When Robert Frost, in his 1930 address “Education by Poetry,” spoke about the importance of being “at home in the metaphor,” he seemed to suggest how infrequently he had felt at home anywhere else. The New England landscape abounds with Frost sites: the Frost Farm, in Derry, New Hampshire, and the Frost Place, in Franconia, New Hampshire; the Robert Frost Stone House, in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, and the Homer Noble Farm, in Ripton, Vermont; a house on verdant Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one on leafy Sunset Avenue in Amherst, Massachusetts. Add to these two houses in England, where Frost lived from 1912 to 1915 and first found acclaim, along with a cottage in Key West, where he often spent winters, and a white pillared house that once stood in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where Frost lived while he worked at the University of Michigan, in the twenties), but was moved by Henry Ford to Greenfield Village, a part of Ford’s museum complex. It now sits on a cleansed American green, near Edison’s laboratories, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, and a courthouse where Lincoln practiced law.
Frost’s stone walls, old barns, cellar holes, birches, and brooks—the sedimentary, second-growth New England that, before Frost, had awaited its bard—imply a writer who cared, like Thoreau, only to be “admitted to Nature’s hearth.” But, wherever he went, Frost schemed to buy land or a house or a farm. Frost is sometimes still associated with the old-fashioned comforts of home, but in reality he was frequently on the move, spending, and often squandering, whatever investments of the heart and the wallet he had lately made. Those cozy houses and picturesque farms that litter the countryside make a trail of places Frost fled. Emerson, whose work he always kept nearby, suggests the fitting motto: “Everything good is on the highway.” And yet Frost never really lit out for the territories; instead, he moved among carbon-copy small farms with mountain views, and smart Victorians on the fringes of campuses, where, having escaped the “academic ways” he always said he loathed, he could return day after day.
Throughout his life, Frost moved into things so he could move out. He does this in language, too, veering toward certainties in order to evade them. He knew, like his “Oven Bird,” how “in singing not to sing.” Frost can be trying company, but he is company: no modern poet draws us so close, though what he does to us at close range is often impolite. If a reader knows only one poem by Frost, it is likely “The Road Not Taken,” that cunning nugget of nihilism disguised as an anthem for nonconformity. A quick Google search turns up mugs, T-shirts, and posters, as well as customizable business cards, all quoting the poem. What tends to be forgotten is the barbed tangle of tenses at its close:
The primary “I” in the poem isn’t the one doing the “sighing”; that’s a later version of the self that this current version, though moving steadily in its direction, finds pitiable. Look up the word “all” in the dictionary, and you will find that it means “the whole amount or quantity of.” In Frost, the word is always sad. So often in his work, the whole of something adds up to much less than one had hoped.
Because Frost is so mercurial, many people feel they have a claim upon him. Heads of Frost, in bronze or stone, are standard clutter for town libraries and English-department common rooms (there’s a wobbly-looking one down the hall from where I am writing this). A man named Mitchel Potter was arrested in 2012 for stealing a bust of Frost from Wichita State twenty-five years earlier, after, he said, he’d done “a lot of beer bongs.” Some local teen-agers in Middlebury, Vermont, broke into the Ripton farm a few winters ago, and partied and urinated on the floors. Their sentence involved taking a mini-class in Frost’s poetry. The aged Frost appears in Tobias Wolff’s novel “Old School,” jesting with the boys at a fictional boarding school and inspiring, in the students, “fits of dignity.” There is the “dark Frost” recommended by Lionel Trilling in the late fifties, a “terrifying poet,” and the shuffling, windswept sage of Kennedy’s inaugural, reciting “The Gift Outright” from memory. Poets have come the closest to rendering the “offstage” Frost. Robert Lowell punned on Coleridge (“Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor”) in his sonnet for Frost, and John Berryman, who remembered both Frost’s “malice” and his “good / big face,” put it succinctly: “For a while here we possessed / an unusual man.”
