Part 3

One year after John Bartlett graduated, the teacher who had impressed him so strongly also left Pinkerton. The principal, Mr. Silver, had been appointed head of the New Hampshire State Normal School at Plymouth, New Hampshire, and as often happens in such cases he wished to take the pick of his faculty with him. Frost went to Plymouth for the school year 1911-1912, and while there formed a friendship with a teacher in the high school, Sidney Cox, now assistant professor of English at Dartmouth and editor of various texts. Professor Cox has furnished certain notes on his memory of this year which, like those of Mr. Bartlett, merit first hand presentation and thanks.

“I met Robert Frost,” says Professor Cox, “in the fall of 1911 at a Normal School dance where both of us were against the wall. The next day he came to the high school to ask me to go for a walk. I went, and when I reached home I had felt from that one talk, as I had never done before, what the real nature of poetry is. Scales had been gently lifted off my eyes. After that came many walks, and long casual whole-souled talks. Mr. Frost had no congenial colleagues with whom to walk, and for both of us it was the first, and as it turned out, the only year in Plymouth.

“I found that Mr. Frost was having exciting times teaching psychology, that he wasn’t following any chart, but improvising his own courses, and having the girls read real books. He made me interested in Plato’s _Republic_ and Rousseau’s _Emile_ when he was in the midst of them with one of his classes. He sometimes mentioned a student who seemed exceptional, but he didn’t suppose he was making any great discoveries.

“Perhaps it was on the walk at the end of which Mr. Frost treated me at the drug store to the delectable beverage of white grape juice that he first made me realize the absurdity of letting students write compositions on the adventures of a penny, and gave me a realizing sense of the distinction between unconditioned speculation and creative imagination. He didn’t put it in any such deadly abstract terms as that. He told me that at Derry he had directed his students to write about what was ‘common to experience but uncommon to expression.’

“Sometimes we talked incidentally about things I was likely to take up in class. I remember his praising Matthew Arnold’s _Sohrab and Rustum_, and critically admiring the craftsmanship in Mark Twain’s _The Jumping Frog_, Stevenson’s _The Bottle Imp_, Hawthorne’s _Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe_, and H. G. Wells’ _The Country of the Blind_. He invariably made me see something new. I first learned of Whitman from him, and at the same time found out that he was what I should formerly have considered objectionable and, without the point being formulated, that it wouldn’t do to dismiss him because my taboo was infringed.

“One particularly beautiful snowy walk took us through an evergreen aisle for miles, down to the Interval and so to the turnpike from Boston. On the way up that state road to Plymouth I remember something started us talking about sex behavior and instruction in sex hygiene. Mr. Frost was skeptical about the latter and said he thought perhaps reading Shakespeare was more likely to avert catastrophe than any amount of scientific talk. Another time I told him about the jumpiness and over-earnestness of one of the woman teachers in high school who boarded where I did, and I was permanently convinced of the wisdom of his remark that what she needed was an emotional education through poetry. He was always interested in people and never spoke of anyone slightingly. On the other hand, he was keenly aware of shams and stupidities, and he was not tender toward them.

“Besides the walks, there were a number of unqualifiedly delightful evenings at his home in the little white house, which he shared with the temporarily bachelor principal. His was a poor man’s living room, but there was a bookcase with a lot of attractive books, many of them thin volumes of poetry,--I remember his drawing my attention to the exquisite Mosher books,--and there were two or three comfortable chairs. On such evenings the children went to bed and we older ones got comfortable, and Mr. Frost read aloud, or we talked. I suppose two of my favorite plays will always be _Arms and the Man_ by Shaw and the _Playboy of the Western World_ by Synge because of hearing Mr. Frost read them. I don’t know anyone who can do the Irish so well. One evening he read from Mr. Dooley.

“He had supervised a triumphant production of one of Sheridan’s plays at Derry, and he scorned the notion that good things were too exacting for school children. The State Superintendent had discovered that he was the best of the English teachers under his administration soon after Mr. Frost had been invited away from his farm. And the Principal of Pinkerton had found that he was wrong in assuming that this teacher was hardly the man to address a farmers’ institute. Regardless of the effort it was to overcome his nervousness before a crowd, Mr. Frost had showed that he had something to say, and could say it well. He took a sly pleasure in surprising people who automatically underrated him because he didn’t have a college degree.

“In early spring Mr. Frost, the principal of the Normal School, one of my fellow teachers in the high school and I went a little way north to a farm for a week-end. Our host and hostess seemed rather flashy and hard people, New Yorkers I think they were. The woman was particularly metallic and thick, like a successful vaudeville performer; and I was much impressed with the considerateness and attention with which Mr. Frost kept up a two-sided conversation with her. They agreed, I remember, on admiring the New York skyline from the harbor. We talked until late that night, and the next morning after breakfast we walked over the snow to a large maple sugar camp. The religious and other metaphorical use of the lamb has always, since that time, been affected by the memory of Mr. Frost’s waving his hand back and forth within an inch of the eyes of the lady’s cosset, and pointing out that it never batted its eyes. I was unaccountably downcast on the way back to Plymouth and mentioned my mood. Mr. Frost commented, ‘It’s well to have all kinds of feelings, for it’s all kinds of a world.’

