literature raises and attempts to answer, and these questions it is
not appropriate to ask of every poet. Frost makes no pretense of great
inclusiveness and great profundities. The canniness of good sense
forbids such rash over-reachings of one’s self. But what we have always
a right to demand is that the poet should be skilled in his craft,
alive in his sensibility, and at least sensible in his conclusions.
Robert Frost is all of these, and to those questions that it is proper
to ask of him, those questions, that is, that are covered in his own
experience, he returns always an answer in true currency equal to the
demand.
His comprehensive answer is the _natural_ (not romantic and not
religious) vision of life, and it is natural in the sense that it is
fitting to man _as he is_. “The poetry of a true real natural vision of
life,” said Goethe, “demands descriptive power of the highest degree,
rendering a poet’s pictures so life-like that they become actualities
to every reader,” and that is what Robert Frost, man of good sense and
fine sensibility, has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be
treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the
long and noble course of American literature.
APPENDIX A
SELECTED BRITISH OPINION ON ROBERT FROST
The following quotations are taken from a little leaflet distributed
by David Nutt. Historically, the leaflet is interesting for showing
the quick captivation of English critics by _North of Boston_. But
more than that, the English writers appear to have succeeded better in
stating the emotional character of Frost’s verse than the Americans who
have undertaken the same task.--G. B. M.
* * * * *
... A unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit
that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one
hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so
of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and
relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of
compression and more lightness, unity and breadth. The language ranges
from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and
intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack
of violence make the unaffected verses look like prose, except that the
sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to
the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as _The Death
of the Hired Man_, _Home Burial_, _The Black Cottage_, and _The Wood
Pile_, do we realize that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious
tenderness.--_The English Review._
* * * * *
... To start with, Mr. Frost is an American poet who noticeably stands
out against tradition.... We find very little of the traditional manner
of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work; scarcely anything, indeed, save a
peculiar adaption, in his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse....
It elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation
does. It is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life
much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words--to put them, that
is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected
virtue comes out of them; it is, in fact, poetry composed, as far as
possible, in a language of things.... We have heard a great deal lately
of the desirability of getting back again into touch with the living
vigors of speech. This usually means matters of vocabulary and idiom;
and Mr. Frost certainly makes a racy use of New England vernacular. But
he goes further; he seems trying to capture and hold within metrical
patterns the very tones of speech--the rise and fall, the stressed
pauses and little hurries, of spoken language. The kind of metrical
modulation to which we are most accustomed--the modulations intended
for decorations or purely esthetic expressiveness--will scarcely be
found in his verses. But, instead, we have some novel inflections of
metre which can only be designed to reproduce in verse form the actual
shape of the sound of whole sentences. As a matter of technique, the
attempt is extraordinarily interesting.... Naturally, this technical
preoccupation bears strongly on the general form of Mr. Frost’s poetry.
He uses almost entirely dialogue or soliloquy; he must have somebody
talking. We might call these poems psychological idylls. Within their
downright knowledge, their vivid observation, and (more important)
their rich enjoyment of all kinds of practical life, within their
careful rendering into metre of customary speech, the impulse is always
psychological--to set up, in some significant attitude, a character or
a conflict of characters. The ability to do this can turn a situation
which is not very interesting at first into something attractive,
as when a rather protracted discourse of two distant relations on
genealogy gradually merges into a shy, charming conversation of
lovers; or, in a more striking instance, when the rambling speech of
an overtasked farmer’s wife works up into a dreadful suggestion of
inherited lunacy. If, as we have said, we cannot quarrel with this
deliberate method of exposition, it can scarcely be questioned that
Mr. Frost is at his best when he can dispense with these structural
preliminaries as in the admirable soliloquy of a farmer mending his
wall, or in the exquisite comedy of the professor sharing his bedroom
with a talkative newspaper-agent, or in the stark, formidable tragedy
called _Home Burial_. Though it is difficult to state absolutely
the essential quality of Mr. Frost’s poetry, it is not difficult to
suggest a comparison. When poetry changes by development rather than
by rebellion, it is likely to return on itself. Poetry in Mr. Frost
exhibits almost the identical desires and impulses we see in the
“bucolic” poems of Theocritus.--_The Nation._
* * * * *
... There is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent
instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the
least suggesting that Mr. Frost should write vers libre; I am only
saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman--But
Mr. Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground, and
much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman
gave the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to
shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It
is another form of the New England conscience.... He does give you
a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows
and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of
wildnesses--of an America that really matters far more than the land of
endless trickery, make-believe, and lying and empty loquacity. That is
the face that--Heaven knows why!--America seems to like to present to
these parts of the world; but those are the least desirable features.
