THE MURRAY HILL BIOGRAPHIES
ROBERT FROST
[Illustration: _Photo by Doris Ulmann_
Robert Frost]
ROBERT FROST
_A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense_
By
GORHAM B. MUNSON
_Author of_ “WALDO FRANK: A STUDY”
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ON MURRAY HILL : NEW YORK
COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
ROBERT FROST
--A--
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
HART CRANE
in memory of many
enthusiastic conversations
about poetry
CONTENTS
I “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN” 11
II “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC” 21
III “A BOY’S WILL” 27
IV “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” 32
V “NEW HAMPSHIRE” 36
VI “PAN WITH US” 58
VII “INTO MY OWN” 69
VIII “A SENSIBILITIST” 87
IX “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL” 99
APPENDIX A [Selected British Opinion
on Robert Frost] 117
APPENDIX B [Bibliographical] 125
APPENDIX C [Robert Frost on Education] 127
[Index] 131
I. “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN”
_“But don’t you think we sometimes make too much
Of the old stock? What counts is the ideals
And those will bear some keeping still about.”_
New England is our association with the name of Frost, and we are no
doubt surprised when told that it is a Scandinavian name. Yet there
are today many persons in Denmark who hearing this sound uttered
behind their backs would turn with that sudden interest aroused by the
unexpected pronouncing of one’s name. Certain of the remote ancestors
of these Danish Frosts may have roved into England in the ninth century
A.D., or it may have been Saxons bearing the name of Forst, which is
the Saxon form of Frost, who invaded England in the fifth century A.D.
and founded the line of English Frosts. In either case, the Frosts were
settled there before the Norman Conquest and the name had begun to
accrete sturdy Anglo-Saxon associations about its slightly harsh sound.
In 1135 Henry Frost, the probable ancestor of the American progenitor
of one line of Frosts,[1] founded the Hospital of the Brothers of St.
John the Evangelist at Cambridge, England, and this foundation became
in 1509 St. John’s College, for which reason it is said that “Henry
Frost ought never to be forgot, who gave birth to so noted a seat of
religion, and afterwards to one of the most renouned seats of learning
in Europe.”
The son of Henry Frost bore the name of the subject of this Study and
wore a coat of arms which reads like a prophetic curio of the poetry of
his namesake. “Argent. A chevron azure between two thistles slipped in
chief, and a hind’s head erased in base proper. Crest: a grey squirrel
sejant, semée of estoiles sable, collared and chained or, and holding
between the paws a hazel branch fructed also proper.”
Until the early seventeenth century the Frost family spread deeper and
deeper into the sub-soil of English life. Then came the migrations of
the Puritans, crowded by unfavorable forces at home and drawn from afar
by the promises of New England. In an old piece of writing one can
read:
“Nicholas, Marride Bertha Cadwalla,
Jan’y 1630 ffrom Tavistock, Devon
Bertha Cadwalla, Borne ffeb’y ye 14th, 1610
Aprill Arrived in
Sailed for America June, 1634, in ye year
In ye Shipp Wulfrana, Alwin Wellborn, Master
ffrom Plimouth, Devon.”
It was this Nicholas Frost who founded the line of which Robert Frost
is a representative of the ninth generation. In the interval New
England incorporated itself into the tissue, blood and bone of these
“generations of men” ultimately to become song from the lips of Robert
Frost.
The history of the early generations of this line is threaded into
the history of certain old villages in Maine--Kittery, Eliot, Wells,
York--located close to the present New Hampshire border, and today
there is an inscription on Ambush Rock where Major Charles Frost was
slain, Frost’s Hill is still known as such, and the Frost Garrison
House, erected in 1733, is the only garrison house that remains in Old
Kittery. Everett S. Stackpole, the patient chronicler of _Old Kittery
and Her Families_, hints that a little mythological moss may have
gathered about the early Frost settlers, and believes that Nicholas
Frost was on the coast of Maine as early as 1632. He surmises that he
returned to Tiverton, Devonshire, England, collected his wife and two
sons, John and Charles, and came back to America in 1634.
Nicholas Frost appears to have landed at Little Harbor, now Rye, New
Hampshire, and to have lived there for at least a year, since there is
record of a daughter Anna being born there in April, 1635. Within the
next two years he removed to the head of Sturgeon Creek, in what is now
Eliot, Maine, where he made his home until his death in 1663.
His vicissitudes and achievements were of a typical pioneer character.
He acquired a fairly large acreage of land, served as one of the first
selectmen of Kittery, signed with his son a petition to Oliver Cromwell
(signed with his mark, a combination of N and F, for this ancestor of
a distinguished poet was illiterate), and lost his wife and fifteen
year old daughter, Anna, to the Indians. It is said that they were
captured on July 4, 1650 “and taken to a camp at the mouth of Sturgeon
Creek. Nicholas and his son Charles were at York at the time, and on
their return attempted to rescue them but were unsuccessful; Charles,
however, killed a chief and a brave. The next day Charles, his father
and some of the neighbors went back to the camp but were too late. The
camp was deserted, only the bodies of Bertha and Anna were found there.