“Not long after that I had to assume the duties of baseball coach, and Mr. Frost’s lifelong interest in baseball helped me. He often talked of players and teams, and once he taught me how to work the short throw to shortstop when there were runners on first and third, and so catch the man stealing home. He was interested in tennis, too, and taught me very clearly what he had recently learned about three different cuts to use in serving.

“I think his one time of attendance at church in Plymouth was so disturbing to his sensibilities that he had a religious motive for staying away.”

It is clear from the notes of these two friends that this was the crystallizing period in Robert Frost’s life. He became during it certain of what he knew as a youth and as a matter of fact a great deal of his published verse was written during these years. He had formulated his central article for his private _ars poetica_--to give an uncommon expression to what was common in experience--and he was not to deviate from that in his future course. By adhering to this, he was very soon after the year at Plymouth destined to be discovered and recognized by the literary public, but essentially the rest of his life has been a prolongation of the Derry-Plymouth phase. The enthusiasm of his friends, Sidney Cox and John Bartlett, when multiplied to the enthusiasms of critics, poets and readers at large did not, that is to say, alter his habits or his aims or his quality. He has continued to do a little farming, some teaching and some writing just as he did between 1900 and 1912.

VI. “PAN WITH US”

_“Pan came out of the woods one day.”_

It is difficult to overestimate the aridity of the minds and feelings of poetry editors in the United States during those years when Robert Frost was writing and teaching and farming in New Hampshire. Not by his own wish did he remain practically unpublished, for once a year at least he made up packets of his verses and sent them to the editors of _Scribner’s_, _Century_, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and one or two others. Almost uniformly they came back: the few exceptions were the _Forum_ and _Youth’s Companion_ whose editor, Mark de Wolfe Howe, stretched a point or two of his editorial policy to include them. But the market for poetry was extremely limited, and the story of the insensibility of those who ruled the market has already been sufficiently told. Yet looking back, one still is mildly surprised that their taste did not welcome Robert Frost’s work. It _was_ fresh work, but yet not too far beyond their canons, not like the verses of Ezra Pound, for instance, who had impetuously denounced Hamilton Wright Mabie and voyaged to Spain.

Certainly, Frost was not a persistent and resourceful salesman for his poems, and perhaps the fault lay partly in him for his lateness in publication.

No wonder poets sometimes have to _seem_ So much more business-like than business men. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

Occasionally, he admits, he looked at the poetry printed in the magazines, felt distaste for its mediocrity and lack of tang, and felt likewise jealousy and envy of the author because after all he had been published. Yet his own pride prevented him from making any energetic plan for breaking through the editorial attitude toward his scripts.

After the year at Plymouth he concluded that it was to be “now or never” with him so far as the Muse was concerned. The ten year conditions on his farm had elapsed and he succeeded in selling it. Now he would set aside the next three or four years for complete devotion to poetry. But where?

John Bartlett was getting on well at Vancouver, B. C., and in September, 1912, planned to marry a Pinkerton girl out there. Frost hesitated between going to Vancouver and going to England, and corresponded with his former student on the problem. But in August he wrote that it was to be England for him. A letter about the cost of living from the British Consul in New York and certain talk in the family about living under a thatched roof had decided the matter: he would spend his free time abroad. So he sailed in September, 1912, and, as has been noted before, Harriet Monroe’s _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_ first appeared in October, 1912. Frost left his country just one month before the event which is usually taken as the beginning of a new, more enlivened and more extensive interest in contemporary American verse, and he stepped into England during a particularly hopeful and exciting season in the arts.

England just before the war of 1914-1918 was full of idealistic movements and a new era seemed about to open its buds. There was an upper crust of writers--Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Conrad, Hudson, Carpenter, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Cunninghame Grahame, Max Beerbohm--that was distinguished enough or respected enough to make it worth while to continue their work or to resist it or to try to supplant them. There were coming up such figures as D. H. Lawrence, Compton Mackenzie, and Gilbert Cannan for Henry James to cast a keenly appraising eye upon. There were at least two brilliantly edited reviews--Ford Madox Hueffer’s (now Ford) _English Review_ and A. R. Orage’s _The New Age_--which sought for new work and instigated new literary developments. There were the Irishmen across their Channel working up a little re-birth on their own. Ezra Pound was everywhere, fighting, initiating, infusing fresh vitality into poetry and poetry discussions. Wyndham Lewis was breaking bonds in painting and prose. Imagism and vorticism, the Bloomsbury groupings and the reactionary schools, all made the scene stirring and great things were expected. Then the war crashed in and the fragility of all the movements became sooner or later apparent. But that was two years after Frost arrived.