Anyhow, Mr. Frost has called in on us to redress the balance of that
particular New World.... He is not a remains of English culture grown
provincial and negligible. He is not, in fact, a sentimentalist. Not to
be a sentimentalist is to be already half-way towards being a poet--and
Mr. Frost goes the other half-way as well, though to describe what
that other half is beats me. Here is the little poem--rhymed for a
change--in which, as it were, he proffers his invitation to read _North
of Boston_.
THE PASTURE
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away--
And wait to watch the water clear, I may;
I shan’t be gone long--You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
He totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long--You come too.
Why is that beautiful and friendly and touching and all sorts
of things? I don’t know. I suppose, just because Mr. Frost is a
poet.--Ford Madox Hueffer in _The Outlook_.
* * * * *
This is an original book which will raise the thrilling question,
What is poetry?... Few that read it through will have been as much
astonished by any American since Whitman.... He has trusted his
conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when
some matter has touched him deeply.... In his first book, _A Boy’s
Will_, there is this piece, entitled _Mowing_:--
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself:
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound,--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
Those last six lines do more to define Mr. Frost than anything I can
say. He never will have “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf”: he can
make fact “the sweetest dream.” Naturally, then, when his writing
crystallizes, it is often in a terse, plain phrase, such as the
proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” or--
Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build;
From the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone;
or
Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.
But even this kind of characteristic detail is very much less important
than the main result, which is a richly homely thing beyond the grasp
of any power except poetry. It is a beautiful achievement, and I think
a unique one, as perfectly Mr. Frost’s own as his vocabulary, the
ordinary English speech of a man accustomed to poetry and philosophy,
more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even
in a letter, almost entirely lacking the emphatic hackneyed forms of
journalists and other rhetoricians, and possessing a kind of healthy,
natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than
that of Keats’.--Edward Thomas in _The New Weekly_.
* * * * *
In its quiet and unsensational way, Mr. Robert Frost’s _North of
Boston_ is the most challenging book of verse that has been published
for some time.... Mr. Frost has turned the living speech of men and
women into poetry.... To me it seems that _Home Burial_ and _The
Fear_ are the most absolute achievements in the book; but that may
only be because they come nearest to the kind of thing I wish to see
done in poetry; and the other pieces in the book all contain notable
qualities, and qualities which have been too long absent from English
verse. Mr. Frost has a keen, humorous sense of character.... Tales
that might be mere anecdotes in the hands of another poet take on a
universal significance, because of their native veracity and truth to
local character.--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson in _The Bookman_.
APPENDIX B
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
BOOKS BY ROBERT FROST
_A Boy’s Will_. London: David Nutt. 1913
_North of Boston._ London: David Nutt. 1914
_North of Boston._ New York: Henry Holt. 1914
_A Boy’s Will._ New York: Henry Holt. 1915
_Mountain Interval._ New York: Henry Holt. 1916
_Selected Poems._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923
_New Hampshire._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923
PRINCIPAL ESSAYS ON ROBERT FROST
Amy Lowell: _Robert Frost_ in _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_.
Waldo Frank: pages 158-162 in _Our America_.
Louis Untermeyer: _Robert Frost_ in _A New Era in American Poetry_.
Edward Garnett: _Robert Frost_ in _Friday Nights_.
Clement Wood: _Robert Frost_ in _Poets of America_.
Llewellyn Jones: _Robert Frost_ in _First Impressions_.
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: _Robert Frost_ in _Fire Under the Andes_.
Percy H. Boynton: _Robert Frost_ in _English Journal_, Oct., 1922.
G. R. Elliott: _The Neighborliness of Robert Frost_ in the _Nation_,
vol. cix, p. 713-715.
