Chapter II: Part 2

“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.

The tables have been changed since Derry days, but he continues the pattern. Therefore, in 1915 he purchased a farm on a hill just outside of Franconia, New Hampshire. In 1920 he moved to Vermont where he had purchased a large farm at South Shaftsbury in the district presided over by that ardent Vermonter, Dorothy Canfield. He is still the farmer and poet. And teacher, too, for that element in him retains its energy. From 1916 to 1919 he was a member of the faculty of Amherst College, this poet without a scholarly eminence in the orthodox sense, without a college diploma even (though now he holds honorary degrees from three institutions of higher learning), but he was encouraged to conduct classes in literature and philosophy in his own freehand way. In teaching literature he assumed that the conspicuous landmarks would be seen in other courses. He could therefore ramble in the lesser known regions of good writing, dwelling always in his informal presentation on the enjoyment of books and slyly encouraging honesty of initiative in writing.

Then President Burton of the University of Michigan called Frost to fill the new Fellowship in the Arts which he established in 1921. The appointment was for one year, but was extended to two, at the close of which Robert Bridges, the British Poet Laureate, was appointed Fellow for the following year. But in 1925, so welcome had Frost been on the Michigan campus, he was called back to Ann Arbor to hold a life fellowship in poetry founded entirely for him.

It was not long, however, before the magnetic pull of New England soil and the fact that two of his children had made their homes in the east drew him away from the attractive post at Michigan. He resigned and came back to the ruggedly lyrical Green Mountains of Vermont in 1926, with the plan of distributing his “teaching” efforts among several colleges.

Thus during the academic year, 1926-1927, Frost was “boarded around” by the various colleges who competed for his residence on the campus. He traveled about, to Wesleyan University for two weeks, to Amherst for ten, to Michigan for a few weeks, to Dartmouth for a visit, and so on, mingling in each place with students and faculty, giving lectures and readings, consulting with literary aspirants, imparting a fresh emotional quality to the collegiate routine that is too usually strange to it. But it is unlikely that he will “tramp about” so much in another year, as Amherst claims his _presence_ (Frost does his teaching by simply being what he is) for an entire term during the next collegiate year.

* * * * *

Imagine that you have been invited to be the guest of Robert Frost for a few days. Let the place be Amherst. He is staying there for a month or two in a house rented from a professor now on his sabbatical year. As you alight from your taxicab late in the afternoon, a well filled out man of good height steps on to the porch, and you are aware that the note this waiting personality strikes is quiet yet vivid. A large boned rugged frame, a strong neck, and poised on its full column a head so modeled that it gives the strength of the body a lyrical accentuation. This head has been described as a faun’s and the eyes and mouth are sometimes said to have an elfin quality, and indeed it is true that one might think of faunishness and sly flitting elves in glancing at it. That is fanciful, though, and not really in correspondence with the sensitivity, the fluent gravity, the friendly lines of the countenance now welcoming you. The words and manner are simple: there is a trace of shyness which attests that the simplicity is not an affectation and yet there is also ease.

You enter and Mrs. Frost, quiet, sweet, intelligent and devoted, greets you. Talk begins, dinner is served. Mr. Frost has been out of touch with the centers of literary life. He asks questions, about the _Dial_, about William Carlos Williams, about that and this eddy in the literature of the day. Patently, he is out of it, he doesn’t follow the magazines and supplements and current books with any assiduity, apparently he prefers to hear--in country fashion--from the lips of the people he meets what is going on.

After coffee, you settle down in the living room for a long evening’s talk, you playing alternately the crisp rôle of questioner and the respectful one of listener, and Frost “in his dry, sly, halting way,” as Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant puts it in her vivid portrait of Frost, talks and ruminates, tells stories, offers critical notes, and speculates. The speculative note in his conversation is important, for it signifies that the growing ends of his mind and feelings still carry him on. There is no impending death here of sensibility or thinking, no dogmatism, in short, that closes off further possibilities of enlarging his experience.