They were buried near the old Garrison.”[2] Stackpole finds some of the
details of this story scarcely credible, but it seems clearly a fact
that Bertha Frost and her daughter were killed by the Indians.
Charles Frost, already mentioned several times in this narrative,
became locally celebrated and until _North of Boston_ was imported from
England in 1915 was probably the most famous of the American Frosts.
He was noted as an Indian fighter, and bitterly hated by his foes who
finally killed him from an ambush on July 4, 1697. The hatred of the
Indians for him went to greater lengths: they opened his grave the
night after the burial and carried the body to the top of Frost’s hill
where it was suspended upon a stake. The reason for this vengeance lay
in an incident that occurred in September, 1676, following the close
of King Philip’s War, an incident that is sometimes described in the
colonial and border war histories of our early settlers.
The Pennacooks, some of the neighboring Abenakis, and a number of
“strange Indians” (alleged to be King Philip’s men) assembled, having
been given an express pledge of safety, at Dover, New Hampshire, for
a friendly conference with the whites. A sham fight was instituted
and using this as a pretext the whites seized four hundred Indians.
Of these three hundred were sent to Boston where a few were hanged
and the rest sold into slavery. It is said that Major Waldron and
Captain (later Major) Frost joined this stratagem with reluctance,
but the Indians held them responsible for what they reasonably deemed
an atrocious and treacherous deed, bided their time and killed Major
Waldron thirteen years later and Major Frost twenty-one years after,
causing one Joseph Storer in Wells to write: “It hath pleased God to
take a way; Major Frost, the Indians waylad him Last Sabbath day as he
was cominge whom from meeting at night; and killed him and John Heards
wife and Denes Downing ... it is a Great Loss to the Whole Province;
and Espesely to his fameley ... mistress Frost is very full of sory;
and all her Children.”
His death is said to have been the last English blood shed in New
England in King William’s War and inspired a memento in verse which
runs:
The last of that grand triumvirate,
Unflinching martyrs of a common fate,
Waldron and Plaisted and Frost, these three,
The flower of New England chivalry.
The descendants of this component of the flower of New England
chivalry occupied themselves in divers ways but kept their home-roots
within a radius of fifty miles of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His son,
the Hon. John Frost, married a sister of Sir William Pepperell who
captured Louisburg in 1745 and himself served His Majesty for a time
as Commander of the man-of-war _Edward_. Later he became a merchant
of Newcastle, New Hampshire, and a member of the Governor’s Council.
His son, William, was also a merchant of Newcastle, but apparently
not as conspicuous as his grandfather or father. The line recovers
its warlike tinge in his son, Lieutenant William Frost, an officer in
the Continental Army during the American Revolution and a resident
of Andover, Massachusetts. The sixth generation gives us Samuel
Abbot Frost, who remained in New Hampshire most of his life and was
the father of four children, among them William Prescott Frost, the
grandfather of Robert, who moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts.
For a time William Prescott Frost aspired to be a well-dressed
young blood, but New England thrift and respectability erased these
fashionable yearnings and he became instead a saver of the margins
of his income and a local pillar of respectability. He wrested a
competency from his job as overseer in a Lawrence mill and was
naturally somewhat baffled by the drifting and poetic tendencies of his
young grandson, probably never more than when he proposed to Robert,
then aged eighteen, that he should take one year to try out his poetry
and then, if that did not meet with success, why, there were plenty of
other worthy pursuits. The reply was: “Give me twenty years!” And it
was to be exactly twenty years before _A Boy’s Will_ was published in
London.
But for all his respectability there was a liberal vein in William
Prescott Frost: otherwise he could not have tolerated the notions and
conduct of his wife. For she was one of the earliest feminists in
America. This lady, remembered as one whose stateliness was enhanced
by an habitual nodding of the head as if with dignified resentment
against the ascendency of the male, decided one day that house-work
was not exclusively the business of women and called for a division of
household tasks. And her husband acquiesced, so that, turn and turn
about, one performed the services of the establishment whilst the
other enjoyed leisure.
This couple had a son and a daughter, and named the boy William
Prescott after the father. He was sent to Harvard, the first of the
line to receive college training, and it was hoped that he would become
a lawyer, a hope that his grandparents later cherished for Robert
Frost. But William Prescott Frost, Jr., revolted against what seven
generations of Frosts had assisted in forming: he revolted so strongly
against New England that his flight ended only when he reached San
Francisco.
But before recording that grimly energetic career, a pause is due,
since “what counts is the ideals and those will bear some keeping
still about,” to ask concerning the congruity of Robert Frost with
his ancestry. What is noticeable first of all in this stock is
its closeness to the soil. It was given, not to wandering, but to
settling, to making a sturdy fight with local conditions, to seeing
matters through on the terms of the environment. That environment
happened to be, in its wider sense, successively colonial America,
the consolidation and growth of the United States, and the beginnings
of the industrial era. In a smaller sense, it was New England and
the family is dyed in the older qualities of both America and its
small northeastern corner--hardihood, resistance, decency and kinship
to the soil, to mention a few. One is tempted to make a second
generalization. The way the Frosts trod was the middle road. In their
family there is no touch of the eccentric or extravagant or fanatic.
