EARLY POEMS

A BOY’S WILL, NORTH OF BOSTON, MOUNTAIN INTERVAL, AND OTHER POEMS

ROBERT LEE FROST was born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874, and moved with his mother and sister to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1885. He attended Dartmouth College for less than a semester and Harvard College as a special student for two years. Working as a chicken farmer and as a teacher in Derry, New Hampshire, he wrote poetry at night. He and his wife, Elinor, moved their family to England in 1912, where his first two books, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, were published in 1913 and 1914. When Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had become an important American poet. Over the next five decades, he published nine more volumes of poetry, and his reputation as one of the century’s most powerful poets grew. In addition to teaching at Amherst, the University of Michigan, and Harvard, Frost received over forty honorary degrees and four Pulitzer Prizes. Frost read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961, the same year the U.S. State Department sent him on a “good-will mission” to Russia. Frost died in Boston, Massachusetts, January 29, 1963.

ROBERT FAGGEN is the Barton Evans and H.Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, the Selectee Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Striving Towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz.

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This volume first published in Penguin Books 1998

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Frost, Robert, 1874-1963.
[Poems. Selections]
Early poems / Robert Frost; edited and with an introduction and
notes by Robert Faggen.
p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

eISBN : 978-1-101-52278-3

I. Faggen, Robert. II. Title. III. Series.
PS3511.R94A6 1998
811’.52—dc21 98—4324

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Introduction

INTRODUCTION

In 1961, Robert Frost, overcoming old age and bad weather, recited his poem “The Gift Outright” to millions, becoming the first American poet to read at a presidential inauguration. A year later, President Kennedy asked Frost to act as a special ambassador to the Soviet Union and to deliver a message of “peaceful rivalry” to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a considerable responsibility given the tensions of the time. Rarely in modern history had there been such a connection between poetry and power, a connection of a kind that rightly produces skepticism in critics and readers. Robert Frost had become the closest thing in the history of American letters to a national monument, a symbol of the Yankee virtues of independence, stoic belief, hard work, and common wisdom —in short, a sage. A color photograph of a white-maned and smiling Frost graced the March 1962 cover of Life magazine with the caption “America’s Ageless Poet.” His unprecedented and still unmatched four Pulitzer prizes, as well as forty-four honorary degrees, already had confirmed his place as the king of American poets. Frost enjoyed his fame but held a deeply ambivalent attitude toward his audience and its expectations. Cultivating the image of a folk philosopher, Frost skillfully avoided calling attention to the troubling complexity of his art. He wanted to be understood, but not easily, and he enjoyed playing the trickster to his audience. In a eulogy for Frost delivered in Amherst in October of 1963, President Kennedy called the poet “one of the granite figures of our time in America. . . . In honoring Robert Frost we therefore can pay honor to the deepest sources of our national strength.” But Kennedy, speaking less than a month before his assassination, added, “If Robert Frost was much honored during his lifetime, it was because many preferred to ignore his darker truths.”

Those darker truths include the uncertain relations between man and nature, the unending conflicts among men, the tensions that threaten marriage and home, and the limitations of human knowledge. Frost’s poetry reveals fear, competition, and violence lurking beneath the eglitarian ideals of democracy and a will to power hidden beneath jokes and light words. Approachability and clarity mask the complexity and strangeness of his poetry. “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling/To get adapted to my kind of fooling,” Frost wrote near the end of his life. A great deal of “in and outdoor schooling” informs his poetry from the beginning, and Frost’s life is filled with the contradictions and tensions of both. As a poultry farmer, Frost wrote pastoral and georgic poetry, modes of contemplation and labor, in the tradition of Theocritus and Virgil, whom he read in the original. He memorized hundreds of the best English poems and wore copies of Shakespeare, Arnold, and Browning to tatters. As commanding a reader of Scripture as most theologians, he was also a passionate and learned botanist and amateur astronomer who maintained a lifelong dialogue with science and scientists. A provincial New Englander, he spent three years studying at Harvard and three years in England, where he immediately impressed the leading practitioners of modernism, Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats. The man who was to become America’s most widely read poet published his first book, A Boy’s Will, in England at the age of nearly forty, his boyhood far behind him. His second book, North of Boston, which has been called “the most American of all modern books of poetry,” was written mainly while he lived in England and also published there.

The great poet of New England Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, and named after the leader of the Confederate Army, General Robert E. Lee. His father, William Prescott Frost, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard, was an ambitious politico in the Democratic party and an aspiring journalist. Unsuccessful at both, he died of consumption when Robert was eleven, leaving the family broke. Isabelle Moodie, Frost’s mother, was a deeply religious woman who baptized her son in the Swedenborgian church. After her husband’s death she moved Robert and his sister, Jeannie, to New Hampshire, where she became a schoolteacher. A first-rate student in high school, Robert was graduated at the top of his class, and was covaledictorian with his future wife, Elinor Miriam White. He also had begun writing poetry, publishing his first effort, “La Noche Triste,” in the school newspaper. Despite his intellect and appetite for knowledge, Frost had little patience for college as he followed his developing talent for poetry and his passion for his fiancée. He enrolled at Dartmouth College and dropped out after less than a term, working then at odd jobs. After a tempestuous courtship, he finally married Elinor.

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.

While managing several hundred hens, Frost also published a number of essays and stories in Farm-Poultryman magazine, some based on the efforts of his neighbor, John Hall, to breed prize hens. But Hall’s appearance later in the poem “The Housekeeper” depicts a man obsessed with perfection and quite willing to let his farm go to hell. Frost was himself, by all accounts, an inept farmer; things went to ruin while he pursued his poetry. Frost exchanged his vocation as a “henman” with a career as a teacher at the Plymouth Normal School and the Pinkerton Academy in New Hampshire from 1906 until 1912. Both he and Elinor then made the romantic decision to sell their farm and “travel about the world a little.” They moved their four children—daughters Leslie, Irma, Marjorie, and son, Carol—to England, where they remained until 1915.

