Indoor schooling remained important enough for Frost to try college again, though his motive appears to have been bolstering his credentials to teach secondary school. He entered Harvard College in 1898, where he studied historical geology with Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (something of the Stephen Jay Gould of his time), classics, and philosophy under George Santayana, Josiah Royce, George Herbert Palmer, and Hugo Münsterberg. Under Münsterberg, Frost read William James’s Psychology: A Briefer Course, a work he would later teach to high school students. James’s attempts to reconcile human consciousness and belief with science informed Frost’s philosophical pragmatism, and the debates among those philosophers remained an important part of Frost’s intellectual and imaginative development.

A superb student, Frost nevertheless left Harvard in 1900 somewhat impatient and under pressure from his own and his family’s health problems (his doctor had warned him against being too sedentary). With the help of his maternal grandfather, Frost bought a poultry farm in 1900, the same year that he lost his mother to cancer and his four-year-old son, Elliott, to cholera. Despite depression and the demands of “hugger mugger” farming, Frost was writing poetry at night. He had a chapbook of a few early poems, entitled Twilight, privately published in 1894 and a few of his poems were published in magazines, most notably “My Butterfly: An Elegy” in Susan Hays Ward’s The Independent (1894) and “The Tuft of Flowers” in the Derry Enterprise (1906). Though he continued to write while tending the farm, success in publication eluded Frost for nearly all of the first two decades as a poet.

Aided by his old high school friend Carl Burrell, Frost had also continued to develop his passion for botany. Throughout the nineteenth century botany was considered an important form of instruction in natural theology and God’s designing providence, directed particularly at the moral education of young men and women. Frost loved the study of rare wild flowers, and orchids appear frequently in his poems. By the turn of the century botany had become increasingly influenced by science that revealed that the beauty of flowers had little to do with human sentiments or perfection but are temporary contrivances in a complex and changing game of procreation and survival. The maiming of an orchid lover is the subject of the “The Self-Seeker,” a poem based on an incident in which Carl Burrell’s legs were crushed in a box factory. But the dark saying of the poem, “pressed into service means pressed out of shape,” reveals the way different forms of life, flowers and men, are part of a relentless machinery in which individual interests and desires are subsumed in a larger, if incomprehensible, process. Flowers in Frost become not only figures of beauty and of poetry but also of the elusive and troubling workings of both nature and God.