Part 1

Chapter 14,006 wordsPublic domain

THE MURRAY HILL BIOGRAPHIES

ROBERT FROST

_A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense_

By GORHAM B. MUNSON _Author of_ “WALDO FRANK: A STUDY”

GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY ON MURRAY HILL : NEW YORK

ROBERT FROST --A-- PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To HART CRANE

in memory of many enthusiastic conversations about poetry

CONTENTS

I “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN” 11

II “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC” 21

III “A BOY’S WILL” 27

IV “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN” 32

V “NEW HAMPSHIRE” 36

VI “PAN WITH US” 58

VII “INTO MY OWN” 69

VIII “A SENSIBILITIST” 87

IX “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL” 99

APPENDIX A [Selected British Opinion on Robert Frost] 117

APPENDIX B [Bibliographical] 125

APPENDIX C [Robert Frost on Education] 127

[Index] 131

I. “THE GENERATIONS OF MEN”

_“But don’t you think we sometimes make too much Of the old stock? What counts is the ideals And those will bear some keeping still about.”_

New England is our association with the name of Frost, and we are no doubt surprised when told that it is a Scandinavian name. Yet there are today many persons in Denmark who hearing this sound uttered behind their backs would turn with that sudden interest aroused by the unexpected pronouncing of one’s name. Certain of the remote ancestors of these Danish Frosts may have roved into England in the ninth century A.D., or it may have been Saxons bearing the name of Forst, which is the Saxon form of Frost, who invaded England in the fifth century A.D. and founded the line of English Frosts. In either case, the Frosts were settled there before the Norman Conquest and the name had begun to accrete sturdy Anglo-Saxon associations about its slightly harsh sound.

In 1135 Henry Frost, the probable ancestor of the American progenitor of one line of Frosts,[1] founded the Hospital of the Brothers of St. John the Evangelist at Cambridge, England, and this foundation became in 1509 St. John’s College, for which reason it is said that “Henry Frost ought never to be forgot, who gave birth to so noted a seat of religion, and afterwards to one of the most renouned seats of learning in Europe.”

The son of Henry Frost bore the name of the subject of this Study and wore a coat of arms which reads like a prophetic curio of the poetry of his namesake. “Argent. A chevron azure between two thistles slipped in chief, and a hind’s head erased in base proper. Crest: a grey squirrel sejant, semée of estoiles sable, collared and chained or, and holding between the paws a hazel branch fructed also proper.”

Until the early seventeenth century the Frost family spread deeper and deeper into the sub-soil of English life. Then came the migrations of the Puritans, crowded by unfavorable forces at home and drawn from afar by the promises of New England. In an old piece of writing one can read:

“Nicholas, Marride Bertha Cadwalla, Jan’y 1630 ffrom Tavistock, Devon Bertha Cadwalla, Borne ffeb’y ye 14th, 1610 Aprill Arrived in Sailed for America June, 1634, in ye year In ye Shipp Wulfrana, Alwin Wellborn, Master ffrom Plimouth, Devon.”

It was this Nicholas Frost who founded the line of which Robert Frost is a representative of the ninth generation. In the interval New England incorporated itself into the tissue, blood and bone of these “generations of men” ultimately to become song from the lips of Robert Frost.

The history of the early generations of this line is threaded into the history of certain old villages in Maine--Kittery, Eliot, Wells, York--located close to the present New Hampshire border, and today there is an inscription on Ambush Rock where Major Charles Frost was slain, Frost’s Hill is still known as such, and the Frost Garrison House, erected in 1733, is the only garrison house that remains in Old Kittery. Everett S. Stackpole, the patient chronicler of _Old Kittery and Her Families_, hints that a little mythological moss may have gathered about the early Frost settlers, and believes that Nicholas Frost was on the coast of Maine as early as 1632. He surmises that he returned to Tiverton, Devonshire, England, collected his wife and two sons, John and Charles, and came back to America in 1634.

Nicholas Frost appears to have landed at Little Harbor, now Rye, New Hampshire, and to have lived there for at least a year, since there is record of a daughter Anna being born there in April, 1635. Within the next two years he removed to the head of Sturgeon Creek, in what is now Eliot, Maine, where he made his home until his death in 1663.

His vicissitudes and achievements were of a typical pioneer character. He acquired a fairly large acreage of land, served as one of the first selectmen of Kittery, signed with his son a petition to Oliver Cromwell (signed with his mark, a combination of N and F, for this ancestor of a distinguished poet was illiterate), and lost his wife and fifteen year old daughter, Anna, to the Indians. It is said that they were captured on July 4, 1650 “and taken to a camp at the mouth of Sturgeon Creek. Nicholas and his son Charles were at York at the time, and on their return attempted to rescue them but were unsuccessful; Charles, however, killed a chief and a brave. The next day Charles, his father and some of the neighbors went back to the camp but were too late. The camp was deserted, only the bodies of Bertha and Anna were found there. They were buried near the old Garrison.”[2] Stackpole finds some of the details of this story scarcely credible, but it seems clearly a fact that Bertha Frost and her daughter were killed by the Indians.

