was on the losing side, and fell into depressions exacerbated by drinking. Often out of work and in rapidly declining health, he died of tuberculosis in 1885, leaving the family virtually broke.
Frost and his family would be bailed out by his paternal grandfather, William
Prescott, Sr., a retired mill supervisor, who would continue to be a looming
financial presence in his life for more than two decades. Frost’s father was buried in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost began to attend school commuting
by train from nearby Salem, where his mother was teaching. Frost’s graduating
class consisted of only 32 students, though more than 70 had been members
of his class freshman year. Some accounts of Frost’s Lawrence years give the
impression that his family suffered severe economic hardship. While it may
be true that Belle Moodie was not wealthy, Frost never endured poverty while
in Lawrence. He was also able to pursue his studies relatively free of external hardships.
The early 1890s saw important growth in both Frost’s indoor and outdoor
schooling. At the top of his class in 1889 and 1890, Frost studied algebra, Greek and Roman history, European history, Latin, and, of course, English literature.
Befriending an older student named Carl Burrell, Frost developed a lifelong
interest in botany, astronomy, and evolutionary theory. His favorite reading at the time included Prescott’s The Conquest of Mexico and Peru, Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs, and Richard Proctor’s Our Place Among the Infinities. In addition to learning haying on Loren Bailey’s farm, Frost also earned enough money to
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