Perhaps he speaks of his Indian-fighting ancestor, Major Charles Frost, and how for years he looked on him with a little disapproval as a black sheep in the family whom other people honored for his treacherous conduct at the Indian conference. Frost, you perceive, sympathizes with the Indians: he doesn’t like unfair play. But lately he has learned that Major Frost objected to the stratagem and entered into it with great reluctance: he is glad to think a little better of the early settler.

He drifts into reminiscence of San Francisco days and that grim father of his. Sometimes his father would give him some change and commission him to bring back cigarettes. But on one awful occasion the quarter slipped from his hand as he was running to the store and fell into one of the cracks of the board sidewalk then the prevalent style in San Francisco. In vain did his small hands try to recover it, and passersby were able to do no better. Frantic, he went to the store, fearfully explained he had dropped his money, and begged for a package of cigarettes. Laughter from the clerk and the men standing about. Nothing to do but return home in trepidation and tell his mother. Father was working in his study and by now no doubt impatient for a smoke. His mother also stood in fear of father’s anger, but in the present case she decided that Robert must go in and tell of the loss. Only first let them pray, mother and son, that Robert should be let off easily. Then Robert went in and reported. His father glanced up for a moment from something he was writing, said brusquely, “Never mind,” and turned back to complete his sentence.

There was something deep between Frost and his father. The man was mentally alert: he had stood second in his class at Harvard and he had been an associate of Henry George. He was ambitious, as his political activity reveals. And he was, despite his consumption, strenuous, engaging in long swims and once in a six day walking race with the champion, Dan O’Leary. He won that, too. O’Leary had sworn that he could give him a liberal handicap and then walk him down. When O’Leary failed to do so, he claimed that Frost’s father had violated walking rules, but afterwards he became his friend. But above all--and this is the really deep bond--his father seems to have planted tragedy into his son’s view of the world: so deeply did he do this that to this day his father’s character excites a species of awesome regard in the son.

And now, in reply to a question, Frost is speaking of school days in Lawrence, of first adventures in reading poets, of meeting Elinor White who tied him for scholarship honors. And he points out how his grandfather, according to his light, loyally stood by him, how he sent him twice to college, backed him patiently in various endeavors to make a living, and finally gave him a farm--which he didn’t succeed in managing expertly. “Never earned a cent, save from and through verse. But for my first twenty years at it I earned a total of two hundred dollars,”[6] he remarks without bitterness.

The poem that he read before the Men’s Club of the Central Congregational Church at Derry, the poem that was so instrumental in landing for him his job at Pinkerton Academy, was, he tells you, _The Tuft of Flowers_ in _A Boy’s Will_, “Yes,” he says with a smile to interpret the remark, “_The Tuft of Flowers_ got me my first real job. Whole family owe their life to this poem and they’d better believe it.”[7] _The Black Cottage_, _The House-Keeper_, and _The Death of the Hired Man_ all date, he goes on to inform you, from 1905 before he joined the Pinkerton faculty, and he adds that “Virgil’s _Eclogues_ may have had something to do with them.... I first heard the voice from a printed page in a Virgilian _Eclogue_ and _Hamlet_.”[7]

The talk shifts the scene to London ... the fooleries of Skipwith Cannéll and Ezra Pound ... the jiu jitsu demonstration Pound made on Frost’s person in a restaurant..... Pound and Frost invited to luncheon by two ladies, Pound disgusted by their shallow flow of talk on art, Pound rising, knocking his chair over as he did so, saying haughtily, “I leave these ladies to you,” departing to Frost’s consternation.... Pound’s challenge to Lascelles Abercrombie to fight a duel on the score that Abercrombie’s articles were a public offense--and the amusing aftermath.

We return to America and Frost tells how editors now snatched for the opportunity to print the poems which previously for many years had been vainly offered to their magazines. And you lead him on to tell how liberal the colleges have been in their attitude toward his way of conducting classes--a curious chapter in modern education.