Charles Frost, already mentioned several times in this narrative, became locally celebrated and until _North of Boston_ was imported from England in 1915 was probably the most famous of the American Frosts.

He was noted as an Indian fighter, and bitterly hated by his foes who finally killed him from an ambush on July 4, 1697. The hatred of the Indians for him went to greater lengths: they opened his grave the night after the burial and carried the body to the top of Frost’s hill where it was suspended upon a stake. The reason for this vengeance lay in an incident that occurred in September, 1676, following the close of King Philip’s War, an incident that is sometimes described in the colonial and border war histories of our early settlers.

The Pennacooks, some of the neighboring Abenakis, and a number of “strange Indians” (alleged to be King Philip’s men) assembled, having been given an express pledge of safety, at Dover, New Hampshire, for a friendly conference with the whites. A sham fight was instituted and using this as a pretext the whites seized four hundred Indians. Of these three hundred were sent to Boston where a few were hanged and the rest sold into slavery. It is said that Major Waldron and Captain (later Major) Frost joined this stratagem with reluctance, but the Indians held them responsible for what they reasonably deemed an atrocious and treacherous deed, bided their time and killed Major Waldron thirteen years later and Major Frost twenty-one years after, causing one Joseph Storer in Wells to write: “It hath pleased God to take a way; Major Frost, the Indians waylad him Last Sabbath day as he was cominge whom from meeting at night; and killed him and John Heards wife and Denes Downing ... it is a Great Loss to the Whole Province; and Espesely to his fameley ... mistress Frost is very full of sory; and all her Children.”

His death is said to have been the last English blood shed in New England in King William’s War and inspired a memento in verse which runs:

The last of that grand triumvirate, Unflinching martyrs of a common fate, Waldron and Plaisted and Frost, these three, The flower of New England chivalry.

The descendants of this component of the flower of New England chivalry occupied themselves in divers ways but kept their home-roots within a radius of fifty miles of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. His son, the Hon. John Frost, married a sister of Sir William Pepperell who captured Louisburg in 1745 and himself served His Majesty for a time as Commander of the man-of-war _Edward_. Later he became a merchant of Newcastle, New Hampshire, and a member of the Governor’s Council. His son, William, was also a merchant of Newcastle, but apparently not as conspicuous as his grandfather or father. The line recovers its warlike tinge in his son, Lieutenant William Frost, an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolution and a resident of Andover, Massachusetts. The sixth generation gives us Samuel Abbot Frost, who remained in New Hampshire most of his life and was the father of four children, among them William Prescott Frost, the grandfather of Robert, who moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts.

For a time William Prescott Frost aspired to be a well-dressed young blood, but New England thrift and respectability erased these fashionable yearnings and he became instead a saver of the margins of his income and a local pillar of respectability. He wrested a competency from his job as overseer in a Lawrence mill and was naturally somewhat baffled by the drifting and poetic tendencies of his young grandson, probably never more than when he proposed to Robert, then aged eighteen, that he should take one year to try out his poetry and then, if that did not meet with success, why, there were plenty of other worthy pursuits. The reply was: “Give me twenty years!” And it was to be exactly twenty years before _A Boy’s Will_ was published in London.

But for all his respectability there was a liberal vein in William Prescott Frost: otherwise he could not have tolerated the notions and conduct of his wife. For she was one of the earliest feminists in America. This lady, remembered as one whose stateliness was enhanced by an habitual nodding of the head as if with dignified resentment against the ascendency of the male, decided one day that house-work was not exclusively the business of women and called for a division of household tasks. And her husband acquiesced, so that, turn and turn about, one performed the services of the establishment whilst the other enjoyed leisure.

This couple had a son and a daughter, and named the boy William Prescott after the father. He was sent to Harvard, the first of the line to receive college training, and it was hoped that he would become a lawyer, a hope that his grandparents later cherished for Robert Frost. But William Prescott Frost, Jr., revolted against what seven generations of Frosts had assisted in forming: he revolted so strongly against New England that his flight ended only when he reached San Francisco.