It can sometimes seem, from the surfeit of images of Frost in his later years, that he was born old, incapable of youth in the same way John Keats is incapable of age. “The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886-1920,” edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, part of a heroic effort by Harvard University Press to collect all Frost’s writings in a definitive edition, goes some way toward filling this imaginative deficit. “I have been pulled two ways and torn in two all my life,” Frost wrote in a letter of 1915. He was born in 1874 in San Francisco, where his father, William Frost, a newspaperman from primeval New England stock, had taken a job. William Frost died of tuberculosis when Frost was eleven; the family—Frost, his sister Jeanie, and his mother, Isabelle—then made a new start in and around Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost’s paternal grandfather oversaw a successful mill.
He tried college twice. First, he went to Dartmouth, where, he said, he lost interest in any task “not self-imposed,” and left after several months. A few years later, having married and started a family, Frost was admitted to Harvard, where he intended to study classics and become a high-school Greek and Latin teacher. He quit after three semesters. He seems to have proposed many times, at least twice successfully, to his future wife, Elinor White. They had exchanged rings in secret before Elinor went off to St. Lawrence University; nearly every time she returned home, it seems, Frost tried to persuade her to drop out. When Frost visited her unannounced, holding a privately printed book of five poems that he had made as a gift for her, she took the book and booted him out. He then set off on a bizarre trip to the Dismal Swamp, in Virginia. He walked ten miles into the swamp and was discovered by some duck hunters. Back home, he visited Elinor, they quarrelled again, he again stormed out, and again suggested that he might do something nuts. In fact, he went to Cambridge to have a drink with friends. Elinor finally graduated, and the two were married.
There was an element of conscious metaphorical shaping to everything Frost did. He couldn’t choose just any swamp as his slough of despond: “dismal,” a word he might have encountered in “Paradise Lost,” had the right to-hell-and-back feel about it. Frost would “always go to farming” knowing, he said, that he would “always make a failure of it.” So he would have to teach; but teaching kept him from writing. Then it was back to farming, which pleased him, likely because he neglected so much of it. And the cycle was renewed: among writers, he seemed like a farmer, and among farmers he seemed like a writer. When his grandfather purchased the farm in Derry for him, in 1900, he rigged it so that Frost wouldn’t own the property—and therefore couldn’t sell it off—until ten years after the old man died. Still, the Frosts made it for just eight, leasing the farm out until the minute the deed matured, when it could be unloaded.
Frost was a little like the anonymous woodsman he describes in “The Wood Pile”: always “turning to fresh tasks,” forgetting “his handiwork on which / He spent himself, the labour of his axe.” Only he didn’t forget. His vagrancy was a quality that he prized and, in fact, adroitly captained. He found the title of his first volume, “A Boy’s Will,” in Longfellow: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will.” But the wind-drivenness was always checked by what he called his “Scotch-Yankee calculation,” a trait that prospered most when he called attention to it, sometimes by keen actions of self-mockery.
In 1916, for the amusement of his friend Louis Untermeyer, Frost drew up a phony circular titled “Anybody Want to Hear R. Frost on Anything?” One subject he advertised was the “True Story of My Life”:
This is autobiography passed through the sieve of self-contempt, an absurdist anti-Who’s Who that elevates, by ostensibly denigrating, the real “true story” of a person’s life. Frost did raise chickens, White Wyandottes, to “try to stop thinking”; he did feel that he was in decline already, at the age of forty-two; he did look with wonder on the fact that he didn’t “seem to die,” having assumed on many an occasion that he was gravely ill, and often contemplating suicide. The final item is agonizingly astute about how others viewed him, and how he viewed himself: “Very intimate and baffling.”
The truest Frost was the most feigning, as these letters reveal time and again. Frost showed “patience in the pursuit of glory” only if his incessant nudging of editors, both here and in England, is compared with some imaginary alternatives: bribery, say, or hostage-taking. When Frost learned of his first paid acceptance, by The Independent, in 1894, he wrote a letter to its literary editor, Susan Hayes Ward, enclosing more poems for her to consider:
“Astonishing” is the key word here: astonishing, that is, even to himself, and even at this moment. Frost beheld his own actions with a kind of strategic impartiality, preëmpting the worst that others might say about him. “Bragging isn’t really ‘bragging’ when it’s so manifestly a performed thing,” the editors write in their fine introduction. Or is it a deeper kind of brag, as though an exception to Frost’s strict anti-bragging policy had to be made in just this one case? “You give me a new courage,” Frost wrote to Ward, a year or so later. “At last I feel as if I could afford to be modest.”