Frost goes on to speak of the people he knows: of Lincoln MacVeagh and Alfred Harcourt when they worked at Holt’s, of Carl Sandburg’s work and Louis Untermeyer’s visits, of a professor at Amherst he admires because “he loves the classics and he is a _field_ scientist.” He expresses his doubts of the “bunko-sciences” (mostly sociological and psychological in character). He tells of a night spent with Paul Elmer More at Princeton. He inserts somewhere one of Padraic Colum’s Irish stories. He relates an experience at Vassar College. He supplied his audience with broadsheets on which were printed several of the poems he would read during his lecture. At the close of the talk the roomful of girls avalanched upon him to autograph the broadsheets. After that he no longer considered it a good idea to furnish his audiences with the poems he intended to recite.

The family is mentioned. His son, Carol, and one daughter, Irma, are married: the oldest daughter, Lesley, runs a book-shop in Pittsfield but now she is going around the world, managing a bookstall on the liner: Marjorie has not been well for some time.

It is past two now. One studies Frost’s face in the lamplight. His “skin and his rebellious hair have now a fine harmony of tone, ‘the grey of the moss of walls,’ a young and living greyness that, like a delicate lichen, softens without hiding the hard and eternal shape of the rock beneath.”[8] And while one studies him, he is perhaps telling you of the friendship that existed between him and Thomas Bird Mosher. Mosher early picked out one of Frost’s poems for affection and printed it in his catalogue, and Frost saw him every so often, saw the sad decline of this epicure who drolly mourned the loss of his sense of taste and in desperation had beefsteaks specially sent from Boston to Portland and specially prepared by the best cooks he could engage only to find them tasteless for him. But never to the end, Frost reminds you, did Mosher lose his fine taste for the blue china poetry of the nineties. Or perhaps he tells you of Aroldo Du Chêne who sculpted his head, or of J. J. Lankes whose woodcuts so appropriately join in mood with the text of _New Hampshire_. Frost had admired the feeling for New England landscape Lankes had revealed in some woodcuts reproduced in the _Masses_ and the _Liberator_. And Lankes had admired Frost’s poetry and illustrated several of the poems for his own enjoyment. Then poet and artist were brought together by Carl Van Doren, then an editor of the _Century_, in a fortunate collaboration for which each, unknown to the other, was already prepared.

Somehow the talk shifts again. “I believe,” Frost is saying, “in what the Greeks called synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole; touching the hem of the goddess. All that an artist needs is samples. Enough success to know what money is like; enough love to know what women are like.”[9] Nature, he explains, does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish and he does so by making a garden and building a wall. That garden is art. Wallace Stevens, he says, has made a formal garden with his poetry.

[10]“One of the real American poets of yesterday,” he goes on to say, “was Longfellow. No, I am not being sarcastic. I mean it. It is the fashion nowadays to make fun of him. I come across this pose and attitude with people I meet socially, with men and women I meet in the classrooms of colleges. They laugh at his gentleness, at his lack of worldliness, at his detachment from the world and the meaning thereof. When and where has it been written that a poet must be a club-swinging warrior, a teller of barroom tales, a participant of unspeakable experiences? That, today, apparently is the stamp of poetic integrity. I hear people speak of men who are writing today, and their eyes light up with a deep glow of satisfaction when they can mention some putrid bit of gossip about them. ‘He writes such lovely things,’ they say, and in the next breath add, half worshipfully, ‘He leads such a terrible life.’ I can’t see it. I can’t see that a man must needs have his feet plowing through unhealthy mud in order to appreciate more fully the glowing splendor of the clouds. I can’t see that a man must fill his soul with sick and miserable experiences, self-imposed and self-inflicted, and greatly enjoyed, before he can sit down and write a lyric of strange and compelling beauty. Inspiration doesn’t lie in the mud; it lies in the clean and wholesome life of the ordinary man. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I haven’t the power to feel, to appreciate and live the extremes of dank living and beautiful inspiration.