But before recording that grimly energetic career, a pause is due, since “what counts is the ideals and those will bear some keeping still about,” to ask concerning the congruity of Robert Frost with his ancestry. What is noticeable first of all in this stock is its closeness to the soil. It was given, not to wandering, but to settling, to making a sturdy fight with local conditions, to seeing matters through on the terms of the environment. That environment happened to be, in its wider sense, successively colonial America, the consolidation and growth of the United States, and the beginnings of the industrial era. In a smaller sense, it was New England and the family is dyed in the older qualities of both America and its small northeastern corner--hardihood, resistance, decency and kinship to the soil, to mention a few. One is tempted to make a second generalization. The way the Frosts trod was the middle road. In their family there is no touch of the eccentric or extravagant or fanatic. They were church-going, but not zealots of puritanism. They served in the army and navy when occasion pressed, but they were not soldiers of fortune. They were small business men and local officeholders, but made no unusual motions in either rôle. What stands out seems to be a temperamental conservatism, adapting itself to changes in history and environment, but never reactionary or radical--until we come upon a variant in the father of Robert Frost. But Robert Frost is heir to the progressive conservatism and the closeness to the locality of the forebears of his father.

II. “ONCE BY THE PACIFIC”

Shortly after the Civil War an immigrant ship from Scotland was coming up the Schuylkill River. It had taken weeks to cross the Atlantic and now it was close enough to be gaily bombarded by peaches thrown from the shore. The passengers caught the strange fruit in their hands and learned to eat it and the taste was welcome after so protracted a spell of ship’s provisions.

There was a fifteen year old girl passenger from Edinburgh who did not take part in the pastime. She came of a lowland Scotch family, a family of seafarers: her father, a sea captain, had been lost at sea and so also had her brother. Bred to patience, she now sat quietly watching. But one of the men came over and dropped the peach he had caught into her lap. “You should eat it,” he explained, and she replied, gazing at the fruit, “It’s too bonnie to eat.”

This Scotch girl was on her way to Columbus, Ohio, to live with an uncle in business there. A few years later she came to Lewiston, Pennsylvania, to teach school. And here it was that Isabelle Moody encountered William Prescott Frost, Jr., on his rebound from New England. Young Frost had his eye on other projects of ambition, but for the time he too was a school teacher in Lewiston. They were married, and the husband went on to San Francisco to work on a Democratic newspaper, the _Bulletin_. A little later he wrote his wife that the windows of the newspaper office had been shot out but he was unharmed. The paper had, it seems, printed derogatory statements about some stock and those who were interested in it had resorted to gun play. Into this smoldering and sometimes violent community Isabelle Moody followed her husband and there on March 26, 1875, a son, christened Robert Lee Frost, was born.

The christening tells the story of the father’s political sympathies. Too young to fight in the Civil War, the boy had been an intense copperhead and had meditated on somehow slipping South to join the Confederates. Now he was a States’ Rights man and once he showed Robert a map of the United States and divided it into five nations into which he predicted the country would sometime split.

The father liked San Francisco. He liked the spirit of plunging which diffused through the community and he was himself always playing the stock market. He liked to spend money liberally. And he liked the threat of grimness which one experienced by simply observing that men wore revolvers with the frequency New Yorkers today wear sticks.

One Sunday afternoon Robert and several other children were permitted to walk along the beach with his father and a few associates. A bottle was found and stopped up and tossed into the waves. Out came the revolvers of all the men and they fired at the floating target. It was no more uncommon than throwing stones.

One Christmas Eve Robert, his sister and his mother returned to their house quite late. They were about to prepare for bed when his mother asked Robert if he had locked the door. He answered that he had, but it at once became indisputable that he had not, for the door was heard to open without benefit of key and someone, to their consternation, entered. Mrs. Frost rushed her children into a room, locked its door, shooed them under a table, and extracted a revolver from a drawer. “I’ll shoot if you come further!” she spoke with a quaver. There was no answer, and she repeated her threat. Then Mr. Frost’s laugh was heard, relieving a tension that was likely often to seize San Franciscans of that period.

On the Fourth of July the plunging editor broke loose. It was his day and it was neither safe nor sane. An old fashioned celebrator, he made the greatest racket possible, set fire to outhouses and destroyed minor properties. He went to the limit on political celebrations, too. In politics or the stock market he would soon make a lucky stroke if he played hard enough. Then after success had burgeoned, he would take care of that consumption that threatened him. He would take a trip to “the Islands”; that is, to Hawaii, the favored resort of that time for consumptives. In the meantime he drank liquor to keep up his pace, he drank warm blood at the stockyards to alleviate the disease, and he did all the celebrating possible when his party triumphed. Robert was a celebrant too, riding, costumed, on floats in the big parades or trudging in torchlight processions until he was sent home to bed from weariness.

But the political ambitions yielded only small fruits. Mr. Frost did go as a delegate to one Democratic National Convention and he was city campaign manager in 1884 when Cleveland was elected President. He was defeated, however, when he ran for election as tax collector of San Francisco. In that campaign the boy Robert was his constant companion--his job was to visit the saloons with his father’s campaign cards and to impale these on the ceiling by flinging upwards a card with a tack through it and a silver dollar beneath the tack which worked as a sort of flying mallet--and this, one fancies, remains to this day the most active participation in politics of Robert Frost.