In young writers, ambition often sprints ahead of accomplishment, then stops and waits for the gap to close. If it didn’t run ahead, there might be no race at all. Frost’s ambition made its start around 1894, but his career didn’t catch up until 1913, when he published his first book, “A Boy’s Will,” and, a year later, his second, “North of Boston.” The intervening period was as hard as any writer has endured. In 1900, Frost’s first child, Elliott, died, of cholera, at the age of three. The Frosts had consulted a homeopath referred by Frost’s mother. His remedies failed; the boy’s symptoms worsened, and by the time the family doctor was called it was too late. “I have seen right in my own family one person lost by not taking instant and out-and-out measures,” Frost later wrote. He thought he had as much as murdered his child. (Four of the six Frost children died before he did; he found a way to blame himself each time.) Frost’s mother, who had told him that Elliott’s death was “God’s judgment” upon the family, soon died of cancer, alone in a sanatorium. The Frosts then moved to the thirty-acre farm in Derry, under circumstances that Frost found aggravating. Elinor had appealed to his grandfather behind Frost’s back. The farm would be purchased and Frost would have to welcome his high-school friend Carl Burrell to be a live-in farmhand. Burrell agreed only if he could bring along his eighty-four-year-old grandfather, Jonathan (Jont) Eastman. And so in October, 1900, only three months after Elliott’s death, Frost, Elinor, their seventeen-month-old daughter, Lesley, and Carl Burrell and his grandfather moved into the small farmhouse, with the two hands living upstairs and sharing all meals with the family. It was Carl who woke early to milk the cow, who harvested the apples and packed the eggs for sale at the market. The whole situation made Frost feel that he was being told, by his grandfather, “Go out and die.” But it must have occurred to him that all these arrangements had been made so that he could write his poems.
The few letters that survive from this period are nearly all to Susan Hayes Ward, Frost’s single, fraying tie to the literary world, fussing about incidentals. Much of what we know of the Derry years comes from what we may surmise from the poems in Frost’s first two books, which Frost wrote on the farm and in England, where, testing his moral luck, he impulsively took his family to live in the summer of 1912. In a letter to William Stanley Braithwaite, three years later, Frost wrote, of “North of Boston”:
Derry was a pliable symbol, reshaped to suit the occasion, for the rest of Frost’s life. The “ten years” were really nine, and not from “eighteen on” but from twenty-six to around thirty-five, though he had farmed intermittently at other times. But to keep farm, “so to speak,” is not to say he kept farm, exactly, nor is to “disallow”—in scare quotes—precisely to disallow. The word “keep” and its variants occur forty-seven times in “North of Boston”; some of Frost’s greatest poems, from later in his career (“The Most of It” and “Directive” both come to mind), turn on that weirdly abundant little word. The letter insists on not meaning what it says, and it assumes a correspondent whose step will not be shaken by the small faults and tremors Frost liked to put into his sentences.
“Strongly spent is synonymous with kept,” Frost writes in his essay “The Constant Symbol.” His letters, no less than his poems, were for him a “symbol . . . of the way the will has to pitch into commitments” without knowing the outcome. This is a speculator’s state of mind, or perhaps a day trader’s, moving a finite sum in and out of investments until the closing bell. As he wrote to his publisher Alfred Harcourt, in 1917, “There are a lot of good things I believe in, but for the life of me I can’t always enumerate them at a moment’s notice.” He prized “misunderstanding” and “understanding” equally, since they were, he said, the same: both clear your mind and leave “you with one less detail in life to be bothered with.” Loss was gain: his aim in thinking was to take “away from the sum and burden of what you have to consider.” One of his greatest statements about poetry applies to his letters also, which seem to subtract sentence after sentence from themselves until they close: “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” He played it straight, it seems, only when he was dickering about his pay.