“Men have told me, and perhaps they are right, that I have no ‘straddle.’ That is the term they use. I have no straddle. That means that I cannot spread out far enough to live in filth and write in the treetops. I can’t. Perhaps it is because I am so ordinary. I like the middle way, as I like to talk to the man who walks the middle way with me. I have given thought to this business of straddling, and there’s always seemed to me to be something wrong with it, something tricky. I see a man riding two horses, one foot on the back of one horse, one foot on the other. One horse pulls one way, the other a second. His straddle is wide. Heaven help him, but it seems to me that before long it’s going to hurt him. It isn’t the natural way, the normal way, the powerful way to ride. It’s a trick.

“I am an ordinary man, I guess. That’s what’s the trouble with me. I like my school and I like my farm and I like people. Just ordinary, you see.”

He pauses. “What I have said,” he reflects, “sounds a little too moral. My point always is that a poet may live as vile a life as he pleases, but then his poetry ought to be of a vile beauty. I hate dis-integrity. I hope I have some range in the appreciation of beauty. I can see it all the way from exquisite through homely and mean even to vile. What I am unsympathetic with is a wide discrepancy between life and art.”

The college clock strikes three. It is Frost’s usual bedtime. Tomorrow he will be up around eleven, a student or two will call with some writings for him to read, at one o’clock we are to be driven to a farm house for a “real New England luncheon,” later there will be a walk.

“Frost,” Waldo Frank has remarked, “is not only a beautiful poet. He is a beautiful person.”

VIII. “A SENSIBILITIST”

_“I’m what is called a sensibilitist,
Or otherwise an environmentalist.”_

The poetry of Robert Frost is of one piece with his life and even with his physical appearance. Like the latter, it makes the impression of solid substance from which mounts a lyric flame whose light confers meaning on the mass. And it resembles his life in that the extraordinary in the shape of event or experience is usually quite absent: the materials are restricted and common. “Common in experience: uncommon in writing” is the true formula for practically all of Frost’s poetry.

Whence arises his distinction in expression? The answer must first be made in terms of sensibility. The art of Robert Frost is built upon the foundation of observation: it is the poetry of observation, an emotional response, lyrical, dramatic, humorous, tragic, to what he has seen and heard.

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter, darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

This is the type of sheer observation that abounds in Frost’s works, and one reads line after line that requires no help for vividness from specially constructed images or even from simile and metaphor which are in their turn composed of other definitely observed things.

The temperament of Frost, as befits an observer, is passive and plastic, and his impressionability depends in the first place for its intensity upon the keenness of his ear and his eye. In fact, his style can almost be entirely explained by saying that he is a remarkably close listener and a very sharp see-er.

Take his versification. What is it but a disciplined and ingrained habit of listening to the tones of speech in New England from the time he was fascinated by Charley Hall’s talk back in Windham to the present? The poems, although they adhere to the molds of blank verse and rhymed lyrics, are “talk poems.” The feat has been that of conforming living speech to metrical forms by taking advantage of the flexibility inherent in all metrical forms, so that Llewellyn Jones, a conservative student of versification, is right when he says:

“Technically, it is the outstanding feature of all Mr. Frost’s verse that he makes it speak in human tones. He has never written a line of free verse that does not scan--if the reader knows how to scan English verse as it should be scanned and not as Latin or Greek verse should be scanned. The reason some people have thought Mr. Frost’s verse very licentiate and why others have said that he writes free verse is because he subordinates his metrical pattern to the cadences of human speech. His metrical ictus is always there but it is not always emphasized, and he is never afraid to let a logical or word accent come in a weak place metrically. His verse is at the opposite pole from that of Swinburne, who gallops to an anapaestic tune in a manner which is quite alien to human speech. On the other hand: ‘I shan’t be gone long.--You come too’ is pure and unadulterated human speech which just happens to fit into the metrical scheme of the poem. Only, such a thing ‘just happens’ so often in Mr. Frost’s work that we know that it does not just happen at all but is the work of an exceptionally sensitive and gifted poet. And indeed Mr. Frost is so sure of the natural speech-tones in his work that he says that no one who reads his verse naturally can read it wrong. But on the other hand those who read it with a preconceived notion in their minds of how a verse should scan often find it a little difficult.”

