that he wasn’t following any chart, but improvising his own courses,
and having the girls read real books. He made me interested in Plato’s
_Republic_ and Rousseau’s _Emile_ when he was in the midst of them
with one of his classes. He sometimes mentioned a student who seemed
exceptional, but he didn’t suppose he was making any great discoveries.
“Perhaps it was on the walk at the end of which Mr. Frost treated me
at the drug store to the delectable beverage of white grape juice
that he first made me realize the absurdity of letting students write
compositions on the adventures of a penny, and gave me a realizing
sense of the distinction between unconditioned speculation and creative
imagination. He didn’t put it in any such deadly abstract terms as
that. He told me that at Derry he had directed his students to write
about what was ‘common to experience but uncommon to expression.’
“Sometimes we talked incidentally about things I was likely to take up
in class. I remember his praising Matthew Arnold’s _Sohrab and Rustum_,
and critically admiring the craftsmanship in Mark Twain’s _The Jumping
Frog_, Stevenson’s _The Bottle Imp_, Hawthorne’s _Mr. Higginbotham’s
Catastrophe_, and H. G. Wells’ _The Country of the Blind_. He
invariably made me see something new. I first learned of Whitman from
him, and at the same time found out that he was what I should formerly
have considered objectionable and, without the point being formulated,
that it wouldn’t do to dismiss him because my taboo was infringed.
“One particularly beautiful snowy walk took us through an evergreen
aisle for miles, down to the Interval and so to the turnpike from
Boston. On the way up that state road to Plymouth I remember something
started us talking about sex behavior and instruction in sex hygiene.
Mr. Frost was skeptical about the latter and said he thought perhaps
reading Shakespeare was more likely to avert catastrophe than any
amount of scientific talk. Another time I told him about the jumpiness
and over-earnestness of one of the woman teachers in high school who
boarded where I did, and I was permanently convinced of the wisdom of
his remark that what she needed was an emotional education through
poetry. He was always interested in people and never spoke of anyone
slightingly. On the other hand, he was keenly aware of shams and
stupidities, and he was not tender toward them.
“Besides the walks, there were a number of unqualifiedly delightful
evenings at his home in the little white house, which he shared with
the temporarily bachelor principal. His was a poor man’s living room,
but there was a bookcase with a lot of attractive books, many of
them thin volumes of poetry,--I remember his drawing my attention to
the exquisite Mosher books,--and there were two or three comfortable
chairs. On such evenings the children went to bed and we older ones
got comfortable, and Mr. Frost read aloud, or we talked. I suppose two
of my favorite plays will always be _Arms and the Man_ by Shaw and
the _Playboy of the Western World_ by Synge because of hearing Mr.
Frost read them. I don’t know anyone who can do the Irish so well. One
evening he read from Mr. Dooley.
“He had supervised a triumphant production of one of Sheridan’s plays
at Derry, and he scorned the notion that good things were too exacting
for school children. The State Superintendent had discovered that he
was the best of the English teachers under his administration soon
after Mr. Frost had been invited away from his farm. And the Principal
of Pinkerton had found that he was wrong in assuming that this teacher
was hardly the man to address a farmers’ institute. Regardless of the
effort it was to overcome his nervousness before a crowd, Mr. Frost had
showed that he had something to say, and could say it well. He took
a sly pleasure in surprising people who automatically underrated him
because he didn’t have a college degree.
“In early spring Mr. Frost, the principal of the Normal School, one of
my fellow teachers in the high school and I went a little way north to
a farm for a week-end. Our host and hostess seemed rather flashy and
hard people, New Yorkers I think they were. The woman was particularly
metallic and thick, like a successful vaudeville performer; and I
was much impressed with the considerateness and attention with which
Mr. Frost kept up a two-sided conversation with her. They agreed, I
remember, on admiring the New York skyline from the harbor. We talked
until late that night, and the next morning after breakfast we walked
over the snow to a large maple sugar camp. The religious and other
metaphorical use of the lamb has always, since that time, been affected
by the memory of Mr. Frost’s waving his hand back and forth within
an inch of the eyes of the lady’s cosset, and pointing out that it
never batted its eyes. I was unaccountably downcast on the way back to
Plymouth and mentioned my mood. Mr. Frost commented, ‘It’s well to have
all kinds of feelings, for it’s all kinds of a world.’
