buy his first telescope by selling subscriptions to The Youth’s Companion.
A poem inspired by Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, entitled “La Noche Triste,”
became Frost’s first published verse and appeared in the Lawrence High School
Bulletin in April 1890. More poems followed, including “A Dream of Julius Caesar,” and Frost became editor of the Bulletin as he prepared to graduate and enter Harvard. In his senior year he met and fell in love with his classmate
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Elinor Miriam White, beginning what would be a tempestuous courtship and
the most important relationship of his life.
Elinor and Robert were co-valedictorians at their graduation; Robert’s
address was entitled “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled” and Elinor’s
“Conversation as a Force in Life.” After graduation, Robert worked as a cler-
ical assistant in the Lawrence mill. He became engaged to Elinor in a private
exchange of rings. Because he was dependent upon his paternal grandfather’s
support, Robert was persuaded to go to Dartmouth instead of Harvard. His
grandfather argued that Dartmouth was both less expensive and less likely to
do the kind of damage to him that he believed Harvard had done to his father.
Bored, restless, and focused on Elinor, he left Dartmouth before the end of the first semester.
What happened to Frost after he returned to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1893
has become one of the most wild and mysterious episodes of his biography.
He briefly helped his mother with unruly students at her school and then took
a job in Arlington Woolen Mill in Lawrence changing carbon filaments in
ceiling lamps and studying Shakespeare in his spare hours. Elinor had returned from studying at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, and Frost had
asked her to marry him. But she would not leave college as he asked, and she
returned in September. Frost quit his job in the mill in February 1893 and
began teaching grade school in Salem. He also learned that The Independent, edited by Susan Hayes Ward, would be publishing his poem “My Butterfly: An
Elegy,” and paying him $15 for it (the poem would later be collected in A Boy’s Will). Frost again tried unsuccessfully to persuade Elinor to marry him, and prepared a privately printed selection of poems for her entitled Twilight (“My Butterfly: An Elegy,” “Summering,” “The Falls,” and “An Unhistoric Spot”).
He traveled to St. Lawrence to present her with a copy and, presumably, inspire her to elope. But her icy response sent him back to Salem. In a state of despair, he traveled to the Dismal Swamp in November by train and walked for miles
into the swamp, presumably with the intention of drowning himself. Instead,
he allowed a group of boatmen to take him to Nags Head on the Atlantic coast,
where he jumped freight cars to Baltimore. His mother sent him the train fare
that allowed him to return to Lawrence by the end of November.
Despite the near-tragic trip to Virginia, Elinor and Robert were married in
Lawrence in December 1895 in a ceremony presided over by a Swedenborgian
pastor. He and Elinor, who had graduated from St. Lawrence, lived with Frost’s mother and sister. Both continued teaching school, Frost for a while at his
mother’s school house in Lawrence. His first child, a son, Elliot was born in
September 1896. Though Frost was writing, he seemed to want to have the
necessary credentials in classics to teach at a good school in order to earn a
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decent income. He passed the Harvard College entrance examinations in Latin,
Greek, ancient history, and physical sciences, and with money borrowed from
his grandfather entered Harvard as a freshman.
Frost studied at Harvard during its golden age of philosophy, and took
courses with George Santayana, Josiah Royce, the classicist George Herbert
Palmer, and Hugo Munsterberg. He had wanted to study with William James,
who was on medical leave, but read his Principles of Psychology under the tutelage of Munsterberg. He also studied evolutionary geology under Nathaniel
Southgate Shaler (the Steven Jay Gould of his era), and English literature as
well as classics and the requisite German, with which he struggled slightly. An excellent student, he withdrew, after he felt he had enough, and as doctors
warned him about concerns about too much sedentary work.
At the dawn of the century, Frost turned from the life of student-teacher
to farmer-poet. He took up poultry farming early in 1899 with financial help
from his grandfather, but family pressures began to change his life in drastic ways. His daughter Lesley was born in December 1899 but his mother was
diagnosed with terminal cancer just a few months later. In July 1900 Elliot died of cholera, and Frost began to suffer symptoms of depression that would plague him for years. The family moved to a 30-acre farm in Derry, in southern New
Hampshire, purchased by William Prescott Frost. Frost’s mother died shortly
thereafter.