In England, Frost befriended the essayist Edward Thomas, and their conversations led to the birth of Thomas’s poetic career and the sure growth of Frost’s own. Their long walks and conversations coincided with the development in Frost’s poetry of a complex blend of dramatic narrative and dialogue. A mortar shell ended Thomas’s life in World War I, and one of Frost’s only elegies, “To E. T.,” was written in his memory. Having met little success in getting individual poems published in the United States, Frost was able to assemble an entire collection and sought out an English publisher. In 1913, David Nutt brought out A Boy’s Will, followed a year later by North of Boston. Both received numerous positive reviews, including one by the impresario and practitioner of literary high modernism, Ezra Pound. Frost met and sparred with major players in the British literary scene, including Pound, William Butler Yeats, Ford Maddox Ford, and T. E. Hulme, all of whom, with a certain measure of condescension, found his poetry superb. Pound, an expatriate native of Idaho, was giddy over having “just discovered another Amur‘kn. VURRY Amu’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace.” Pound advised Harriet Monroe, editor of the prestigious journal Poetry, to print his review of Frost’s first book “at once as we ought to be first and some of the reviewers here are sure to make fuss enough to get quoted in N.Y.” Patronizing and opportunistic though he may have been, Pound knew, as he had when he first encountered the work of T. S. Eliot, a good thing when he saw it. By the time of his return to the United States in 1915, Frost had become a poet of considerable note, and Henry Holt was eager to publish his books. After the publication of Mountain Interval in 1916, he was offered a onesemester teaching position at Amherst, which he eventually quit in 1920 after disagreements with the president, Alexander Meiklejohn. From then on Frost would spend his time in and out of visiting professorships at prestigious universities. His reputation grew to national and global proportions, fueled both by the power of his work and also by his success as a performer and raconteur. The twenty years of relative isolation and anonymity that had produced some of the most engaging and innovative poetry of the twentieth century were over.

Frost was an unassuming innovator, though a great one. More than any poet except Shakespeare, he brought the possibilities of English meters and the rhythms of ordinary speech together with exquisite skill, power, and subtlety. Rarely calling attention to his own technical brilliance Frost chose to lure the reader into his labyrinth, allowing his poetry’s strangeness and complexity to work gradually upon the imagination. If the self-exiled Americans Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot were showing their contempt for America and democracy by crafting a poetry incomprehensible to the common reader, Frost desired to contain his vision in art that did not call attention to its artfulness. He appealed to a democratic audience in part because of a strong belief that all humanity shared thoughts and desires in common, even if only a few had the skill or the courage to reveal them in literature. He once said of his own work, “I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual observer altogether obvious.” One of his great predecessors, Emily Dickinson, wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” Frost found his own way of telling the truth slant, obliquely, embracing all of its complexity. Frost emphasized the importance of metaphor in all ranges of thought, and he loved the way metaphor could both “say one thing in terms of another” but also “say one thing and mean another.” Metaphor and poetry become ways of both concealing and revealing, the way the wall does in his famous poem “Mending Wall.” Frost expressed this tension in a letter to a friend: “I have written to keep the curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you.” Yet Frost’s writing, approachable and beguiling, presents an invitation to the secret places of his mind. Frost did develop a relationship, though a diabolical one, with his audience: “My poems . . . are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them and in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.”

Unlike the urban visions of Eliot, Crane, and Stevens, Frost’s poetry strikes the reader first and foremost as being about country life and about nature, and he focused on aspects of both “common in life but uncommon in poetry.” His work appears to evoke the pastoral ideals of rural independence that had been advocated by Thomas Jefferson. And it invites us to read nature as a purifying scripture and symbol of the spirit, as it had been by the American sages Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, both of whom Frost read and admired. But, once taken in, we find Frost’s country world pervaded by struggle, limitation, ambiguity, and evil. And Frost’s vision is always complicated by the drama of the observer in interpreting any fact or situation.

Frost appears to urge, as he titled one poem, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” The title tells us a great deal about the trickiness and subtlety of Frost’s work. Sounding like an invitation to homespun country wisdom, the title wryly alludes to Prince Hamlet’s response to Ophelia: “Do you think I meant country matters?” In the Elizabethan world, “country matters” implied “something indecent.” To an audience accustomed to poetry that pointed to nature as a source of solace or transcendent revelation, Frost no doubt meant something indecent by a poem that describes the inexplicable destruction of a farm by fire, its use by birds who “rejoice in the nest they kept” indifferent to human loss, and its rebuke of human sentimentality “dwelling too much on what has been.” “Versed,” a colloquialism that means “taught” or “schooled,” casually raises a question that haunts Frost’s work: What is the relation of poetry, “verse,” to knowledge of the world? If poetry had become the repository for sentiments and emotion, Frost’s poem suggests the need to unlearn our emotions in order to accept and survive in life’s cruelty. Our having “to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebes wept,” [emphasis mine] reflects the difficulty of accommodating human beliefs and desires to the indifference and coldness of the world.

Frost’s thoughtful and subversive attitude about country matters can be seen very clearly in a little-known interview. Asked whether he thought nature was cruel or not, Frost’s anecdotal answer reveals much about his ironic stance toward an educated and genteel audience. He takes exception with the view held by Matthew Arnold that nature is cruel and that man is somehow morally superior. But he takes special care to poke fun at an American minister and professor expounding to students on the peacefulness and beauty of nature:

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