They were church-going, but not zealots of puritanism. They served in
the army and navy when occasion pressed, but they were not soldiers
of fortune. They were small business men and local officeholders, but
made no unusual motions in either rôle. What stands out seems to be
a temperamental conservatism, adapting itself to changes in history
and environment, but never reactionary or radical--until we come upon
a variant in the father of Robert Frost. But Robert Frost is heir to
the progressive conservatism and the closeness to the locality of the
forebears of his father.
II. “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC”
Shortly after the Civil War an immigrant ship from Scotland was coming
up the Schuylkill River. It had taken weeks to cross the Atlantic and
now it was close enough to be gaily bombarded by peaches thrown from
the shore. The passengers caught the strange fruit in their hands and
learned to eat it and the taste was welcome after so protracted a spell
of ship’s provisions.
There was a fifteen year old girl passenger from Edinburgh who did not
take part in the pastime. She came of a lowland Scotch family, a family
of seafarers: her father, a sea captain, had been lost at sea and so
also had her brother. Bred to patience, she now sat quietly watching.
But one of the men came over and dropped the peach he had caught into
her lap. “You should eat it,” he explained, and she replied, gazing at
the fruit, “It’s too bonnie to eat.”
This Scotch girl was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, to live with an
uncle in business there. A few years later she came to Lewiston,
Pennsylvania, to teach school. And here it was that Isabelle Moody
encountered William Prescott Frost, Jr., on his rebound from New
England. Young Frost had his eye on other projects of ambition, but for
the time he too was a school teacher in Lewiston. They were married,
and the husband went on to San Francisco to work on a Democratic
newspaper, the _Bulletin_. A little later he wrote his wife that the
windows of the newspaper office had been shot out but he was unharmed.
The paper had, it seems, printed derogatory statements about some stock
and those who were interested in it had resorted to gun play. Into this
smoldering and sometimes violent community Isabelle Moody followed
her husband and there on March 26, 1875, a son, christened Robert Lee
Frost, was born.
The christening tells the story of the father’s political sympathies.
Too young to fight in the Civil War, the boy had been an intense
copperhead and had meditated on somehow slipping South to join the
Confederates. Now he was a States’ Rights man and once he showed Robert
a map of the United States and divided it into five nations into which
he predicted the country would sometime split.
The father liked San Francisco. He liked the spirit of plunging which
diffused through the community and he was himself always playing the
stock market. He liked to spend money liberally. And he liked the
threat of grimness which one experienced by simply observing that men
wore revolvers with the frequency New Yorkers today wear sticks.
One Sunday afternoon Robert and several other children were permitted
to walk along the beach with his father and a few associates. A bottle
was found and stopped up and tossed into the waves. Out came the
revolvers of all the men and they fired at the floating target. It was
no more uncommon than throwing stones.
One Christmas Eve Robert, his sister and his mother returned to their
house quite late. They were about to prepare for bed when his mother
asked Robert if he had locked the door. He answered that he had, but
it at once became indisputable that he had not, for the door was heard
to open without benefit of key and someone, to their consternation,
entered. Mrs. Frost rushed her children into a room, locked its door,
shooed them under a table, and extracted a revolver from a drawer.
“I’ll shoot if you come further!” she spoke with a quaver. There was no
answer, and she repeated her threat. Then Mr. Frost’s laugh was heard,
relieving a tension that was likely often to seize San Franciscans of
that period.
On the Fourth of July the plunging editor broke loose. It was his day
and it was neither safe nor sane. An old fashioned celebrator, he made
the greatest racket possible, set fire to outhouses and destroyed minor
properties. He went to the limit on political celebrations, too. In
politics or the stock market he would soon make a lucky stroke if he
played hard enough. Then after success had burgeoned, he would take
care of that consumption that threatened him. He would take a trip to
“the Islands”; that is, to Hawaii, the favored resort of that time for
consumptives. In the meantime he drank liquor to keep up his pace, he
drank warm blood at the stockyards to alleviate the disease, and he
did all the celebrating possible when his party triumphed. Robert was
a celebrant too, riding, costumed, on floats in the big parades or
trudging in torchlight processions until he was sent home to bed from
weariness.
But the political ambitions yielded only small fruits. Mr. Frost did
go as a delegate to one Democratic National Convention and he was
city campaign manager in 1884 when Cleveland was elected President.
He was defeated, however, when he ran for election as tax collector
of San Francisco. In that campaign the boy Robert was his constant
companion--his job was to visit the saloons with his father’s campaign
cards and to impale these on the ceiling by flinging upwards a card
with a tack through it and a silver dollar beneath the tack which
worked as a sort of flying mallet--and this, one fancies, remains to
this day the most active participation in politics of Robert Frost.