Though not the most assiduous of farmers, Frost worked the Derry farm
full time from 1901 to 1906. He also worked intensely on his poetry at night,
filling his notebooks with drafts that would eventually become a number of
the poems of his first four books. When his grandfather died in 1901, he
willed him an annuity of $500 and use of the farm for ten years, after which
the annuity was to be increased to $800 and Frost would have ownership of
the farm. Frost was hardly wealthy but he was not pressed. He kept up his
poultry business and published stories based on the poultry business in Farm-Poultry and Poultryman (the poem “The Housekeeper” and “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury” also reflect his experience with poultry breeders). The Frost family also grew in these years; his son Carol (b. 1902), Irma (b. 1903), and Marjorie (b. 1906).
From 1906 to 1911, Frost made a transition back from farming to teaching,
while still working on his poetry. He assumed a post teaching English at the
Pinkerton Academy in 1906, and he would develop a reputation for an innova-
tive, conversational teaching style with an emphasis on “the influence of great books and the satisfactions of superior speech.” Frost’s teaching impressed the New Hampshire superintendent of schools sufficiently to invite him in 1909 to
lecture before assemblies of New Hampshire state teachers. He did so but was
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so nervous that he put rocks in his shoes to create pain to distract him from
the audience. Frost also directed students in plays by Marlowe, Sheridan, and
Yeats. A particular favorite of his was a production of Milton’s masque Comus.
By 1911, Frost had sold the rest of his poultry and moved the family from
the Derry farm, first to nearby Derry Village and then to Plymouth. He began
teaching psychology and education at the Plymouth State Normal School,
assigning works by William James includ
ing Psychology: Briefer Course and Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals. He also taught works by Herbert Spencer, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Plato. Though
Frost had published several of his poems in The Independent, New England Magazine, and the Derry Enterprise, he had no success interesting New York or major American publishers in his poetry.
Elinor and Robert decided together that the family needed to move on from
Derry in some kind of adventure. Frost wanted to devote himself entirely to
writing and thought that getting away from Derry might be a good idea. The
choice was between journeying out west or going to England, and they chose
the latter. With the money from the sale of the farm, the Frosts planned to live modestly in England for a few years where Robert could write.
By 1911, Frost had decided to sell his farm in Derry and move away – some-
where, away. He later described the decision about where to go as a coin toss
between Canada and England, with the latter winning. But there were prob-
ably a number of reasons for choosing England, including both its literary
climate and relatively low cost of living. Sale of the farm in New Hampshire
and an annual annuity of $800 from his paternal grandfather would provide
the funding for Robert and Elinor and the four children to live very mod-
estly in England while Robert continued to write. Elinor was attracted to the
romance of living in a thatched-roof English cottage. Frost hoped their money
would last as long as four or five years but ultimately it did not. On the other hand, Frost’s literary fortunes developed unexpectedly well within only a few
years, enabling him to return to the United States with both publishing and
teaching opportunities. They sailed from Boston in August 1912, stayed in
London for a week, and rented a cottage in Beaconsfield, twenty miles north
of London. Within a few months, Frost prepared the manuscript of his first
book, A Boy’s Will, and found a publisher, David Nutt, who accepted it. Robert Frost’s first book was published on April 1, 1913 in London. He was thirty-eight years old. When he left for England he was a hard working but not par-
ticularly successful farmer and an unknown and virtually unpublished poet.
When he returned, he was on his way to one of the most remarkable careers
(if such a term can be used to describe Frost’s remarkable life) in literary
history.
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Whatever Frost’s motives, he did not appear overeager to ingratiate himself in the London literary scene. Living in Beaconsfield, Frost focused on his writing but also sought out a publisher and managed to spend some time amongst
the literary lions of modernism. Traveling into London, Frost met and sparred
with W. B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, and Ezra Pound as well Rupert Brooke,
Jacob Epstein, T. E. Hulme, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Walter de la
Mare, and Robert Graves. As his funds grew low and some of his and his
family’s patience with literary London wore thin, Frost eventually moved to
rural Gloucestershire where he intensified his friendship with the Georgian
poets, devoted more like himself to country things, Wilfred Gibson, Lascelles
Abercrombie, and, perhaps most important, Edward Thomas. Thomas and
Frost developed a deep friendship through which both men, especially Thomas,
grew as poets. It ended, tragically, with Thomas’s death in combat in 1917.
It would be wrong to simplify Frost’s complex relationship with literary
London. He spent time at Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop and with sculptor
Jacob Epstein through whom he met the critic and philosopher T. E. Hulme.
