Frost, Robert

▪ American poet

Introduction

in full  Robert Lee Frost 

born March 26, 1874, San Francisco, California, U.S.

died January 29, 1963, Boston, Massachusetts

 American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.

Life

      Frost's father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a journalist with ambitions of establishing a career in California, and in 1873 he and his wife moved to San Francisco. Her husband's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1885 prompted Isabelle Moodie Frost to take her two children, Robert and Jeanie, to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they were taken in by the children's paternal grandparents. While their mother taught at a variety of schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Robert and Jeanie grew up in Lawrence, and Robert graduated from high school in 1892. A top student in his class, he shared valedictorian honours with Elinor White, with whom he had already fallen in love.

      Robert and Elinor shared a deep interest in poetry, but their continued education sent Robert to Dartmouth College and Elinor to St. Lawrence University. Meanwhile, Robert continued to labour on the poetic career he had begun in a small way during high school; he first achieved professional publication in 1894 when The Independent, a weekly literary journal, printed his poem “My Butterfly: An Elegy.” Impatient with academic routine, Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year. He and Elinor married in 1895 but found life difficult, and the young poet supported them by teaching school and farming, neither with notable success. During the next dozen years, six children were born, two of whom died early, leaving a family of one son and three daughters. Frost resumed his college education at Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years' study there. From 1900 to 1909 the family raised poultry on a farm near Derry, New Hampshire, and for a time Frost also taught at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at Derry. All this while he was writing poems, but publishing outlets showed little interest in them.

      By 1911 Frost was fighting against discouragement. Poetry had always been considered a young person's game, but Frost, who was nearly 40 years old, had not published a single book of poems and had seen just a handful appear in magazines. In 1911 ownership of the Derry farm passed to Frost. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and use the proceeds to make a radical new start in London, where publishers were perceived to be more receptive to new talent. Accordingly, in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the Atlantic to England. Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had written but not gotten into print. English publishers in London did indeed prove more receptive to innovative verse, and, through his own vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, Frost within a year had published A Boy's Will (1913). From this first book, such poems as “Storm Fear,” “Mowing,” and “The Tuft of Flowers” have remained standard anthology pieces.

      A Boy's Will was followed in 1914 by a second collection, North of Boston, that introduced some of the most popular poems in all of Frost's work, among them “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple-Picking.” In London, Frost's name was frequently mentioned by those who followed the course of modern literature, and soon American visitors were returning home with news of this unknown poet who was causing a sensation abroad. The Boston poet Amy Lowell (Lowell, Amy) traveled to England in 1914, and in the bookstores there she encountered Frost's work. Taking his books home to America, Lowell then began a campaign to locate an American publisher for them, meanwhile writing her own laudatory review of North of Boston.

      Without his being fully aware of it, Frost was on his way to fame. The outbreak of World War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915. By then Amy Lowell's review had already appeared in The New Republic, and writers and publishers throughout the Northeast were aware that a writer of unusual abilities stood in their midst. The American publishing house of Henry Holt had brought out its edition of North of Boston in 1914. It became a best-seller, and, by the time the Frost family landed in Boston, Holt was adding the American edition of A Boy's Will. Frost soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay. From this moment his career rose on an ascending curve.

      Frost bought a small farm at Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1915, but his income from both poetry and farming proved inadequate to support his family, and so he lectured and taught part-time at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan from 1916 to 1938. Any remaining doubt about his poetic abilities was dispelled by the collection Mountain Interval (1916), which continued the high level established by his first books. His reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923), which received the Pulitzer Prize. That prize was also awarded to Frost's Collected Poems (1930) and to the collections A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942). His other poetry volumes include West-Running Brook (1928), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962). Frost served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939–43), Dartmouth (1943–49), and Amherst College (1949–63), and in his old age he gathered honours and awards from every quarter. He was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958–59; the post is now styled poet laureate consultant in poetry), and his recital of his poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was a memorable occasion.

Works

      The poems in Frost's early books, especially North of Boston, differ radically from late 19th-century Romantic verse with its ever-benign view of nature, its didactic emphasis, and its slavish conformity to established verse forms and themes. Lowell called North of Boston a “sad” book, referring to its portraits of inbred, isolated, and psychologically troubled rural New Englanders. These off-mainstream portraits signaled Frost's departure from the old tradition and his own fresh interest in delineating New England characters and their formative background. Among these psychological investigations are the alienated life of Silas in “The Death of the Hired Man,” the inability of Amy in “Home Burial” to walk the difficult path from grief back to normality, the rigid mindset of the neighbour in “Mending Wall,” and the paralyzing fear that twists the personality of Doctor Magoon in “A Hundred Collars.”

      The natural world, for Frost, wore two faces. Early on he overturned the Emersonian concept of nature as healer and mentor in a poem in A Boy's Will entitled “Storm Fear,” a grim picture of a blizzard as a raging beast that dares the inhabitants of an isolated house to come outside and be killed. In such later poems as “The Hill Wife” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the benign surface of nature cloaks potential dangers, and death itself lurks behind dark, mysterious trees. Nature's frolicsome aspect predominates in other poems such as “Birches,” where a destructive ice storm is recalled as a thing of memorable beauty. Although Frost is known to many as essentially a “happy” poet, the tragic elements in life continued to mark his poems, from “‘Out, Out—'” (1916), in which a lad's hand is severed and life ended, to a fine verse entitled “The Fear of Man” from Steeple Bush, in which human release from pervading fear is contained in the image of a breathless dash through the nighttime city from the security of one faint street lamp to another just as faint. Even in his final volume, In the Clearing, so filled with the stubborn courage of old age, Frost portrays human security as a rather tiny and quite vulnerable opening in a thickly grown forest, a pinpoint of light against which the encroaching trees cast their very real threat of darkness.