“The sense of intimacy gives the thrill of sincerity,” he wrote in another letter, reminding us that both “intimacy” and “sincerity” are, for him, ends in themselves, not means of comfort or connection. At Amherst College, where, beginning in 1917, he taught off and on for more than forty years, he surprised the students by gossiping mercilessly about his colleagues. He liked “the actuality of gossip, the intimacy of it,” not necessarily the dirt. These statements are gently provocative, as Frost, who was always careful to come off as potentially malevolent, no doubt intended. His correspondents and, later, his biographers were in an uncomfortable bind: he spoke to them, as to everyone, in “parables and in hints and in indirections,” as he put it, “whether from diffidence or some other instinct.” Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume official biography of Frost is thus one of the strangest books ever written. Thompson stayed by Frost’s side for more than twenty years; he was like Boswell without an imagination or a memorable prose style. (He seems to have grown to detest Frost, and competed with him for the affections of Kay Morrison, Frost’s secretary and lover.) And so this huge book, full of details that Frost spoon-fed to Thompson and that Thompson vomited up, will never be replaced: everyone writing about Frost, including me, consults it.
Most of the remarkable things in the new volume of letters have been in circulation for a long time, in stray collections, in the Thompson biography, and in William H. Pritchard’s “Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,” the best single volume on Frost. But it is wonderful to find premonitions of them and small aftershocks, and their contexts can now be imagined much more clearly. The most famous letters in the book—the most famous that Frost ever wrote—are two to his former student John Bartlett, introducing his theory of “the sound of sense.” The first, written from England on July 4, 1913, is Frost’s declaration of independence from what he calls “a worn out theory of versification,” from Swinburne and Tennyson, his Victorian predecessors, and from what was left of his timidity:
Frost was working out the intonations and rhythms of his Derry neighbors, whom he had first studied, he wrote, with an “almost technical interest in their speech.” The theory is in some ways unsurprising: anyone who has ever had a dog knows what you can accomplish with the “abstract sound of sense.” But Frost went on:
The brilliance of the theory was all in its application, and when it was applied, in poems like “Home Burial,” Frost not only reclaimed English prosody for American speech; he found the distinct accent of his own grieving. In the poem—a kind of little play (it has been staged, with iffy results) for two voices—a husband and a wife argue over their responses to the death of their child. The man has just spied the family cemetery through a window:
Frost was especially proud of that last line. Obviously, you don’t say, as the meter would suggest, “don’t don’t, don’t don’t.” I hear four equal strong stresses, but you might hear it differently. At other times in the poem, the “sentence sounds” cling to the meter for dear life, as when the wife describes her husband’s seemingly affectless action of digging the child’s grave:
“Leap up, like that, like that, and land”: it isn’t a description of the action; it is the precise rhythmic signature of the action redone in language. Frost was a wizard at that kind of effect. Most of his lines fall somewhere between these two extremes of strict adherence to and open defiance of the meter. The lines are, he wrote “apprehended by the ear. . . . The most original writer catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously.”
Around the time Frost wrote those words, his family was living what he termed their “mildly literary life” in a London suburb, calling occasionally on Pound (“six inches taller for his hair,” with a coat of “heavy black velvet”) and Yeats, both of whom had endorsed Frost in ways that Frost found inadequate. T. S. Eliot arrived in London a year later; his literary début was still several years off, and he never appears in these letters. Modernism was stirring, the war was coming. It had been more than two years since December, 1910, the moment, Virginia Woolf said, when “human character changed.” The family’s response to all this was to get out of London’s orbit entirely, to Gloucestershire, where the landscape and the acoustics were more like Derry.
Soon, Frost was back home in New Hampshire, buying and selling property, taking and quitting jobs, making and losing friends, and, in the letters that close this volume, shaping his reputation with, one suspects, the sense that someone in the future would be there listening. He was becoming that Frost we all can picture, “the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity,” as Randall Jarrell put it. Perhaps two-thirds of his best poems had been written. Frost had once taught a friend’s child, he wrote, “a way to make a big splash with a small object and a small splash with a large object.” These letters, showing Frost at home in metaphor, if nowhere else, expand upon that lesson. He threw in his lot with small objects; poems, he wrote, provided nothing more than a “momentary stay against confusion.” His own oppositional modernism was as revolutionary as Eliot’s, though it arose not from divine afflatus but, as the title of one of his poems has it, from “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” In a letter to a friend on May 18, 1914, Frost describes a visitor to his home in Gloucestershire, the poet W. H. Davies, and some of the hazards of ignorance:
