Frost, Robert 1874-1963

FROST, ROBERT 1874-1963

Poet

A Poet of New England

When Robert Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, he was widely regarded as the greatest living American poet. Having carefully cultivated the image of the grandfatherly farmer-poet for several decades, he had claimed New England as his literary territory and the vernacular of its residents as his poetic voice. Ironically, his public persona tended to blind critics to his accomplishments as a poet and to cause them to overlook how innovative his experiments in capturing the sounds of everyday speech had seemed when he published his second book, North of Boston, in 1914.

Background

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on 26 March 1874. When he was eleven his father died, and Frost, his mother, and his younger sister went to live in Lawrence, Massachusetts, near his paternal grandparents, where Frost's mother took the first of a series of teaching jobs to support her children. At Lawrence High School Frost played on the baseball team, and in his senior year he edited the school Bulletin, where his first poem had appeared in April 1890. He and his future wife, Elinor White (whom he married in 1895), were covaledictorians of the class of 1892. Frost entered Dartmouth College in autumn 1892 but dropped out before the end of the first semester. Over the next several years he worked at various jobs, including teacher, mill worker, and newspaper reporter.

A Published Poet

In early 1894 Frost was encouraged when The Independent, a prestigious New York magazine, accepted his poem "My Butterfly" for publication. Over the next two decades Frost published a few other poems in newspapers and magazines, but he remained virtually unknown as a poet until the appearance of his first two books in 1913 and 1914. In 1897 Frost enrolled at Harvard University. He did well in his course work but left in spring 1899 suffering from physical and mental exhaustion brought on in part by financial concerns and the stresses associated with a growing family.

The Derry Farm

In late 1900 Frost's grandfather bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, where the poet and his growing family spent the next decade. Frost wrote little poetry during his first few years on the farm, but the landscape and people of Derry provided him with the raw materials he used in many of his finest poems for the rest of his life. In 1911 Frost, who had returned to teaching in 1906, sold the Derry farm, and in summer 1912 the Frosts sailed to England, where Frost intended to devote all his time to writing.

First Success

Soon after his arrival Frost submitted a collection of some of his poems to a British publisher. A Boy's Will was quickly accepted and appeared the following spring. In March 1913 Frost met American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, who expressed enthusiasm for the book and wrote two glowing reviews, one for the Chicago little magazine Poetry, in which he exclaimed, "This man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it." Pound also lent his copy of the book to William Butler Yeats, who called it "the best poetry written in America in a long time." Frost subsequently met Yeats, whose poetry he greatly admired, and made other literary acquaintances as well. The closest of his new friendships was with poet and essayist Edward Thomas, who was later killed in World War I.

An Annus Mirabilis

The twelve months that followed the acceptance of Frost's first book were truly a "remarkable year" for the poet. In an enormous burst of creativity he wrote nearly all of the blank-verse dramatic narratives that made his second book, North of Boston, a clear step forward in terms of craft and a revolutionary volume in terms of poetic technique. In poems such as "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," and "The Housekeeper"—all set in the rural area of New England "north of Boston"—Frost created intensely psychological word portraits in the everyday rural dialect of his characters. As he explained to an acquaintance at the time, he had "dropped to an everyday level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above." Two decades earlier an editor had suggested that Frost's poems sounded "too much like talk." By 1912 Frost had made that so-called flaw into his greatest poetic strength.

Acclaim at Home

North of Boston was published in May 1914 to enthusiastic reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, and later that year the American publisher Henry Holt agreed to publish American editions of Frost's books. Driven home by the outbreak of World War I, Frost and his family arrived in New York City in February 1915. One of the first things Frost saw was a copy of the New Republic that included a laudatory review of North of Boston by the renowned American Imagist poet Amy Lowell. Frost's reputation was made.

Later Work

Frost's next book, Mountain Interval (1916), maintained the high standards set by North of Boston with dramatic narratives such as "The Road Not Taken," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "Birches," and "Out, Out—"and lyrics such as "Hyla Brook," "The Oven Bird," and "Putting in the Seed." New Hampshire (1922) earned him the first of the four Pulitzer Prizes he won over the next two decades (more than any other poet), and other honors came his way as well. Yet by the time he published A Further Range (1936), which won him his third Pulitzer Prize, some critics were faulting the political views that Frost, a conservative Democrat, was expressing in public and in his poems, particularly his reservations about President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. In the 1940s and 1950s, as Frost's popularity with the public continued to grow, the New Critics, whose literary opinions and methods of analysis were widely accepted in American colleges and universities, tended to dismiss Frost's poetry as too superficial in content and too conventional in its use of traditional poetic meter and rhyme. Yet perceptive readings of Frost's poetry by prominent critics such as Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell revealed the psychological complexity and modern sensibility of Frost's poetry and helped to maintain his reputation as a major American poet.

"Like Playing Tennis Without a Net."

Beginning with Pound and Lowell in the 1910s, critics often asked Frost why he did not write free verse, for certainly it would be easier for him to capture the sounds of natural, everyday speech if he did not have to be concerned with adhering to a preestablished meter. Frost frequently explained that writing free verse was "like playing tennis without a net." With his great modernist contemporaries Frost shared a worldview in which chaos prevailed and in which no cosmic order was possible. The most a poet could hope to create in a poem, Frost said, was a brief point of order, a "momentary stay against confusion." For him the irregular rhythms of everyday speech were a metaphor for the world's chaos, and traditional poetic form was a means of imposing some momentary order upon it. Such views make Frost an important transitional figure between traditionalism and modernism, but it is the enduring emotional appeal of his poems, not the theory behind them, that ensures his lasting reputation as a poet.

Sources:

William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984);

Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-19I5 (New York, Chicago 6c San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart 6c Winston, 1966);

Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (New York, Chicago 6c San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970);

Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978).