Carl Van Doren: _Quintessence and Subsoil_ in the _Century_, February,
1923.
John Freeman: _Frost_ in the _London Mercury_, vol. xiii, pages 176-187.
Charles Cestre: _Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson_
in _Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine_, vol. xiv, pages 363-388.
Jean Catel: _La Poesie americaine d’aujourd’hui_ in the _Mercure de
France_, March 15, 1920.
Albert Feuillerat: _Robert Frost_ in _Revue des Deux Mondes_, tome
xvii, pages 185-210.
APPENDIX C
ROBERT FROST ON EDUCATION
The following extracts are from a talk which Robert Frost gave at
Wesleyan University in December, 1926. They were taken down in
shorthand by a reporter for the _New Student_ and thus preserve the
exact verbal flavor of Frost’s conversation as well as the best direct
statement of his educational aim that I have encountered.--G. B. M.
“The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have. That is
much harder than anything else in the world to get--it’s the freedom
of my material. You might define a school boy as one who could recite
to you, if you started him talking, everything he read last night,
in the order in which he read it. That’s a school boy. That’s just
the opposite of what I mean by a free person. The person who has the
freedom of his material is the person who puts two and two together,
and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time, and brought
together. One little thing mentioned, perhaps, reminds him of something
he couldn’t have thought of for twenty years. That’s the kind of talk
I’d rather give.
“I’d rather be perfectly free of my material--reach down here in time
and off there in space, and here’s my two and two put together. Here’s
my idea, my thought. That’s the freedom I’d like to give.
“It depends so much on the disconnection of things. There’s too much
sequence and logic all the time, of reciting what we learned over
night. There’s an attempt in the honor courses to get toward what I
mean. I don’t know what the honor courses will do toward it.
“I think what I’m after is free meditation. I don’t think anybody gets
to it when he’s in anybody’s company--only when his soul’s alone.
I do it when I wake up in the morning, when I’m starting an idea,
and restarting. Sleep is probably a symbol of the interruption, the
disconnection that I want in life. Your whole life can be so logical
that it seems to me like a ball of hairs in the stomach of an angora
cat. It should be broken up and interrupted, and then be brought
together by likeness, free likeness.
“You might ask me this question: how am I going to find time? I would
so run a course by self-withdrawal. I would begin a course by being
very present, and then slowly disappear. A sort of vanishing act. I’d
rather melt away just as I stood there, and leave a fellow more and
more alone, and let him feel deserted, like a baby in a room alone.
“I know a good story, with a man’s name. I don’t mind using names. A
fellow named Conrad Aiken, one of our very best poets, though not one
of our most read, was once told in school to interpret something from
some French dramatist. He went home and got so much interested in doing
it that he didn’t come back to class for three weeks, but by that time
he had the whole play done in verse. He was sent to the office, on the
matter of cuts. He ran away on that. He came back afterwards to please
an uncle, he told me. We always pleased our uncles. Is that freedom to
do more than you ought to? He’d done more than a man might be asked to
do in his whole college course. If a man did that for me, I’d give him
A in every course.”