In 1885 consumption won the contest for the body of William Prescott
Frost and silenced its teeming hopes and plans, its explosive moods
and tense restraints. His wife who had suffered for weeks at a time
from his gloomy silences and his son who had suffered from his grim
severities mourned for him--and found that his extravagance had led
to letting his insurance lapse. It was necessary to return to the
New England the dead man had hated, to seek refuge with Robert’s
grandparents in Lawrence.
So the little boy relinquished the tiny chicken farm he had started
in the backyard at San Francisco and on the long ride sat beside his
surviving parent, both sunk in memories of the grim dignity of the
deceased, he who had never worn anything but a top hat, who had always
been drily polite without the least ingratiation, and yet had been
pathetic, too, since he had been _terrible_ to himself. If anything
planted tragedy in Robert Frost, it must have been, one surmises, the
vision of his father, friend on the one hand of Buckley, the notorious
blind boss of San Francisco, and on the other of Henry George with whom
for a brief time he managed a single tax newspaper.
Perhaps from his father he acquired a certain recklessness of
temperament, less extreme, but discernible in the drifting ways of his
life: his father was energetically imprudent and the world, one knows,
judges the son gently imprudent in the affairs of practical living. But
the presence of the mother is also implied in the poetry. Her Scotch
blood, transmitted, courses perhaps in the canny good sense, in the
slightly oblique humor, and above all in the thriftiness of the poetic
productions. She was herself an occasional versifier and reviewed books
for her husband’s newspaper. In religion she was a Swedenborgian, and
these facts are sufficient to suggest that she probably awakened an
emotional area in her son that the father left untouched, that area
that was later to fructify into a new contribution to American poetry.
III. “A BOY’S WILL”
Robert and his sister had been trained by their father to no love
of New England. Circumstance, however, had now deposited them among
the despised children of this section, and for the first time they
saw pennies. They made up a little game. First, they would hold up
a nickel and say, “San Francisco!” Then they would exhibit a penny
and scornfully pronounce, “Boston!” But this childish snobbism soon
vanished as they became more at home in the East.
Robert received the usual schooling and in high school clearly
outstripped his class. He was apparently in full possession of
valedictorian honors as graduation neared when a rival emerged coming
rapidly forward from a lower class. The rival was a Lawrence girl,
a descendant of the Whites of Acton who fought at Concord and of
Peregrine White on the _Mayflower_. Elinor White was completing her
high school course in two and a half years, thus catching up with
Robert’s class, and when the averages were computed it was found that
she had tied him for the honor of valedictorian. It was decided,
nevertheless, that Robert Frost should deliver the address, while on
the graduation program the names of Elinor Miriam White and Robert
Frost should appear together as holders of the office. This happened
to forecast the future, for the boy and girl, already friends, were
married in October of 1895 and their names have ever since been joined
in a union of singular idyllic beauty.
Another courtship was developing during the same phase of Robert
Frost’s life which was also to ripen into a lifelong devotion, and that
was the courting of the Muse of Poetry. Before he left San Francisco,
he had begun a serial story. It concerned the doings of a lost and
forgotten tribe living in a ravine no one of the outside world knew
about. After he came east, he continued this serial from time to time,
filling in the details of scenery and inhabitants.
Here we strike a master-image, one that constantly recurs in Frost’s
life, for aside from the varieties of it to be found in his poems--for
example, in such lines as “Me for the hills where I don’t have to
choose” and the first two stanzas of _Into My Own_--the poet has
confessed that often he puts himself to sleep by dreaming of this
inaccessible and sometimes happy tribe defending its canyon. One hopes
that this recurrent and dominant image will not be subjected to the
ingenious but suspect leaps to conclusions of the psycho-analysts.
Better far the slower method of the behaviorist who is in closer accord
with the commonsense of man which tells us that we do not thoroughly
know people until we have seen them in many situations over a lengthy
span of seasons.
When fourteen Robert Frost began to open books with a new zest.
Hitherto he had been content to have his mother read to him and
his favorite story had been _Tom Brown’s School Days_ which
characteristically he had never finished--because he could not bear
the thought that he had completed the tale. But now he adventured for
himself among books. He read with eager responsiveness all of William
Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to Shelley’s _Alastor_
and Keats’ _Endymion_ but found them too much at the time for his
interests and resources. Edward Rowland Sill and his Emersonianism was
better adapted to his requirements, and Frost still preserves a mild
respect for this obscured Connecticut poet who in his day carried the
fruitage of New England culture to the far West.
The following year at the age of fifteen Frost was himself trying out
his hand at writing verse, and two years later composed _My Butterfly_
which is one of the pieces in _A Boy’s Will_ and the earliest poem he
has kept. The first stanza is quoted not only to reveal its superiority
to the poetry of adolescence at large but to explain what followed its
publication.
Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Save only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.
The tentative submission of _My Butterfly_ to the _Independent_ had
brought a prompt note of acceptance and a check for fifteen dollars.
It happened that William Hays Ward, the editor, was a devout student
of Sidney Lanier, a fact that explains his liking for the musical
dexterity of this poem, but though he printed some of the subsequent
poems Frost mailed him, he never liked another as well. They were not
in the Lanier vein, and that was where a young poet should be working.