At first Frost was not aware of this metropolitan ferment. He repaired to _T. P.’s Weekly_ which conducted a department of country walks and inquired for quiet places in the countryside where he wished to live. The conductor of this department was an ex-policeman (and therefore as becomes a London “bobbie” intelligent in giving directions) and Frost took a fancy to him. On his advice he settled in the little suburban town of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.

One night Frost sat before his fire spreading out before him his poems and reading them over. As was his custom, a certain number were discarded. Of those that remained he pondered on making a selection that might form some sort of coherent book. He shuffled through them, arranged and rearranged, and gradually _A Boy’s Will_ came to birth. He had a book of manuscript but no publisher in mind.

In this pass he recalled his friend, the ex-policeman, and determined to ask his advice on a publisher for poetry! The former policeman was equal to the call. He suggested Elkin Matthews, but said that as a rule he required subsidized manuscripts. Frost objected to that, and his counsellor brought up the name of David Nutt. This appealed to Frost: he remembered that David Nutt had been Henley’s publisher: and thither he went one afternoon only to be told that he could not see David Nutt that day, but if he called the next day he would be able to do so. Coming at the time directed, he was ushered into a private office for an interview with a lady in dark clothes who informed him she would speak for David Nutt. Later he learned that David Nutt had been deceased for several years, and the lady was his widow, but at this time the whole proceeding impressed him as mysterious.

Three days afterward he received a letter stating that the firm of David Nutt would publish _A Boy’s Will_. The long period of twenty years of frustrated publication was almost closed, and the first drops of the exhilaration England was to give him had touched his lips.

More were to follow presently. Walking in London one day he noticed that Harold Munro’s Poetry Book Shop was opening its doors that very evening with a reception and reading. Although uninvited, he walked in with the crowd that night and sat on the stairs during the festivities. A man sitting below remarked, “I see by your shoes you are an American,” and introduced himself as F. S. Flint. Frost confided to him his engagement in writing poetry, and Flint asked if he knew his countryman, Ezra Pound. Frost had never heard of Pound and was promptly cautioned not to betray that fact to Pound himself.

Flint must have spoken to Pound about the new arrival, for shortly there came to Frost’s suburban home a post card bearing an address, the name of Ezra Pound, and beneath it: “At home sometimes.”

Some months later Frost called at Pound’s address and happened to find him at home. Piqued at first because Frost had been so leisurely in responding to his card, Pound soon warmed to his rugged caller with the boyish face and when he learned that possibly proof sheets of _A Boy’s Will_ might now be secured at David Nutt’s he insisted on going at once to the office. The proof sheets were ready, and the pair returned to Pound’s studio. Frost was directed to occupy himself in some way while Pound turned immediately to reading the poems. Satisfied that here was sound poetry, Pound then dismissed his guest with the remark that he had a review to write, and in a short time the first salutation to _A Boy’s Will_ appeared in type over the distinguished name of Ezra Pound.

_A Boy’s Will_ was received quickly and warmly by the literary press: the general tenor can be felt from a quotation from the notice in the _Academy_. It said: “We have read every line with the amazement and delight which are too seldom evoked by books of modern verse.” The poetry-reading public was lured.

Pound had a new “find” and he began to take Frost here and there to luncheons, studios and parties, and among the most delightful of the last were the Tuesday evenings at T. E. Hulme’s. Frost was pleased and interested, but did not change his stripe.

All the time his capital was decreasing, for although he was now a “success”[4] in a moderate way, he never succeeded in winning any royalty statements from David Nutt. _A Boy’s Will_ had appeared in 1913 and the following year the same firm gladly brought out _North of Boston_ which was greeted by the _Times Literary Supplement_ with the statement that “poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind breathes upon smoldering embers,” and there were more buyers. But only a success of estimation for Frost. To eke out his capital, he fell back upon farming and in the winter of 1914 leased a small farm called Little Iddens near Leadbury in Gloucestershire. His near neighbors were Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie.

Gibson enjoyed joshing Frost about America. It appeared that Gibson’s poetry aroused various people in America to write him letters of gratitude that sometimes began, “Dear Bro.,” and proceeded to give other signs in orthography and grammar of semi-literacy and raw taste. Frost himself now received his first letter from an American admirer. It was on stationery of high quality from a farm in Stowe, Vermont, called Four Winds Farm. The neat script merely informed him that the writer and her mother had enjoyed his poetry, and the signature was that of a lady named Holt. It was a publisher’s wife, though Frost did not suspect the fact. But the letter did enable him to return triumphantly Gibson’s joshing: he displayed it to him as an example of the way farmer’s wives wrote in America as well as evidence of the kind of people who read _his_ books.