Frost himself settled the matter when he said to Miss Sergeant:

“They call me a dialect poet.... Not so you’d notice it. It was never my aim to keep to any special speech unliterary, vernacular or slang. I lay down no law to myself there. What I have been after from the first, consciously and unconsciously, is tones of voice. I’ve wanted to write down certain brute throat noises so that no one could miss them in my sentences. I have been guilty of speaking of sentences as a mere notation for indicating them. I have counted on doubling the meaning of my sentences with them. They have been my observation and my subject matter.

“I know what I want to do most. I don’t do it often enough. In _The Runaway_ I added the moral at the end just for the pleasure of the aggrieved tone of voice. There are high spots in respect of vocal image in _Blueberries_:

There _had_ been some berries--but those were all gone.
He didn’t say where they had been. He went on:
‘I’m sure--I’m sure--as polite as could be.’”

It is plain to see why Frost calls himself an “anti-vocabularian,” for the speech materials he attends to are limited in number of words. But there is a gain here: the right limitation of vocabulary will produce honesty of vocabulary, will insure, that is, some personal content in experience for the words one employs, and this matching of vocabulary and personal experience gives force.

If Frost’s ear gives a natural life to his verse, his eye gives it a clarity, a definiteness, a firmness of outline that produces a strong feeling of actuality. Edward Garnett in his essay on Frost lifted out from his better known poems a number of images and held them toward the reader for inspection of their purity and hardness. We may take a recently published poem, _Once by the Pacific_,[11] with the same purpose in mind, the more so as this poem lies on Frost’s usual plane of excellence and is not quite among his best.

The shattered water made a misty din,
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The sand was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent.
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was spoken.

Here we _see_ rows of waves growing taller as we gaze out from the shore, and beyond above the fitfully glowing horizon the strands of clouds disordered by the wind. (“Great waves _looked over others_ coming in.... The clouds were low and _hairy_ Like _locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes_.”) Already the scene is massive, and we are being prepared for the introduction of a cosmic word in the last line. The rest of the poem is devoted to heightening this anticipatory mood. We stand on the sand which is backed by a cliff which is backed by a continent: thus the scale of the struggle is enlarged to huge dimensions. The falling darkness of one night is similarly magnified: “not only a night, an age.” And then the poem is ready to leave its symbolic frame altogether in the last two lines. “There would be more than ocean water broken Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was spoken.”

It is this simplicity and coherence of imagery that creates the concreteness of Frost’s vision. At the same time, grandiose though the theme is, the language is utterly like talk: the waves “thought of doing something to the shore that water never did to land before ... you could not tell, and yet it looked as if the sand was lucky” ... God will say, “Put out the light.”

If Frost is thus faithful in the use of his own eyes and his own ears, it follows, since they cannot be universal in scope, that he will write about his own locality. He will be obliged to be American, New England, indigenous, to be an “environmentalist,” to do things with the “native touch” Edward Garnett spoke of, because the very process of his writing poetry commits him to it.

But this is not all the story. The third conspicuous element in his style is his sense of situation, his sense of drama. This, too, has been often illustrated by the critics of Frost, and Edward Garnett has quoted in connection with it one of Goethe’s offhand remarks: “A lively feeling of situations and an aptitude to describe them makes the poet.” Frost has qualified in this way many times--in _The Death of the Hired Man_, in _Fear_, in _The Witch of Coos_, among many others. And he has given us one “straight” example of drama in the one act play, _A Way Out_, printed in the _Seven Arts_.