INDEX
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 65, 81
_Academy_, 64
_Alastor_, 29
Amherst, 73, 75, 81
Anderson, Sherwood, 110
Aristotle, 107
_Arms and the Man_, 54
_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 58, 66, 70
_Axe-Helve, The_, 72
Babbitt, Irving, 34, 106, 109, 111, 112
Bartlett, John, 40, 51, 57, 59
Baseball, interest in, 56
Beerbohm, Max, 60
Bennett, Arnold, 60
_Black Cottage_, 39, 80
_Blueberries, The_, 90
“Bobbie,” the London, 61
_Bottle Imp, The_, 53
_Boy’s Will, A_, 18, 30, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 80, 113
Bridges, Robert, 74
Broadsheets, autographed, 82
Brooks, Van Wyck, 72, 111
Bryant, W. Cullen, 29
Buckley, blind boss, 26
_Bulletin_, 22
Burton, Pres. of Univ. of Michigan, 74
Cadwalla, Bertha, 13
Canfield, Dorothy, 73
Cannan, Gilbert, 61
Cannéll, Skipwith, 80
Carpenter, E., 60
Catel, Jean, 73
_Century, The_, 58, 83
Chapin, James, 70 note
Chesterton, G. K., 60
Chicken farm, 25
College, 32, 34, 72, 75
Colum, Padraic, 81
Columnist, 33
_Comus_, 47
Conrad, Joseph, 60
Convention talks, 48
_Country of the Blind, The_, 53
Cox, Sidney, 51 _et seq._, 57
_Critic_, 46
Dartmouth, 32, 75
_Death of the Hired Man, The_, 80, 94
Derry, 36 _et seq._
_Dial, The_, 76
Dreiser, Theodore, 110
_Dr. Faustus_, 47
Du Chêne, Aroldo, 83
_Eclogues_, 80
Eliot, T. S., 100, 101
England, trip to, 60 _et seq._
_English Review_, 61
_Emile_, 52
_Endymion_, 29
Farming, 36, 38, 65, 73
_Fear_, 94
Fellowship at Michigan University, 74
_Fire Under the Andes_, 79, 80, 82, 83
_First Impressions_, 71
Flint, F. S., 63
Football, interest in, 43
Ford, Ford Madox, 61
Forst, 11
_Forum, The_, 58
France, Anatole, 72
Frank, Waldo, 71, 72, 86
_Friday Nights_, 70
Frost, Bertha, 15
Frost, Carol, 38, 82
Frost, Elinor Bettina, 38
Frost, Elliott, 36
_Frost Genealogy in Five Families_, 15
Frost, Henry, 12
Frost, Irma, 38, 82
Frost, John, 17
Frost, Lesley, 36, 38, 82
Frost, Lt. Wm., 17
Frost, Major Charles, 13, 15, 16, 77
Frost, Marjorie, 38, 82
Frost, Nicholas, 13, 14
Frost’s Garrison House, 13
Galsworthy, John, 60
Garnett, Edward, 70, 71, 91, 93
George, Henry, 26, 78
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, 65, 66
Goethe, 93, 114
_Golden Room, The_, 66
Grahame, Cunninghame, 60
_Grindstone, The_, 107, 108
Hall, Charley, 35, 88
_Hamlet_, 80
Harcourt, Alfred, 81
Hardy, Thomas, 72
Harvard, 34, 72
_Heretics_, 51
Holt, Henry and Co., 69, 81
Holt, Mrs., 66
_House-Keeper, The_, 80
Howe, Mark de Wolfe, 58
Hudson, W. H., 60
Hueffer, Ford Madox, 61
Hulme, T. E., 65
_Independent, The_, 30
International P.E.N. Club, 72
_Into My Own_, 28
James, Henry, 61
Jones, Llewellyn, 71, 89, 113
_Jumping Frog, The_, 53
Lagerlof, Selma, 72
_Land of Heart’s Desire, The_, 47
Lanier, Sidney, 30
Lankes, J. J., 70 note, 83
Lawrence, D. H., 61
Lewis, Wyndham, 61
_Liberator, The_, 83
Lindsay, Vachel, 110
Literary formula, 48
Longfellow, H. W., 84
Lowell, Amy, 69, 71, 110
Mabie, Hamilton W., 59
Mackenzie, Compton, 61
MacVeagh, Lincoln, 81
_Masses, The_, 83
Masters, Edgar Lee, 110
Mencken, H. L., 111
_Mending Wall_, 107
Merriam, Rev. Charles, 39
Michigan University, 74, 75
Mill, worker in, 32
Montpellier University, 73
Moody, Isabelle, 22
More, Paul Elmer, 81, 111, 112
Morrison, Henry, 48
Mosher, Thomas Bird, 82
_Mountain Interval_, 70 note, 73
_Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe_, 53
Munro, Harold, Poetry Book-Shop, 63
_My Butterfly_, 30
_Need for Being Versed in Country Things_, 103
_New Age, The_, 61
_New Era in American Poetry, A_, 71
_New Hampshire_, 70 note, 73, 99
New Hampshire State Normal School, 51
_New Republic, The_, 69, 91
_North of Boston_, 15, 65, 69, 70
Nutt, David, 62, 63, 69
_Old Kittery and Her Families_, 13
O’Leary, Dan, 79
_Once by the Pacific_, 91
O’Neill, Eugene, 96
Oppenheim, James, 72