“Not long after that I had to assume the duties of baseball coach, and
Mr. Frost’s lifelong interest in baseball helped me. He often talked of
players and teams, and once he taught me how to work the short throw to
shortstop when there were runners on first and third, and so catch the
man stealing home. He was interested in tennis, too, and taught me very
clearly what he had recently learned about three different cuts to use
in serving.
“I think his one time of attendance at church in Plymouth was so
disturbing to his sensibilities that he had a religious motive for
staying away.”
It is clear from the notes of these two friends that this was the
crystallizing period in Robert Frost’s life. He became during it
certain of what he knew as a youth and as a matter of fact a great
deal of his published verse was written during these years. He had
formulated his central article for his private _ars poetica_--to give
an uncommon expression to what was common in experience--and he was
not to deviate from that in his future course. By adhering to this, he
was very soon after the year at Plymouth destined to be discovered and
recognized by the literary public, but essentially the rest of his life
has been a prolongation of the Derry-Plymouth phase. The enthusiasm
of his friends, Sidney Cox and John Bartlett, when multiplied to the
enthusiasms of critics, poets and readers at large did not, that is
to say, alter his habits or his aims or his quality. He has continued
to do a little farming, some teaching and some writing just as he did
between 1900 and 1912.
VI. “PAN WITH US”
_“Pan came out of the woods one day.”_
It is difficult to overestimate the aridity of the minds and feelings
of poetry editors in the United States during those years when Robert
Frost was writing and teaching and farming in New Hampshire. Not by
his own wish did he remain practically unpublished, for once a year at
least he made up packets of his verses and sent them to the editors of
_Scribner’s_, _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and one or two others.
Almost uniformly they came back: the few exceptions were the _Forum_
and _Youth’s Companion_ whose editor, Mark de Wolfe Howe, stretched a
point or two of his editorial policy to include them. But the market
for poetry was extremely limited, and the story of the insensibility
of those who ruled the market has already been sufficiently told. Yet
looking back, one still is mildly surprised that their taste did not
welcome Robert Frost’s work. It _was_ fresh work, but yet not too far
beyond their canons, not like the verses of Ezra Pound, for instance,
who had impetuously denounced Hamilton Wright Mabie and voyaged to
Spain.
Certainly, Frost was not a persistent and resourceful salesman for his
poems, and perhaps the fault lay partly in him for his lateness in
publication.
No wonder poets sometimes have to _seem_
So much more business-like than business men.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.
Occasionally, he admits, he looked at the poetry printed in the
magazines, felt distaste for its mediocrity and lack of tang, and felt
likewise jealousy and envy of the author because after all he had been
published. Yet his own pride prevented him from making any energetic
plan for breaking through the editorial attitude toward his scripts.
After the year at Plymouth he concluded that it was to be “now or
never” with him so far as the Muse was concerned. The ten year
conditions on his farm had elapsed and he succeeded in selling it. Now
he would set aside the next three or four years for complete devotion
to poetry. But where?
John Bartlett was getting on well at Vancouver, B. C., and in
September, 1912, planned to marry a Pinkerton girl out there. Frost
hesitated between going to Vancouver and going to England, and
corresponded with his former student on the problem. But in August he
wrote that it was to be England for him. A letter about the cost of
living from the British Consul in New York and certain talk in the
family about living under a thatched roof had decided the matter: he
would spend his free time abroad. So he sailed in September, 1912,
and, as has been noted before, Harriet Monroe’s _Poetry: A Magazine of
Verse_ first appeared in October, 1912. Frost left his country just
one month before the event which is usually taken as the beginning
of a new, more enlivened and more extensive interest in contemporary
American verse, and he stepped into England during a particularly
hopeful and exciting season in the arts.