But Frost was obdurate then as now in these concerns, and Ward gave him
up.
So at seventeen Robert Frost was looking very much like the Frost
of today. He was dipping into literature apparently without system
but really reading for his own purposes as a nascent poet. He was
assimilating New England and coming close to an essence of its oldest
settlers in a girl who was to prove an ideal helpmate through the years
of unrecognition that lay ahead. He was displaying literary talent
well above the merely good for those of his years. And he was showing
a certain “set” character and pertinacity in finding out his own
direction in poetry. William Hays Ward tried to divert him and failed.
Twenty odd years later in London Ezra Pound at once recognized this
“set-ness” and did not try to instigate any changes.
IV. “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN”
From 1892 to 1900 life offered Robert Frost a variety of prospective
roads to travel. He refused them all after short reflection and
continued to be drawn toward the road he had already peered at as a
youth in high school. It was the road on which he should have Love and
Poetry as presiding deities.
At the age of twenty he married Elinor White. Her father was a retired
Universalist clergyman and she had attended a Universalist college, St.
Lawrence University. But in deference to the faith of Robert Frost’s
mother, they were married by a Swedenborgian minister.
Robert, too, had been away to college in 1892. It was Dartmouth: he
went at his grandfather’s behest: and he stayed only a few months.
Interests in him were beginning to ripen and somehow the college did
not touch these interests. That was all, and quietly he withdrew to
become for a time a bobbin boy in a Lawrence mill.
But he had no ambition to work up in a mill. That, like college, was a
road not taken. In his pocket he carried a volume of Shakespeare which
he read during rest intervals in the mill.
Somewhat restless, undecided and drifting those days were for him, and
perhaps they are best symbolized by a brief tramping tour which he made
down South.
His mother was taking pupils in her little school in Lawrence and
Robert instructed there for a while in Latin. Previously he had had
a spell of making shoes. Finally, he was the reporter-editor of the
Lawrence _Sentinel_, a weekly paper. Reporting, however, was against
his temperament. One had to be active to get the news, active and
prying into the reticences of people. Robert Frost, respecting his own
reticences, respected those of others, and the occupation was extremely
distasteful. More to his liking was a germinal “column” he inaugurated,
one into which he could insert vignettes he had written: the picture of
a ragged child coal-picker in a railroad yard, the picture of the stray
eagle who lit on the top of the American flag-pole of the Lawrence Post
Office until some hours later it was shot down to Frost’s indignation.
Marriage did not precipitate the problem of making a living. Making
a living merely continued to be a sort of hazy actuality about which
eventually something would be done. But as another preparatory step
to meeting this problem, Robert again tried college, again backed up
by his uncomprehending but sympathetic grandfather. This time it was
Harvard in the year 1897, and in the same class was another poet whose
work Frost was to like years later but whom he did not know at the
time. The other poet was Wallace Stevens.
Frost picked up something for himself during the two years he stayed
at Harvard. He improved his acquaintance with Latin and Greek and
particularly enjoyed reading Greek with a young instructor named
Babbitt who later went to Trinity College. The ancient classics were
much to his liking and it was about this time that he found in Virgil’s
_Eclogues_ and _Georgics_ the nourishment his emotional constitution
most craved. Philosophy lured him in a general way as it continues to
lure him. Santayana gave a course which he recalls with pleasure in the
“golden speech” and the “deliberate speed, majestic instancy” of the
exposition of this brilliant thinker.
But despite all this, college could not hold him to the end. There was
a man in Windham, New Hampshire, he had known in the interval between
Dartmouth and Harvard, a man named Charley Hall, whose speech had a
racy commonness, and the stimulus of this man’s talks was greater than
the correct speech of college instructors. On the basis of this homely,
shrewd and living talk, could not poetry be written by a good listener?
Frost deserted academic halls for his own peculiar university, a life
close to the soil among soil-tinged folk, listening to their turns of
thought and feeling and phrase.
Journalism, handicraft, teaching, factory work, college, all were to
be roads not taken, and in 1900 his grandfather was still pondering,
perhaps more than Robert, on what was to be the career of his grandson.
V. “NEW HAMPSHIRE”
Grandfather Frost reached a decision that to American poetry at any
rate was fortunate. With $1800 he purchased a farm at Derry, New
Hampshire, for his grandson and thither Robert Frost transported his
family in 1900. The family now numbered four: a son, Eliot, had been
born in 1896, and a daughter, Lesley, in 1899. Eliot, however, died in
the middle of 1900.
Derry, which is in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire almost
on a line northward from Lawrence to Kingston, New Hampshire, an old
birthplace of Frost’s ancestors, was apparently the right locality
for the nurturing of Robert Frost’s bents. Like a true New England
village it had its academy, Pinkerton Academy, standing on a hill
with Derry Village spread out below it. A mile away from that was
the comparatively recent “Depot” where most of the five thousand
inhabitants lived. But there was a breakage of character between the
village proper and the “Depot.” The latter was developing, rapidly
of course, along the lines of present-day industrial New England:
it had several shoe factories and foretold in its little way a new
and confused order of society. But Derry Village was then very much
as it had been in 1880. Its families were conservative and regarded
their religion and inherited culture very stolidly, entrenched in the
feeling that twenty or thirty years ago the satisfactory elevation in
religious thought and education had been achieved and now required only
maintenance. It had its local small scale industries, founded upon
Yankee inventiveness, particularly the Chase mill, a woodworking plant
which among other specialties turned out in large quantities the wooden
tags that nurserymen employ to identify their stock.