Gibson has commemorated this delightful time in a poem entitled _The Golden Room_ printed some time ago in the _Atlantic Monthly_, and for the sake of the picture the first two stanzas may well be quoted here.

Do you remember the still summer evening When in the cosy cream-washed living-room Of the Old Nailshop we all talked and laughed-- Our neighbors from the Gallows, Catherine And Lascelles Abercrombie; Rupert Brooke; Elinor and Robert Frost, living awhile At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight We talked and laughed, but for the most part listened While Robert Frost kept on and on and on In his slow New England fashion for our delight, Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips, And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes.

We sat there in the lamplight while the day Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers Called over the low meadows till the owls Answered them from the elms; we sat and talked-- Now a quick flash from Abercrombie, now A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas, Now a clear, laughing word from Brooke, and then Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy That had the body and tang of good draught-cider And poured as clear a stream.

Meanwhile the war was increasing its diabolical momentum and the arts in England were going under. Poets went to the front instead of to studios and review offices, and among them was Edward Thomas with whom Frost formed his most congenial friendship on English soil. Thomas had been a critic and author of several biographical studies and travel books. Frost fanned the critic’s hitherto latent talent for writing poetry to a quiet blaze and the outcome was the volume, _Poems_, by Thomas in 1917, a volume that was gratefully dedicated to Robert Frost. Thomas was killed on Easter Monday in 1917 and Frost has commemorated both the poetry and his friend.

You went to meet the shell’s embrace of fire On Vimy Ridge; and when you fell that day The war seemed over more for you than me, But now for me than you--the other way.

Two years before the death of Thomas, in March of 1915, Frost had left England for America, bringing with him the fifteen year old son of his friend.

He had gone through years of non-recognition: in a foreign land he had been exhilarated with a modest success and the sympathetic praise of fellow poets: all had been engulfed in the horror and sadness of the greatest war in our history: and now Frost faced again the uncertainties of America. There was a surprise awaiting him.

VII. “INTO MY OWN”

Passing down a side street in New York as he came away from the steamer which had brought him back from England, Robert Frost’s eyes saw propped on a stand a magazine he had never heard of. From curiosity he purchased it at once: it was called _The New Republic_. Inside he came upon a page appreciation of _North of Boston_ which was signed by Amy Lowell. But more arresting still, the book appeared to be published by Henry Holt and Co. An American publisher! He did not know he had one. This seemed a good omen, and the following day Frost called on the Holt company.

Yes, they had imported the sheets for three hundred bound copies from David Nutt, and this small order had been very quickly exhausted. Now they would like to publish _North of Boston_ and _A Boy’s Will_ themselves, but David Nutt had reserved all rights. It soon appeared, though, that David Nutt had violated the agreement, and Henry Holt won the legal right to bring out Frost’s books in America. In quick succession they published _North of Boston_ and _A Boy’s Will_ within that year, 1915.

Rapid sales followed. _North of Boston_ eventually ran around twenty thousand copies, and the other books have done well, considering the market for poetry, though not nearly so well as the first.[5] The critics were exuberant: among them was Edward Garnett who contributed an influential article on Frost, since included in _Friday Nights_, to the _Atlantic Monthly_. Furthermore, public taste for a time appeared to have crystallized about such work as Frost’s. The hour was right, for there was ripening a new interest in contemporary American verse: the critics were enthusiastic: and the character of Frost’s writing, at once novel and conservative, pleased all camps. A great many people agreed with Edward Garnett’s opinions: “It seemed to me that this poet was destined to take a permanent place in American literature.... Surely a genuine New England voice, whatever be its literary debt to old-world English ancestry.”

Recognition, long deferred, now heaped itself upon the quiet poet. A chapter in Amy Lowell’s _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_ was given over to him and his work, Louis Untermeyer wrote a chapter on his verse in _A New Era in American Poetry_, Llewellyn Jones did likewise in _First Impressions_, Clement Wood in _Poets of America_, and it very shortly came to pass that no survey of the poetry of our decades was complete without a considerable discussion of this author. Waldo Frank in _Our America_ introduced his passage on Frost by saying: “The poetry of Frost is of that excellent sort which it is hard to catalogue. It is lyrical. It is dramatic, since his books are--as he says--‘of people.’ It is philosophic, since the tales he tells trace conscious lines about the boundaries of life. Fully, it is poetry--and of New England.”

Frost found himself an advisory board member of the _Seven Arts_ in 1916 and 1917, that gallant venture in behalf of our national arts directed by Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks and James Oppenheim. And in the file of the _Seven Arts_ there rests _The Way Out_, the one published play by Frost. Truly, he had scarcely tapped and all the doors of literary America suddenly opened to him.