      Frost demonstrated an enviable versatility of theme, but he most commonly investigated human contacts with the natural world in small encounters that serve as metaphors for larger aspects of the human condition. He often portrayed the human ability to turn even the slightest incident or natural detail to emotional profit, seen at its most economical form in “Dust of Snow”:

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

      Other poems are portraits of the introspective mind possessed by its own private demons, as in “Desert Places,” which could serve to illustrate Frost's celebrated definition of poetry as a “momentary stay against confusion”:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race

is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

      Frost was widely admired for his mastery of metrical form, which he often set against the natural rhythms of everyday, unadorned speech. In this way the traditional stanza and metrical line achieved new vigour in his hands. Frost's command of traditional metrics is evident in the tight, older, prescribed patterns of such sonnets as “Design” and “The Silken Tent.” His strongest allegiance probably was to the quatrain with simple rhymes such as abab and abcb, and within its restrictions he was able to achieve an infinite variety, as in the aforementioned “Dust of Snow” and “Desert Places.” Frost was never an enthusiast of free verse (vers libre) and regarded its looseness as something less than ideal, similar to playing tennis without a net. His determination to be “new” but to employ “old ways to be new” set him aside from the radical experimentalism of the advocates of vers libre in the early 20th century. On occasion Frost did employ free verse to advantage, one outstanding example being “After Apple-Picking,” with its random pattern of long and short lines and its nontraditional use of rhyme. Here he shows his power to stand as a transitional figure between the old and the new in poetry. Frost mastered blank verse (i.e., unrhymed verse in iambic pentameter) for use in such dramatic narratives as “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial,” becoming one of the few modern poets to use it both appropriately and well. His chief technical innovation in these dramatic-dialogue poems was to unify the regular pentameter line with the irregular rhythms of conversational speech. Frost's blank verse has the same terseness and concision that mark his poetry in general.

Assessment

      Frost was the most widely admired and highly honoured American poet of the 20th century. Amy Lowell thought he had overstressed the dark aspects of New England life, but Frost's later flood of more uniformly optimistic verses made that view seem antiquated. Louis Untermeyer's judgment that the dramatic poems in North of Boston were the most authentic and powerful of their kind ever produced by an American has only been confirmed by later opinions. Gradually, Frost's name ceased to be linked solely with New England, and he gained broad acceptance as a national poet.

      It is true that certain criticisms of Frost have never been wholly refuted, one being that he was overly interested in the past, another that he was too little concerned with the present and future of American society. Those who criticize Frost's detachment from the “modern” emphasize the undeniable absence in his poems of meaningful references to the modern realities of industrialization, urbanization, and the concentration of wealth, or to such familiar items as radios, motion pictures, automobiles, factories, or skyscrapers. The poet has been viewed as a singer of sweet nostalgia and a social and political conservative who was content to sigh for the good things of the past.

      Such views have failed to gain general acceptance, however, in the face of the universality of Frost's themes, the emotional authenticity of his voice, and the austere technical brilliance of his verse. Frost was often able to endow his rural imagery with a larger symbolic or metaphysical significance, and his best poems transcend the immediate realities of their subject matter to illuminate the unique blend of tragic endurance, stoicism, and tenacious affirmation that marked his outlook on life. Over his long career Frost succeeded in lodging more than a few poems where, as he put it, they would be “hard to get rid of,” and he can be said to have lodged himself just as solidly in the affections of his fellow Americans. For thousands he remains the only recent poet worth reading and the only one who matters.

Philip L. Gerber

Additional Reading

Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. by Lawrance Thompson (1965); and The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, ed. by Louis Untermeyer (1963), offer good coverage of his correspondence. The Notebooks of Robert Frost, ed. by Robert Faggen (2006), is the first scholarly edition of Frost's personal notebooks. Frank Lentricchia and Melissa Christensen Lentricchia, Robert Frost: A Bibliography, 1913–1974 (1976), gives reliable data concerning the publication of Frost's works. The most complete biography is Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, 3 vol., vol. 3 coauthored with R.H. Winnick (1966–76). A fine early biography is Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: Trial by Existence (1960). William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, 2nd ed. (1993), is a provocative revisionist biography. Other biographies are Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography (1996); and Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life (1998). Philip L. Gerber, Robert Frost, rev. ed. (1982), provides a comprehensive introduction to the life and works. Elaine Barry (compiler), Robert Frost on Writing (1973), collects letters, prefaces, reviews, lectures, and interviews in which Frost offers ideas concerning the composition and purpose of poetry. George W. Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost (1960); and Reuben A. Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost (1963), are excellent early critical studies. Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977, reissued with a new afterword, 1990); and Judith Oster, Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet (1991), stand out among subsequent studies. Norman N. Holland, The Brain of Robert Frost (1988), is a cognitive approach informed by psychological insights and exploring the working of the human mind through a close examination of Frost's poems. Other critical studies include Mark Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997); and Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (2001). Useful overviews of Frost's life and work are provided in Robert Faggen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (2001); Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta (eds.), The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (2001); and Deirdre Fagan, Critical Companion to Robert Frost (2007).Philip L. Gerber Ed.

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