Orage, A. R., 61
_Our America_, 71
Pebble incident, 48
Pepperell, Sir William, 17
Phi Beta Kappa, 72
Pinkerton Academy, 36, 39, 40-51, 80
Plato’s _Republic_, 52
_Playboy of the Western World_, 54
Poe, Edgar A., 29, 106
Poet Laureate, 72
_Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_, 60, 70 note
_Poets of America_, Politics, 25
Pound, Ezra, 31, 59, 61, 63, 64, 80, 100, 101
Princeton, 81
Production of plays, 47, 54
Pulitzer Prize, 70 note
Quarter, the lost, 78
Reporting, 33
Revolvers in San Francisco, 23
Robinson, Edward A., 111
Rolland, Romain, 72
Rousseau, J. J., 109
_Runaway, The_, 90
Sandburg, Carl, 81, 110
San Francisco, 22, 77, 78
Santayana, G., 34
_Saturday Review of Literature_, 99
Scaliger’s rhetorical question, 110
_Scribner’s_, 58
Sergeant, Elizabeth S., 77, 79, 82, 83
_Selected Poems_, 70 note, 73
_Sentinel_, 33
_Seven Arts, The_, 72, 94
Sex hygiene, 53
Shaw, G. B., 60
Shoe-making, 33
Sill, Edward R., 29
Silver, Ernest L., 42, 51
_Sohrab and Rustum_, 53
Sorbonne, 72
South, tour through, 33
Spingarn, 110
Stackpole, Everett S., 13, 15
Stevens, Wallace, 34, 84
Storer, Joseph, 16
Swedenborgianism, 26, 32
Swinburne, A. C., 89
Teaching, 33, 40-51, 55, 73, 74
_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, 71
Tennis, interest in, 56
Thomas, Edward, _Poems_, 67
_Times Literary Supplement_, 65
_Tom Brown’s School Days_, 29
_T. P.’s Weekly_, 61
_Trial by Existence, The_, 113
_Tuft of Flowers, The_, 80
Untermeyer, Louis, 71, 81
Valedictorian, 27, 28
Van Doren, Carl, 83
Vassar College, 81
Virgil, 34, 80
Ward, W. Hays, 30, 31
_Way Out, The_, 72, 94
Week-end party, 55, 56
Wells, H. G., 60
Wesleyan University, 75
White, Elinor, 27, 28, 32, 79
Williams, W. Carlos, 76
_Witch of Coos, The_, 70 note, 94
Wood, Clement, 71
_Youth’s Companion_, 58
FOOTNOTES
[1] That of Elder Edmund Frost of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
[2] _Frost Genealogy in Five Families_ by Norman Seaver Frost.
[3] Elinor Bettina was born on June 20, 1907, and died on June 21.
[4] See Appendix A.
[5] Five printings of _North of Boston_ were called for in its first
year, and ten more have been needed since. Its sale has been phenomenal
for a book of poetry, and in 1926 it even led the author’s later books,
though each of them has been steadily in demand ever since it appeared.
_New Hampshire, A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes_, which was issued
in 1923, comes next in popularity to _North of Boston_, requiring
five large printings. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for that year,
while one of the poems included in that volume, namely, _The Witch of
Coos_, won the prize offered by _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_ in 1922.
_Mountain Interval_ has also required five printings, and the _Selected
Poems_ are now in their fourth printing.
In London _New Hampshire_ has appeared under the imprint of Grant
Richards, Ltd., and the _Selected Poems_ under that of William
Heinemann.
In addition to their regular editions, a de luxe volume of _North of
Boston_, illustrated in line by James Chapin, appeared in 1919, and a
de luxe edition of _New Hampshire_, with woodcuts by J. J. Lankes, who
also decorated the regular edition, came out in 1923.
[6] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[7] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[8] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[9] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
[10] Quoted from an interview in the New York _Times_, October 21, 1923.
[11] Published in the _New Republic_, December 29, 1926.
[12] Page 99 to 110 appeared originally as part of an essay on Frost
published in _The Saturday Review of Literature_ for March 28, 1925.
The text has now been slightly altered.