(_Southern Ohio Market Town_)
I heard an old farm-wife,
Selling some barley,
Mingle her life with life
And the name “Charley.”
Saying: “The crop’s all in,
We’re about through now;
Long nights will soon begin,
We’re just us two now.
“Twelve bushels at sixty cents,
It’s all I carried—
He sickened making fence;
He was to be married—
“It feels like frost was near—
His hair was curly.
The spring was late that year,
But the harvest early.”
_Robert Frost_
Although known as the chief interpreter of the new New England,
Robert (Lee) Frost was born in San Francisco, California, March 26,
1875. At the age of ten he came East to the towns and hills where,
for eight generations, his forefathers had lived. After graduating
from the high school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1892, Frost
entered Dartmouth College, where he remained only a few months. The
routine of study was too much for him and, determined to keep his
mind free for creative work, he decided to earn his living and
became a bobbin boy in one of the mills at Lawrence. He had already
begun to write poetry; a few of his verses had appeared in _The
Independent_. But the strange soil-flavored quality which even then
distinguished his lines was not relished by the editors, and the
very magazines to which he sent poems that today are famous,
rejected his verse with amazing unanimity. For twenty years Frost
continued to write his highly characteristic work in spite of the
discouraging apathy, and for twenty years the poet remained unknown.
In 1897, two years after his marriage, Frost moved his family to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in a final
determination to achieve culture. This time he followed the
cut-and-dried curriculum for two years, but at the end of that
period he stopped trying to learn and started to teach. For three
years he taught school, made shoes, edited a weekly paper, and in
1900 became a farmer at Derry, New Hampshire. During the next eleven
years Frost labored to wrest a living from the stubborn rocky hills
with scant success. Loneliness claimed him for its own; the ground
refused to give him a living; the literary world continued to remain
oblivious of his existence. Frost sought a change of environment
and, after a few years’ teaching at Derry and Plymouth, New
Hampshire, sold his farm and, with his wife and four children,
sailed for England in September, 1912.
For the first time in his life, Frost moved in a literary world.
London was a hot-bed of poets; groups merged, dissolved and
separated over night; controversy and creation were in the air.
Frost took his collection of poems to a publisher with few hopes,
went back to the suburban town of Beaconsfield and turned to other
matters. A few months later _A Boy’s Will_ (1913), his first
collection, was published and Frost was recognized at once as one of
the few authentic voices of modern poetry.
_A Boy’s Will_, unlike the later volumes, is frankly subjective;
original in outlook and idiom in spite of certain reminiscences of
Browning. Chiefly lyrical, this volume, lacking the concentrated
emotion of his subsequent works, is a significant introduction to
the following book, which has become a contemporary classic. Early
in 1914, Frost leased a small place in Gloucestershire, his
neighbors being the poets Lascelles Abercrombie and W. W. Gibson. In
the spring of the same year, _North of Boston_ (1914), one of the
most intensely American books ever printed, was published in
England. (See Preface.) This is, as he has called it, a “book of
people.” And it is more than that—it is a book of backgrounds as
living and dramatic as the people they overshadow. Frost vivifies a
stone wall, an empty cottage, an apple-tree, a mountain, a forgotten
wood-pile left
To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the slow, smokeless burning of decay.
_North of Boston_, like its successor, contains much of the finest
poetry of our time. Rich in its actualities, richer in its spiritual
values, every line moves with the double force of observation and
implication. The first poem in the book illustrates this power of
character and symbolism. Although Frost is not arguing for anything
in particular, one senses here something more than the subterranean
enemies of walls. In “Mending Wall,” we see two elemental and
opposed forces. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,”
insists the seeker after causes; “Good fences make good neighbors,”
doggedly maintains the literal-minded lover of traditions. Here,
beneath the whimsical turns and pungency of expression, we have the
essence of nationalism versus the internationalist; the struggle
between a blind responsibility and a pagan iconoclasm.
So with all of Frost’s characters. Like the worn out incompetent in
“The Death of the Hired Man” (one of the finest _genre_ pictures of
our time), the country boy in “Birches,” or the positive,
tight-lipped old lady in “The Black Cottage,” his people are always
intensified through the poet’s circumlocutory but precise
psychology. They remain close to their soil. Frost’s monologs and
dramatic idyls, written in a conversational blank verse, establish
the connection between the vernacular and the language of
literature; they remain rooted in realism. But Frost is never a
photographic realist. “There are,” he once said, “two types of
realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to
show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the
potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind.... To me,
the thing that art does for life is to strip it to form.”
In March, 1915, Frost came back to America—to a hill outside of
Franconia, New Hampshire, to be precise. _North of Boston_ had been
published in the United States and its author, who had left the
country an unknown writer, returned to find himself famous.
_Mountain Interval_, containing some of Frost’s most beautiful poems
(“Birches,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “The Hill Wife”), appeared
in 1916. The idiom is the same as in the earlier volumes, but the
notes are more varied, the convictions are stronger. The essential
things are unchanged. The first poem in Frost’s first book sums it
up:
They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
The fanciful by-play, the sly banter, so characteristic of this
poet, has made his grimness far less “gray” than some of his critics
are willing to admit. This elfin whimsy winks through the broad
bucolic humor of “The Cow in Apple Time,” the mock pity of “The Road
Not Taken,” the tenderness of “The Runaway” and the lovely
apostrophe to an orchard in “Good-Bye and Keep Cold.”
Frost taught at Amherst College from 1916 to 1919, but found that
his association with scholastic life took too much of his creative
energy. In 1920, therefore, he bought a few acres in Vermont and
devoted himself once more to the double labors of farmer and poet.
Through his lyrics as well as his quasi-narratives, he has uttered
(and is voicing) some of the deepest and richest notes in American
poetry.