All this was right for Robert Frost: a settled rooted community, its
life persisting in the presence of an enveloping alien and noisy
industrialism which has not yet succeeded in totally smothering its
vitality, and the academy on the hill as a sign, however inadequate,
that culture should keep conservatism a little worried about the large
questions of life lest conservatism fall into complacency. “I believe
in tradition and accident and a bit of an idea bothering tradition,”
Frost once remarked years after the Derry period, and Derry itself
appears to have been a living pattern of this traditionalism affected
by accident and ideas.
Frost’s small farm was a couple of miles “down the turnpike.” Like
scores of other farms in Rockingham county it was a farm out of which
even a very experienced farmer would have had difficulty in extracting
a living. For Frost it was a downhill dogged battle. The unprolific
character of the soil was unfairly aided in its resistance to success
on the tiller’s part by the hay-fever which attacked Frost in the
middle of August each year and made him wretched for two months. In
addition, it was the child-bearing and rearing phase of his married
life. A son, Carol, born in 1902, a daughter, Irma, in 1903, and
another daughter, Marjorie, in 1905 naturally increased the strain of
his struggle.[3] In spite of all that, there was a good deal of play,
too: botanizing, making wood paths, inducting the children into outdoor
life. His farming neighbors, probably correctly, did not approve of
Frost’s methods (he could be caught milking the cows at ten at night in
order to sleep later in the morning) and the end of this venture came
in 1905 when he drove up to the butcher’s to make further purchases
on credit. The fattish butcher came brusquely out on the porch of his
store, cocked an appraising eye at Frost’s horse and inquired, none too
delicately, if anyone had a lien on it. Then Frost, with four children,
a rundown farm, and a bundle of unpublished poems (including _Black
Cottage_ which he had just written) on his hands, decided to apply for
a position at Pinkerton Academy.
If the farm had not grudgingly yielded him a living, it had done
something else; it had toughened his respect for nature, it had
disciplined him by its immalleability to aught but extremely hard
labor. It put, in short, a fibrous quality in his living which has been
expressed in the poetry.
It was almost literally with a poem that Robert Frost secured his
position at Pinkerton. The incident was this: he had been invited to
read a poem before the Men’s Club of the Central Congregational Church
at Derry. The reading aroused the interest of the Pinkerton trustees,
among them, John C. Chase, the head of the mill; and the pastor of the
church, Reverend Charles Merriam, used his influence in crystallizing
this interest into an offer. And so Robert Frost came to worry and
modify the traditional state of affairs at Pinkerton Academy during
the years 1906 to 1911.
The reports of eye-witnesses have a superior validity in biography as
well as in courts of law, and the author of this study is grateful to
Mr. John Bartlett of Boulder, Colorado, for the privilege of utilizing
portions of his letter on this period in Robert Frost’s life. Mr.
Bartlett wrote:
“I joined the class of 1910 in the fall of 1907, being rated then as
a member of the Junior Middle Class. Pinkerton had a student body of
one hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and its equipment consisted of
a modern brick building on a hill-top and facing to the east, and a
little lower on the hill the ‘old academy’ of wood, well preserved and
painted white.
“There were several fine old teachers, excellent representatives of
the school that believed that thoroughness and hard work were the
beginning and the conclusion of the educational process. Great store
was set by Latin which was taught by George W. Bingham, the stern and
aged principal, and by Greek in which Mary Parsons, maiden member of
a distinguished Derry Village (and New Hampshire, too) family, gave
instruction.
“The faculty was true to the good old Pinkerton tradition. The Academy
had been founded in the first years of the nineteenth century and
dedicated to the development of cultured Christian character. Old
rules governing the student body were still in effect. Card playing,
for example, was forbidden, and for a boy to escort a girl to and from
an entertainment was still a technical violation of ‘requirements.’
There were compulsory study hours and compulsory attendance at church.
Students must be in their homes at seven p.m. and not leave thereafter
except on Friday evening when grace was extended to ten p.m. and Sunday
evening when the students were expected to attend church services.
Once a week the principal called the roll of the assembled student
body and each student reported his record of the week, thus: ‘All the
requirements,’ ‘One exception, excused,’ ‘Two exceptions.’
“Most of the students came from homes within a radius of fifteen miles.
A great many were from farm families, while Derry ‘Depot’ sent the
children of factory workers. An Academy-owned dormitory housed the
majority of the few boarding students.
“I am sure that when I entered the Academy there was much faculty
hostility to Frost, and even among the older students there was some
also. I recall that the submission to Frost as the English teacher of
all prepared papers in an inter-class debate between Junior Middlers
and Seniors was objected to by the Senior team, a grossly offensive act
meriting disciplinary rebuke, but such did not follow. And I believe
that there were certain members of the faculty who had toward the new
English teacher almost a personal animosity.