The scene is “a bachelor’s kitchen bedroom in a farmhouse with a table spread for supper. Someone rattles the door-latch from outside. Asa Gorrill, in loose slippers, shuffles directly to the door and unbolts it. A stranger opens the door for himself and walks in” and takes a survey. “Huh,” he says. “So this is what it’s like. Seems to me you lock up early. What you afraid of?” And Asa replies in a piping drawl: “’Fraid of nothing, because I ain’t got nothing--nothing’t anybody wants.”

The situation has taken form at once: Asa Gorrill, the queer hermit, on the defensive, and the intruder, hurried, rudely questioning and commanding, mysterious. The dialog quickly develops both the characters and the situation. The stranger investigates the room and the old man’s means as though perhaps his motive might be robbery--in case his suspicion of miserly hoardings finds evidence to go upon. He hints of violent action, of a necessity for hurry. He is aggressive, reckless, a factory hand in some sort of trouble. Asa trembles, wishes he were off, doesn’t dare to resist, unwillingly answers the questions that build up a picture of his daily life--when he goes to market and what for, how he carries in his logs, what he believes in, what his history has been.

Then the stranger reveals he has committed a murder and is in flight. He was seen once during the day by a wagonload of women. He insists on donning some of the hermit’s extra clothes and mimicking his behavior. The proposal is apparently that he hide here in the house and take turns with the hermit in “stretching his legs” abroad.

Dressed to resemble the old man, the murderer then drags Asa round and round in a game to get themselves dizzy. “And then when we’re down,” he says, “I want you should wait till you can see straight before you speak and try to tell which is which and which is t’other.”

This is the high dramatic moment of the play as they fall moaning from their whirling and each accuses the other of the crime. The weak old man faints from terror in the excitement, the stranger clubs him with his fist and drags him out. The room is empty for a time.

A posse calls and the sham hermit fools it. Its members pass on. It is “a way out.”

It will be noted that this play has both literary and theatrical form. The two are not the same: for instance, Eugene O’Neill, generally rated the best American playwright, often fails to produce a coincidence of what is visually effective with what is psychologically and dramatically determined. That Frost has done; the form stands up on the printed page as well as on the boards: the psychological springs of action are revealed: the writing is terse and necessary.

Needless to say, these elements of his style--the gift for tones of voice, the aptitude for concrete images, and the sense of the dramatic--would not suffice if they did not give rise to full-bodied, vital and corresponding emotions. Robert Frost is the type--the pure poet. The outline of his life has shown that he has all of the poet’s traditional impracticality, though in his case there is no indulgence in utopian flights. Now, on the basis of his poems, we can add that he is emotionally centered, and the world is to him predominantly a source of emotion. It is his _sensibility_, and not ideas and his actions, that mostly strikes at his emotions, and the result is song inspired by _natural_ objects which include, of course, people. Yet though his poetry is clearly not cerebral, neither is it thumpingly emotional. His personal make-up gives it its flavor--the humor and slyness, the sense of rural retreat, the friendliness. But to his intelligence goes the credit for its economy and restraint, its solidity and subtlety, for its bounding lines. Frost knows sufficiently what he is about in writing poetry to compose his own _ars poetica_.

“Imagery and after-imagery are about all there is to poetry. Synecdoche and synecdoche--My motto is that something must be left to God.

“In making a poem you have no right to think of anything but the subject matter. After making it, no right to boast of anything but the form.

“A poem must at least be as good as the prose it might have been. A poem is a box with a _set_ or assortment of sentences that just fit together to fill it. You are rhyming sentences and phrases, not just words. They must go into it as unchanged in size and shape as the words.

“A straight crookedness is most to be desired in a stick or a line. Or a crooked straightness. An absolutely abandoned zig-zag that goes straight to the mark.

“Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether and I ask myself what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they can do something, unless they amount to deeds as in ultimatums or battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker, from which there is no appeal. My definition of poetry (if I were forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.

“All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.

“There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form.

“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the words.