In 1885 consumption won the contest for the body of William Prescott Frost and silenced its teeming hopes and plans, its explosive moods and tense restraints. His wife who had suffered for weeks at a time from his gloomy silences and his son who had suffered from his grim severities mourned for him--and found that his extravagance had led to letting his insurance lapse. It was necessary to return to the New England the dead man had hated, to seek refuge with Robert’s grandparents in Lawrence.

So the little boy relinquished the tiny chicken farm he had started in the backyard at San Francisco and on the long ride sat beside his surviving parent, both sunk in memories of the grim dignity of the deceased, he who had never worn anything but a top hat, who had always been drily polite without the least ingratiation, and yet had been pathetic, too, since he had been _terrible_ to himself. If anything planted tragedy in Robert Frost, it must have been, one surmises, the vision of his father, friend on the one hand of Buckley, the notorious blind boss of San Francisco, and on the other of Henry George with whom for a brief time he managed a single tax newspaper.

Perhaps from his father he acquired a certain recklessness of temperament, less extreme, but discernible in the drifting ways of his life: his father was energetically imprudent and the world, one knows, judges the son gently imprudent in the affairs of practical living. But the presence of the mother is also implied in the poetry. Her Scotch blood, transmitted, courses perhaps in the canny good sense, in the slightly oblique humor, and above all in the thriftiness of the poetic productions. She was herself an occasional versifier and reviewed books for her husband’s newspaper. In religion she was a Swedenborgian, and these facts are sufficient to suggest that she probably awakened an emotional area in her son that the father left untouched, that area that was later to fructify into a new contribution to American poetry.

III. “A BOY’S WILL”

Robert and his sister had been trained by their father to no love of New England. Circumstance, however, had now deposited them among the despised children of this section, and for the first time they saw pennies. They made up a little game. First, they would hold up a nickel and say, “San Francisco!” Then they would exhibit a penny and scornfully pronounce, “Boston!” But this childish snobbism soon vanished as they became more at home in the East.

Robert received the usual schooling and in high school clearly outstripped his class. He was apparently in full possession of valedictorian honors as graduation neared when a rival emerged coming rapidly forward from a lower class. The rival was a Lawrence girl, a descendant of the Whites of Acton who fought at Concord and of Peregrine White on the _Mayflower_. Elinor White was completing her high school course in two and a half years, thus catching up with Robert’s class, and when the averages were computed it was found that she had tied him for the honor of valedictorian. It was decided, nevertheless, that Robert Frost should deliver the address, while on the graduation program the names of Elinor Miriam White and Robert Frost should appear together as holders of the office. This happened to forecast the future, for the boy and girl, already friends, were married in October of 1895 and their names have ever since been joined in a union of singular idyllic beauty.

Another courtship was developing during the same phase of Robert Frost’s life which was also to ripen into a lifelong devotion, and that was the courting of the Muse of Poetry. Before he left San Francisco, he had begun a serial story. It concerned the doings of a lost and forgotten tribe living in a ravine no one of the outside world knew about. After he came east, he continued this serial from time to time, filling in the details of scenery and inhabitants.

Here we strike a master-image, one that constantly recurs in Frost’s life, for aside from the varieties of it to be found in his poems--for example, in such lines as “Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose” and the first two stanzas of _Into My Own_--the poet has confessed that often he puts himself to sleep by dreaming of this inaccessible and sometimes happy tribe defending its canyon. One hopes that this recurrent and dominant image will not be subjected to the ingenious but suspect leaps to conclusions of the psycho-analysts. Better far the slower method of the behaviorist who is in closer accord with the commonsense of man which tells us that we do not thoroughly know people until we have seen them in many situations over a lengthy span of seasons.

When fourteen Robert Frost began to open books with a new zest. Hitherto he had been content to have his mother read to him and his favorite story had been _Tom Brown’s School Days_ which characteristically he had never finished--because he could not bear the thought that he had completed the tale. But now he adventured for himself among books. He read with eager responsiveness all of William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to Shelley’s _Alastor_ and Keats’ _Endymion_ but found them too much at the time for his interests and resources. Edward Rowland Sill and his Emersonianism was better adapted to his requirements, and Frost still preserves a mild respect for this obscured Connecticut poet who in his day carried the fruitage of New England culture to the far West.

The following year at the age of fifteen Frost was himself trying out his hand at writing verse, and two years later composed _My Butterfly_ which is one of the pieces in _A Boy’s Will_ and the earliest poem he has kept. The first stanza is quoted not only to reveal its superiority to the poetry of adolescence at large but to explain what followed its publication.