England just before the war of 1914-1918 was full of idealistic
movements and a new era seemed about to open its buds. There was
an upper crust of writers--Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Conrad, Hudson,
Carpenter, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Cunninghame Grahame, Max
Beerbohm--that was distinguished enough or respected enough to make
it worth while to continue their work or to resist it or to try to
supplant them. There were coming up such figures as D. H. Lawrence,
Compton Mackenzie, and Gilbert Cannan for Henry James to cast a keenly
appraising eye upon. There were at least two brilliantly edited
reviews--Ford Madox Hueffer’s (now Ford) _English Review_ and A. R.
Orage’s _The New Age_--which sought for new work and instigated new
literary developments. There were the Irishmen across their Channel
working up a little re-birth on their own. Ezra Pound was everywhere,
fighting, initiating, infusing fresh vitality into poetry and poetry
discussions. Wyndham Lewis was breaking bonds in painting and prose.
Imagism and vorticism, the Bloomsbury groupings and the reactionary
schools, all made the scene stirring and great things were expected.
Then the war crashed in and the fragility of all the movements became
sooner or later apparent. But that was two years after Frost arrived.
At first Frost was not aware of this metropolitan ferment. He repaired
to _T. P.’s Weekly_ which conducted a department of country walks and
inquired for quiet places in the countryside where he wished to live.
The conductor of this department was an ex-policeman (and therefore as
becomes a London “bobbie” intelligent in giving directions) and Frost
took a fancy to him. On his advice he settled in the little suburban
town of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.
One night Frost sat before his fire spreading out before him his
poems and reading them over. As was his custom, a certain number were
discarded. Of those that remained he pondered on making a selection
that might form some sort of coherent book. He shuffled through them,
arranged and rearranged, and gradually _A Boy’s Will_ came to birth. He
had a book of manuscript but no publisher in mind.
In this pass he recalled his friend, the ex-policeman, and determined
to ask his advice on a publisher for poetry! The former policeman was
equal to the call. He suggested Elkin Matthews, but said that as a rule
he required subsidized manuscripts. Frost objected to that, and his
counsellor brought up the name of David Nutt. This appealed to Frost:
he remembered that David Nutt had been Henley’s publisher: and thither
he went one afternoon only to be told that he could not see David
Nutt that day, but if he called the next day he would be able to do
so. Coming at the time directed, he was ushered into a private office
for an interview with a lady in dark clothes who informed him she
would speak for David Nutt. Later he learned that David Nutt had been
deceased for several years, and the lady was his widow, but at this
time the whole proceeding impressed him as mysterious.
Three days afterward he received a letter stating that the firm of
David Nutt would publish _A Boy’s Will_. The long period of twenty
years of frustrated publication was almost closed, and the first drops
of the exhilaration England was to give him had touched his lips.
More were to follow presently. Walking in London one day he noticed
that Harold Munro’s Poetry Book Shop was opening its doors that
very evening with a reception and reading. Although uninvited, he
walked in with the crowd that night and sat on the stairs during the
festivities. A man sitting below remarked, “I see by your shoes you are
an American,” and introduced himself as F. S. Flint. Frost confided to
him his engagement in writing poetry, and Flint asked if he knew his
countryman, Ezra Pound. Frost had never heard of Pound and was promptly
cautioned not to betray that fact to Pound himself.
Flint must have spoken to Pound about the new arrival, for shortly
there came to Frost’s suburban home a post card bearing an address,
the name of Ezra Pound, and beneath it: “At home sometimes.”
Some months later Frost called at Pound’s address and happened to find
him at home. Piqued at first because Frost had been so leisurely in
responding to his card, Pound soon warmed to his rugged caller with the
boyish face and when he learned that possibly proof sheets of _A Boy’s
Will_ might now be secured at David Nutt’s he insisted on going at once
to the office. The proof sheets were ready, and the pair returned to
Pound’s studio. Frost was directed to occupy himself in some way while
Pound turned immediately to reading the poems. Satisfied that here was
sound poetry, Pound then dismissed his guest with the remark that he
had a review to write, and in a short time the first salutation to _A
Boy’s Will_ appeared in type over the distinguished name of Ezra Pound.
_A Boy’s Will_ was received quickly and warmly by the literary press:
the general tenor can be felt from a quotation from the notice in the
_Academy_. It said: “We have read every line with the amazement and
delight which are too seldom evoked by books of modern verse.” The
poetry-reading public was lured.
Pound had a new “find” and he began to take Frost here and there to
luncheons, studios and parties, and among the most delightful of the
last were the Tuesday evenings at T. E. Hulme’s. Frost was pleased and
interested, but did not change his stripe.
All the time his capital was decreasing, for although he was now a
“success”[4] in a moderate way, he never succeeded in winning any
royalty statements from David Nutt. _A Boy’s Will_ had appeared in
1913 and the following year the same firm gladly brought out _North
of Boston_ which was greeted by the _Times Literary Supplement_ with
the statement that “poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind
breathes upon smoldering embers,” and there were more buyers. But only
a success of estimation for Frost. To eke out his capital, he fell
back upon farming and in the winter of 1914 leased a small farm called
Little Iddens near Leadbury in Gloucestershire. His near neighbors were
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie.
Gibson enjoyed joshing Frost about America. It appeared that Gibson’s
poetry aroused various people in America to write him letters of
gratitude that sometimes began, “Dear Bro.,” and proceeded to give
other signs in orthography and grammar of semi-literacy and raw taste.
Frost himself now received his first letter from an American admirer.
It was on stationery of high quality from a farm in Stowe, Vermont,
called Four Winds Farm. The neat script merely informed him that the
writer and her mother had enjoyed his poetry, and the signature was
that of a lady named Holt. It was a publisher’s wife, though Frost
did not suspect the fact. But the letter did enable him to return
triumphantly Gibson’s joshing: he displayed it to him as an example of
the way farmer’s wives wrote in America as well as evidence of the kind
of people who read _his_ books.
Gibson has commemorated this delightful time in a poem entitled _The
Golden Room_ printed some time ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and for
the sake of the picture the first two stanzas may well be quoted here.
Do you remember the still summer evening
When in the cosy cream-washed living-room
Of the Old Nailshop we all talked and laughed--
Our neighbors from the Gallows, Catherine
And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke;
Elinor and Robert Frost, living awhile
At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them
Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight
We talked and laughed, but for the most part listened
While Robert Frost kept on and on and on
In his slow New England fashion for our delight,
Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,
And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes.
We sat there in the lamplight while the day
Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers
Called over the low meadows till the owls
Answered them from the elms; we sat and talked--
Now a quick flash from Abercrombie, now
A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas,
Now a clear, laughing word from Brooke, and then
Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy
That had the body and tang of good draught-cider
And poured as clear a stream.
Meanwhile the war was increasing its diabolical momentum and the arts
in England were going under. Poets went to the front instead of to
studios and review offices, and among them was Edward Thomas with whom
Frost formed his most congenial friendship on English soil. Thomas had
been a critic and author of several biographical studies and travel
books. Frost fanned the critic’s hitherto latent talent for writing
poetry to a quiet blaze and the outcome was the volume, _Poems_, by
Thomas in 1917, a volume that was gratefully dedicated to Robert Frost.
Thomas was killed on Easter Monday in 1917 and Frost has commemorated
both the poetry and his friend.
You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire
On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day
The war seemed over more for you than me,
But now for me than you--the other way.
Two years before the death of Thomas, in March of 1915, Frost had left
England for America, bringing with him the fifteen year old son of his
friend.
He had gone through years of non-recognition: in a foreign land he
had been exhilarated with a modest success and the sympathetic praise
of fellow poets: all had been engulfed in the horror and sadness
of the greatest war in our history: and now Frost faced again the
uncertainties of America. There was a surprise awaiting him.
VII. “INTO MY OWN”
Passing down a side street in New York as he came away from the steamer
which had brought him back from England, Robert Frost’s eyes saw
propped on a stand a magazine he had never heard of. From curiosity he
purchased it at once: it was called _The New Republic_. Inside he came
upon a page appreciation of _North of Boston_ which was signed by Amy
Lowell. But more arresting still, the book appeared to be published by
Henry Holt and Co. An American publisher! He did not know he had one.
This seemed a good omen, and the following day Frost called on the Holt
company.
Yes, they had imported the sheets for three hundred bound copies from
David Nutt, and this small order had been very quickly exhausted.
Now they would like to publish _North of Boston_ and _A Boy’s Will_
themselves, but David Nutt had reserved all rights. It soon appeared,
though, that David Nutt had violated the agreement, and Henry Holt
won the legal right to bring out Frost’s books in America. In quick
succession they published _North of Boston_ and _A Boy’s Will_ within
that year, 1915.
Rapid sales followed. _North of Boston_ eventually ran around twenty
thousand copies, and the other books have done well, considering the
market for poetry, though not nearly so well as the first.[5] The
critics were exuberant: among them was Edward Garnett who contributed
an influential article on Frost, since included in _Friday Nights_, to
the _Atlantic Monthly_. Furthermore, public taste for a time appeared
to have crystallized about such work as Frost’s. The hour was right,
for there was ripening a new interest in contemporary American verse:
the critics were enthusiastic: and the character of Frost’s writing,
at once novel and conservative, pleased all camps. A great many people
agreed with Edward Garnett’s opinions: “It seemed to me that this poet
was destined to take a permanent place in American literature....
Surely a genuine New England voice, whatever be its literary debt to
old-world English ancestry.”
Recognition, long deferred, now heaped itself upon the quiet poet. A
chapter in Amy Lowell’s _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ was
given over to him and his work, Louis Untermeyer wrote a chapter on his
verse in _A New Era in American Poetry_, Llewellyn Jones did likewise
in _First Impressions_, Clement Wood in _Poets of America_, and it very
shortly came to pass that no survey of the poetry of our decades was
complete without a considerable discussion of this author. Waldo Frank
in _Our America_ introduced his passage on Frost by saying: “The poetry
of Frost is of that excellent sort which it is hard to catalogue. It is
lyrical. It is dramatic, since his books are--as he says--‘of people.’
It is philosophic, since the tales he tells trace conscious lines about
the boundaries of life. Fully, it is poetry--and of New England.”
Frost found himself an advisory board member of the _Seven Arts_ in
1916 and 1917, that gallant venture in behalf of our national arts
directed by Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks and James Oppenheim. And
in the file of the _Seven Arts_ there rests _The Way Out_, the one
published play by Frost. Truly, he had scarcely tapped and all the
doors of literary America suddenly opened to him.
He had come into his own, so far as eminence counts. In 1916 he was Phi
Beta Kappa poet at one of the colleges he had neglected to graduate
from, and he read at Harvard for the occasion the poem called _The
Axe-Helve_. Since then there has been a shower of honors. In the early
part of 1922 he was elected an honorary member of the International
P.E.N. Club in the company of Thomas Hardy, Anatole France, Romain
Rolland, Selma Lagerlof, and others of western world fame. This
international honor was seconded in the same year by the local action
of the Women’s Clubs of Vermont in conferring on him the title of
Poet Laureate of that state. Very quickly, too, his work has been
incorporated in the English literature courses of foreign universities:
at the Sorbonne study of Robert Frost’s books is a requirement in the
English teacher’s course and from the University of Montpellier, Jean
Catel has written, “We are going to study Frost as a poet together with
such recognized writers as Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, etc.” Lately
critical estimates of his poetry have appeared in Italy.
But Robert Frost was not to be hurried. _Mountain Interval_ came out in
1916 and absorbed most of the balance of his unpublished poems. Then a
wait until 1923 when a _Selected Poems_ was brought out, and then _New
Hampshire_, the first new book in seven years. It is now four years
since _New Hampshire_ and Frost is still unwilling to release another
collection. “In a year or two I suppose I’ll have another book ready,”
he says.