“Frost came as the representative of new things, and there was
collision. He did not arrive at the Academy in time to participate
in the morning chapel exercises; he had no classroom; he defied
the Pinkerton tradition in the informality of his presence and the
free-and-easy way he handled his classes. The fact that he had no
college degree would, for a portion of the faculty, keep him forever
outside the circle. He was younger than nearly all the others. A dozen
things made him an ‘outsider.’ He looked it and acted it.
“The old order of things at Pinkerton went quickly. A new principal,
Ernest L. Silver (later principal of the New Hampshire State
Normal School), came in 1909. There were new teachers and new
subjects--agriculture, domestic science, and this and that. Pinkerton
in brief time was doing a lot of catching up. I believe that Frost’s
success with his English classes had a great deal to do with the
rapidity and completeness of this change.
“No greater departure from traditional Pinkerton teaching methods could
be conceived than those of Robert Frost. A boy of sixteen or seventeen
isn’t aware in respect to much of a teacher’s pedagogy beyond knowing
whether it pleases him or not. But, looking back, I believe I know the
first great difference between Frost and the other teachers. He had far
greater interest in the individual student. He had a way of manifesting
this, of asking questions and of making observations in a few words,
all the while getting closer to the boy in question. It was not a
professional self-conscious thing, but a desire from Frost’s heart to
get closer and learn more.
“A new member of one of his classes, I had handed in a single short
theme. Late one afternoon as a group of boys were passing a football
about on the athletic field, Frost came up. He was a frequent figure
on the athletic field and sometimes he would take off his coat and
‘make a bluff,’ as the boys put it, at playing. This afternoon he
happened to come near me. He asked several questions concerning
the Pawtuckaway Mountains where the ‘Devil’s Den’ about which I had
written was located. I answered them awkwardly: I was a shy boy. In a
matter-of-fact way he observed that I was a fellow who had ideas.
“That was all there was to the conversation, for a spinning ball came
my way, but I can still see Frost and the fall mud and the football
bucking machine and the boys on that afternoon. He seemed to show in
this conversation several hundred times the interest in me that other
teachers had.
“He really had this interest, I am sure, and it was not directed
toward me alone, but toward all his students. He asked them personal
questions, drew them out.
“In those days Frost was always asking questions of people. Not the
mechanical questions of politeness, but questions that would get at
things Frost was interested in ... and he was interested in a great
deal. If we took a winter walk toward Londonderry and met a logging
team, which stopped as we came abreast, there would be a conversation
right there. Frost would have the teamster talking about logging things
and horses and wood roads and such matters. He talked with his students
in somewhat the same way. There was always something to be learned
from these New Englanders, and Frost learned it.
“And he was interested in the boy’s problems of individuality.
Seemingly, he could like any sort of boy. He might not win a boy in the
first few months of his contact with him, but nearly always he won him
in the end.
“The most excited boy over an English paper I ever saw was Dave
Griffith, the athlete of ’10, a magnificent halfback and sprinter. He
had written on a sport subject and had earned commendation from Frost.
Breaking the study hour rule of the dormitory, Dave stealthily went
from room to room to announce grandly his accomplishment. Dave had a
haughty disregard for scholastic honors in general (few of which he
ever received), but he knew when he had something to be proud of.
“We had a boarding student in the Junior class, Arthur Eastman, who was
neither among the scholars on one hand nor the athletes on the other.
Arthur suddenly was famous for a four-line stanza which Frost was
commending to his classes. I believe the boy never again wrote a verse
which was praised. On the other hand, one of the older students who
turned out verse with great abundance and prided himself on his ability
received no approval whatever. The school knew that Frost considered
this student’s verse of no merit.
“Frost’s English classes were always ‘easy’ classes. Frost had none of
the taskmaster’s attitude, yet his classes did a great deal of work
and covered fully as much ground as any ordinary class. Any feeling
for literature displayed by a student was cultivated: any talent for
writing was nursed along. A few in each class were gradually developed
who could always be counted on for lively discussion. Very frequently
departures from the regular routine were made. Often, for example,
Frost, slumped down in his chair, would read to the class. And every
time a new _Critic_ was out, Frost would discuss it with his classes.
“The _Critic_ was the student publication, and it was better than it
had been for many years before Frost’s engagement. He let the boys and
girls run it largely themselves: faculty supervision of it was much
less than formerly. There was a good deal of comradeship between Frost
and the _Critic_ staff. Unconventional things occurred ... the _Critic_
files may contain at least one poem the distinguished authorship
of which is not generally known. I believe the _Critic_ sometimes
contained, because of his ‘hands off’ policy, things that he would not
have passed for publication. But he knew that his policy was right and
held to it.
