The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 3
off career of teaching and giving public talks that would continue for the rest of his life. In 1916, Henry Holt published his third book, Mountain Interval, and Frost read “The Bonfire” and “The Ax-Helve” at Harvard College and also gave
readings in New York, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. He also accepted an
offer to teach at Amherst College for one semester per year, and began in the
fall of 1917 with courses on poetry appreciation and pre-Shakespearean drama.
The initial relationship with Amherst lasted only three years. Frost wanted to spend more time writing and less time teaching, and in 1920 he resigned. He
also had a fallout with Amherst President Alexander Meiklejohn over personnel
matters in the English department (Frost appeared to regard Meiklejohn as too
morally permissive). He moved from Amherst and sold the Franconia property,
buying an eighteenth-century stone farmhouse in South Shaftsbury, Vermont.
Consulting for Henry Holt involved occasional trips to New York with Elinor,
but he also continued public talks and readings, including an inaugural reading at the new Bread Loaf School of English in Ripton (near Middlebury College),
with which he would have a life-long affiliation. Frost also planted an apple
orchard and pine trees with his son Carol. His sister Jeanie, who was living in Maine, was suffering from mental illness, and needed hospitalization.
Frost could not keep himself completely out of academe for long. In 1921,
he accepted a position as Fellow in Letters at the University of Michigan, a
position that required advising students and giving talks for one semester
but no teaching. He held the post for two years before returning to Amherst
in 1923 after President Meiklejohn had been fired. Frost taught courses on
literature and one on critical judgment. His discussions at Amherst on quantum mechanics with Danish physicist Niels Bohr became an important inspiration
for “Education by Poetry” (1930), his essay on metaphor and belief.
New Hampshire, Frost’s fourth book, published late in 1924, included the title poem, a long work with “notes and grace notes.” Frost was awarded his
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Life
first Pulitzer Prize for the volume, and he also received honorary doctorates
from Middlebury and Yale. The tennis match between Amherst and Michigan
continued when Frost accepted a lifetime appointment from the University of
Michigan, with no teaching obligations, beginning in the fall of 1925. Frost left his family in New England while he taught in Michigan. His daughter Marjorie
suffered from severe physical ailments, while her sister Irma’s mental health
also deteriorated. The strain of Frost’s tenure in Michigan proved too great.
When Amherst President George Wilson Olds visited Michigan and offered
Frost a new position, he accepted and started teaching again in January 1927,
along with his summer affiliation with the new Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
The next decade saw great professional triumph for Frost and deep personal
loss. In 1928, West-Running Brook and an expanded edition of his Selected Poems were published by Holt, with whom Frost was now able to negotiate a higher percentage of both royalties and monthly payments. On a trip to
Europe with Elinor, Frost traveled to Dublin to visit Yeats, Padraic Colum,
and George Russell and also met T. S. Eliot for the first time in London. Frost was awarded his second Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems (1930), and he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. When Edwin
Arlington Robinson died in 1936, Frost wrote a remarkable Introduction to his
final book, King Jasper. In 1936, Harvard honored Frost with an appointment as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, which required him to deliver a series of lectures. Frost’s lectures focused on “The Renewal of Words,” and were delivered to audiences of thousands at Memorial Hall. Although the lectures
were intended for publication, no manuscript or transcription of them survives.
A Further Range (1936) won Frost his third Pulitzer Prize in 1937.
Frost had kept a breakneck lecturing schedule during these years, very often
to help pay for the medical expenses of his family. His sister Jeanie had been committed to a state mental hospital in Augusta, Maine, and died there in 1929.
His daughter Marjorie suffered on and off from a variety of severe ailments
including a pericardiac infection and pneumonia. After she married and had
a daughter in 1934, she contracted puerperal fever and died, despite Frost’s
efforts to have her treated. Elinor underwent cancer surgery late in October
1937. The Frosts went to Florida for her recuperation but she died in Gainesville after a series of heart attacks in March 1938.
Frost resigned from his position at Amherst College. He had become close
friends with Theodore Morrison, director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Confer-
ence, and his wife, Kathleen, “Kay,” Morrison, in 1936. In the turmoil after
the death of his wife, Frost began a tumultuous relationship with Kay Mor-
rison that started with a sudden marriage proposal and then settled into her
becoming his professional assistant for the rest of his life. By 1939, Frost had
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taken an apartment in Boston and purchased the Homer Noble Farm, which
was within walking distance of Bread Loaf. He also accepted the position of
Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow in Poetry at Harvard, giving informal seminars.