Frost was conscious from the beginning of being an outsider to literary
London. On January 8, 1913, Harold Monro, editor of Poetry and Drama and publisher of Georgian Poetry, opened his Poetry Bookshop in London. Frost was present at this literary event. On the occasion, poet Frank Flint asked Frost whether he was American. Surprised, Frost responded, “Yes, How’d you know?”
Flint simply replied: “Shoes.”1 It was Flint who made the introduction between Pound and Frost and a number of the London literary elite. In an amusing way,
Frost was first identified in London as an American by his square-toed shoes
more suited to a New Englander.
Hulme and Frost had numerous fruitful conversations about a range of
philosophical and aesthetic matters including Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution and imagism at Hulme’s flat on Frith Street. He found an admirer in Robert Graves, who would later call Frost “one of the very few poets alive
whom I respected and loved.”2 Through Pound, Frost met Yeats twice at his
Bloomsbury apartment and discussed the Irish poet’s plays he had put on with
students while teaching at the Pinkerton Academy. But he also found Yeats to
be a “false soul” ( N, 457), engaged in too much of a masquerade in and out of his poetry. Yeats’s holding forth seriously about leprechauns and fairies as well as treating Frost, as Pound did, with mild condescension also fueled Frost’s
animosity.
Frost’s most complex relationship was with Pound, the Idaho-born poet
who became a latter-day European troubadour and a father of literary high
modernism. At the urging of his new London acquaintances, Frost came calling
on Pound who quickly secured an advanced copy of the first edition of A
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Boy’s Will, about to be published by David Nutt. Though Frost shared Pound’s belief that poetry should be every bit as well written as prose (or, at least as prose could be), Frost came to have little patience for Pound’s cosmopolitan
championing of literary rebellion, the cult of making it new. Frost preferred
“the old fashioned way to be new,” a phrase Frost used in his remarkable
appreciation of E. A. Robinson, his Introduction to King Jasper. Though Pound wrote two insightful and largely positive reviews of A Boy’s Will, Frost also became sorely annoyed by Pound’s patronizing and condescending attitude
toward him. Pound, Frost’s junior, had taken the attitude that he had virtually discovered this “VURRY Amur’k’n” writer,3 whom he once also went so far
as to call a “backwoods, even a barnyard poet,”4 unfair indeed given Frost’s
dramatic and metric sophistication; his great knowledge of Roman and Greek
poetry in the original was a classicism that Pound could at best only fake.
Although North of Boston was largely assembled when Frost met him, Pound took enormous credit from friends for having encouraged Frost to publish this
book of eclogues and georgics.
Frost’s letters from late in 1913 indicate that though he was comfortable in
England, money was running low. Beaconsfield had none of the appeal of rural
England, and by March, the Frosts had decided to move to the village of Dymock in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside to be near Wilfred Gibson,
Lascelles Abercrombie and “those that spoke our language and understood our
thoughts.”5 Frost admired Gibson and described him in a letter to a friend back in the States as “my best friend. Probably you know his work. He muc
h talked
about in America at the present time. He’s just one of the plain folks with none of the marks of the literary poseur about him – none of the wrongheadedness of the professional literary man.”6 Surely he imagined Gibson in marked contrast
to both Yeats and Pound.
In England, in the midst of conversations about poets with Hulme and Flint,
Frost made his most pointed formulations about the sound of sense in letters
to his friends and former students in America, John Bartlett and Sidney Cox.
The publication of North of Boston in 1915 by David Nutt was met by favor-able reviews in The Nation (London), The Outlook, The Times Literary Sup-plement, Pall Mall Gazette, The English Review, The Bookman, The Daily News, and other journals. Frost’s literary reputation had now grown as his financial resources dwindled. He prepared to move back to the United States determined
not to become part of the elite group of modernist literary ex-patriates writ-
ing for a limited audience. However much Frost insisted on his subtlety and
integrity, he also disdained obscurity.
Frost returned to the United States in February 1915. Henry Holt published
North of Boston in the same month, followed by A Boy’s Will in April. Both
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received remarkably strong reviews. The Frosts settled on a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. It was a moment in which Frost had to make choices among
teaching, farming, and writing as he indicated to a bemused reporter who
visited him at his farm:
You know, I like farming, but I’m not much of a success at it. Some day
I’ll have a big farm where I can do what I please and where I can divide
my time between farming and writing . . . I always go to farming when I
can. I always make a failure, and then I have to go to teaching. I’m a
good teacher, but it doesn’t allow me time to write. I must either teach
or write: can’t do both together. But I have to live, you see?
( I, 12)
With growing fame from the reputation of his books, Frost began an on-and-
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 2