“He was philosophical, too, when one of the honor members of the Senior
class, given liberty in connection with his Commencement essay not in
keeping with Pinkerton practice, read a paper at Graduation which was
a wretched failure. This boy had not been required to submit his essay
for faculty approval. And he messed the job, actually writing the final
paragraphs two hours before he was due on the platform. Frost remarked
later, ‘It sounded as though you had read one book or article and then
written your essay.’ That was all that was ever said between us, and it
was enough! Frost had divined the fact.
“Out of the English classes came during those years several plays
coached by Frost. In one year I remember we had Marlowe’s _Dr.
Faustus_, Milton’s _Comus_ and Yeats’ _The Land of Heart’s Desire_.
The plays were a success on both sides of the footlights. Frost liked
to have his fun as much as any of the students, and the rehearsals
brought us all together in a fine way. These plays were a new thing at
Pinkerton. The Academy had presented several of Shakespeare’s plays
since the century came in but no cognizance of other drama had been
taken.
“In 1909 the state began to be interested in Frost’s classes. He talked
at conventions, booked by Henry Morrison, the New Hampshire State
Superintendent. And from time to time educators visited our classes.
These convention talks were ordeals, and Frost always came back from
them in a condition of exhaustion. Once he made an experiment before
a talk given at Exeter, I believe. He put sharp pebbles in his shoes
and walked about for hours, painfully, hoping that physical pain would
alleviate the mental torture he was in. But it didn’t!
“The student body was with him one hundred per cent as the fall term of
1909 opened. There was a new order of things in the school and Frost
was recognized as a big figure.
“I do not recall just when it was that Frost first wrote a formula,
famous with his classes, upon a Pinkerton blackboard. He put forward
the following kinds of matter used for literary purposes:
Uncommon in experience--uncommon in writing.
Common in experience--common in writing.
Uncommon in experience--common in writing.
Common in experience--uncommon in writing.
The last was the kind of material to search for, he told us.
“We celebrated a football victory over our rival school, Sanborn
Seminary, in November, 1909, with a supper provided by the new domestic
science department. Frost was the hit of the evening with a string of
verses he put on the blackboard. This was one:
In the days of Captain John,
Sanborn Sem had nothing on,
Pinkerton, Pinkerton.
“A few of the boys spent considerable time with Frost out of school
hours. I remember a walk over the turnpike to Manchester twelve miles
away in the late afternoon, an hour spent in a bookstore, an oyster
stew, and then a ride home on the electric railway. Our conversation on
walks touched books only now and then. They might include reminiscences
of Frost’s early life, discussion of school affairs, aspects of farm
life in New Hampshire, some current news happening of importance, and
nearly anything else. If in passing a farmhouse the aroma of fried
doughnuts came out to us, Frost might propose that we buy some. Down
around the corner we might encounter a fern he hadn’t seen since he was
last in the Lake Willoughby region. And if darkness overtook us and
it was a favorable night for observation, Frost would be sure to take
at least five minutes to study the heavens and attempt to start our
astronomical education.
“There was always an abundance of conversation, but almost never any
argument. Frost never argued. He knew what he knew, and never had any
interest in arguing about it. In the same way he was always willing to
let others think what they wanted to think.
“He had a Woodrow Wilson sense of loyalty. I never knew a person who
was more sensitive to slights, rebuffs and acts of unfriendliness than
Frost or who seemed to carry the scar of them longer, and I have never
met one whose loyalty was more thoroughly of the lasting kind.
“I remember how I came back to Derry late in 1910, having left college
‘between two days,’ defeated and defiant, meeting disapproval and
condemnation. I was a boy getting hit by life and receiving no friendly
overtures when I needed them most. Frost heard I was back and walked
miles to see me and take me over the country roads for a talk. I
remember how a few months later he speeded me on my way to British
Columbia with a handshake and a look in the eye. There was a book at
that parting, Chesterton’s _Heretics_. I read it three times on the
way out. I remember letter after letter as I sought a way to fit in at
Vancouver, and the frequent letters as I finally started in newspaper
work. Letters all about me, my problems. That was what friendship meant
to Robert Frost, help to the maximum when a boy needed it.”
One year after John Bartlett graduated, the teacher who had impressed
him so strongly also left Pinkerton. The principal, Mr. Silver, had
been appointed head of the New Hampshire State Normal School at
Plymouth, New Hampshire, and as often happens in such cases he wished
to take the pick of his faculty with him. Frost went to Plymouth for
the school year 1911-1912, and while there formed a friendship with
a teacher in the high school, Sidney Cox, now assistant professor of
English at Dartmouth and editor of various texts. Professor Cox has
furnished certain notes on his memory of this year which, like those of
Mr. Bartlett, merit first hand presentation and thanks.
“I met Robert Frost,” says Professor Cox, “in the fall of 1911 at
a Normal School dance where both of us were against the wall. The
next day he came to the high school to ask me to go for a walk. I
went, and when I reached home I had felt from that one talk, as I had
never done before, what the real nature of poetry is. Scales had been
gently lifted off my eyes. After that came many walks, and long casual
whole-souled talks. Mr. Frost had no congenial colleagues with whom to
walk, and for both of us it was the first, and as it turned out, the
only year in Plymouth.