Though his emotional turmoil was still palpable to many around him, he had
taken steps to settle down. In 1940 Frost traveled from his South Shaftsbury
farm to visit his son Carol who was suffering from severe depression and entertaining suicidal thoughts. He returned to Boston only to learn that Carol had
committed suicide with a deer-hunting rifle.
During World War II, Frost divided his time between his house on Brewster
Street in Cambridge, Pencil Pines in Florida, and the Homer Noble Farm.
Dedicated to Kay Morrison, A Witness Tree was published in 1942 and includes a variety of different kinds of lyrics including “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” “The Subverted Flower,” “The Most of It,” “To a Moth Seen in
Winter,” and “The Gift Outright.” Some of the poems reach back to experiences
much earlier in Frost’s life. It was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, Frost’s fourth. Frost’s friendship with Rabbi Victor Reichert appeared to nurture A Masque of Reason, based on the Book of Job and published in 1945. Its companion, A Masque of Mercy, more focused on the legend of Jonah, was published in 1947 along with another collection of lyrics, Steeple Bush, which includes “Directive.” Steeple Bush received sharp reviews largely because of its “editorial” poems. However, Complete Poems, 1949 received strong reviews and sold well. It was, however, only complete as of 1949 – there was yet one more book to come.
Frost was now not only a poet but a statesman and sage of American letters.
In 1950 the US Senate adopted a resolution honoring him on his seventy-fifth
birthday (which had actually been the previous year). Following a series of gala celebrations of his eightieth birthday in 1954, he accompanied his daughte
r
Lesley to Brazil as a delegate to the World Congress of Writers. The Vermont
State Legislature named a mountain in Ripton after him in 1955. He received
honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge in the same year. Frost had
received so many honorary degrees, in fact, that he made a patchwork quilt
from them.
Despite his irritations with Ezra Pound’s condescension and politics, Frost
joined a powerful group of fellow writers including Eliot and Ernest Hemingway campaigning to drop treason charges against Ezra Pound. He also supported
Pound’s release from St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington. Despite
Frost’s criticism of the New Deal, he remained, as he once said, a disappointed democrat. After predicting the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, he became
the first poet asked to write a poem for a presidential inauguration. He did
not read the poem he wrote, ostensibly because of glare and wind, and recited
instead “The Gift Outright.” At the height of the cold war, Kennedy sent Frost as
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Life
a goodwill ambassador to the Soviet Union, where he gave readings in Leningrad and Moscow and met a number of Soviet poets including Anna Akhmatova,
Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Andrei Tvardovsky. He traveled
to Gagra, a resort on the Black Sea, to meet Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev.
Upon returning to the United States, Frost claimed that Khruschev said that
“the United States was too weak to defend itself,” angering Kennedy from whom
he remained estranged. Frost was still busy at his writing. He published his final book of poems, In the Clearing, in March 1962, and continued to give readings and talks until December 1962.
On December 3, 1962 Frost entered Peter Brent Brigham Hospital and was
soon operated on for cancer. He suffered a pulmonary embolism in late Decem-
ber. In January 1963, he was honored with the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, and
though ailing, continued correspondence and seeing visitors. He died on Jan-
uary 29, shortly after midnight, at the age of eighty-eight. Frost’s ashes were interred in the family plot in Old Bennington on June 16, 1963.
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Chapter 2
Contexts
Frost has always stood a large but solitary figure in the landscape of twentieth-century American poets. Unlike almost all of his luminary contemporaries
and near-contemporaries – Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams, cummings, and
Moore – Frost enjoyed an unrivaled popularity with a general readership. At
the same time, at least for a long period, Frost had the respect of his peers and of critics as one of the great artists of his era. Yet he has often baffled some critics, scholars, and readers for his appearance of both artistic and political conservatism, a refusal to participate in the ferment of modernist and postmodernist preoccupations with either self-defined ideas of the new or the self-reflexive attitudes toward language. A great craftsman, he seemed to believe in values of individualism, order, and human agency in an age when it had become simply
na¨ıve to do so. Yet many readers have, even during his life, perceived his subtle and acute insight into human psychology, and a vision of life in the poetry that though couched sometimes in humor and wit was, without question, terrifying
and bleak. Frost developed a way both within and outside his poetry of seeming offhanded if not, sometimes, funny (in all senses of the word) and humorous,
often joking with his readers and referring to his poems as jokes. But irony
works in many different strategic ways in Frost:
I own any form of humor show fear and inferiority. Irony is simply a
kind of guardedness. So is a twinkle. It keeps the reader from
criticism . . . Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody’s doubt whatsoever. At bottom the
world isn’t a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone
to let someone know we know that he’s there with his questions: to
disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the
standing argument. Humor is the most engaging cowardice. With it
myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of
gunshot.
( LU, 166)
At bottom, Frost’s world isn’t a joke, or one that can be hard at times to take.
A couplet Frost published tells us that all kinds of learning – far inside and 13
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outside books – may be necessary as we approach the world of his “fooling”:
“It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling / To get adapted to my kind of fooling.”
Frost always kept both his learning and his intellectual interests muted. His
posture as pastoral and somewhat untutored rural sage grew more pronounced
as his fame increased – his immense learning of the classics, his great knowledge of science, theology, and philosophy, were matters that he kept largely to himself and to which he sometimes only hinted in his public talks. But his wickedly
playful, shape-shifting evasiveness goes to the heart of the ethical force of much of his poetry. Rather than provide the simple order and closure for which it has become popular, his poetry often has the propulsive and disturbing effect that Frost suggested in a 1927 letter his writing might have on the attentive reader: I was asked in yesterdays mail by a New Yorker: in my Mending Wall was
my intention fulfilled with the characters portrayed and the atmosphere
of the place? You might be amused by my answer. I should be sorry if a
single one of my poems stopped with either of those things – stopped
anywhere in fact. My poems – I should suppose everybody’s poems – are
all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since
infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such
like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over
them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place and so in vain. It is my intention we are
speaking of – my innate mischievousness.
( SL, 344)
When Frost arrived in England in 1912 and encountered Ezra Pound and
eventually W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford, the poems if not
the poetic vision of what would soon be published as A Boy’s Will and, to a large extent, North of Boston, had already been formed. He may have written some of the poems in England but we know that he had already begun and published a
few of the innovative, longer narratives in North of Boston while in the United States (“A Hundred Collars,” “The Black Cottage, and “The Housekeeper,”
among others). Frost developed intellectually and artistically in considerable isolation, as a young student in Massachusetts both at Lawrence and, then,
Harvard and while living as a poultry farmer in Derry, New Hampshire, in the
first decade of the twentieth century. This does not mean that he did not react to the ferment of modernism or remain impervious to his time in E
ngland, to
World War I, the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the cold
war. But Frost rarely allowed himself to be swayed easily by the moment and
tended to absorb both politics and artistic currents carefully, subtly, and often ironically into the existing eddy of his poetic and intellectual preoccupations
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and symbolic landscapes. Frost distrusted intellectual currents and fashions.
Many, though, have mistaken his approachability and lucidity for simplicity,
innocence, or na¨ıvety. Though Frost wrote lyrics within recognizable traditions, his innovations in meter, particularly blank verse, subject matter, and form,
made him one of the most unusual, if not iconoclastic poets of his time.
Frost had the modernist preoccupation with refreshing the language, purging
it of some of its early Victorian literariness. We can often hear Frost talking about poetry and poetic practices in terms of the new and the casting off of
the old. In this respect, he sounds not only American but Emersonian in his
advocacy of discarding the sepulchers of the European fathers:
I must have registered the pious wish I wished in 1915 when the
Germans were being execrated for having destroyed Reims Cathedral. I
wish they could with one shell blow Shakespeare out of the English
language. The past overawes us too much in art. If America has any
advantage of Europe it is in being less clogged with the products of art.
We aren’t in the same danger of seeing anywhere around us already done
the thing we were just about to do. That’s why I think America was
invented not discovered to give us a chance to extricate ourselves from
what we had materialized out of our minds and natures. Our most
precious heritage is what we haven’t in our possession – what we haven’t
made and so have still to make.
( N, 179)
Yet, Frost held great respect for traditions and institutions and could in another thought go against Emerson’s ideal, expressed at the end of “Give All to Love,”