Robert FrostEssay Preview: Robert FrostReport this essayRobert Lee Frost, b. San Francisco, Mar. 26, 1874, d. Boston, Jan. 29, 1963, was one of Americas leading 20th-century poets and a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. An essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England, Frost wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional–he often said, in a dig at archrival Carl Sandburg, that he would as soon play tennis without a net as write free verse–he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter and in the poetic use of the vocabulary and inflections of everyday speech. His poetry is thus both traditional and experimental, regional and universal.
After his fathers death in 1885, when young Frost was 11, the family left California and settled in Massachusetts. Frost attended high school in that state, entered Dartmouth College, but remained less than one semester. Returning to Massachusetts, he taughtschool and worked in a mill and as a newspaper reporter. In 1894 he sold “My Butterfly: An Elegy” to The Independent, a New York literary journal. A year later he married Elinor White, with whom he had shared valedictorian honors at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. From 1897 to 1899 he attended Harvard College as a special student but left without a degree. Over the next ten years he wrote (but rarely published) poems, operated a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (purchased for him by his paternal grandfather), and supplemented his income by teaching at Derrys Pinkerton Academy.
In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boys Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frosts primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frosts transatlantic reputation.
As part of his determined efforts on his own behalf, Frost had called on several prominent literary figures soon after his arrival in England. One of these was Ezra POUND, who wrote the first American review of Frosts verse for Harriet Munroes Poetry magazine. (Though he disliked Pound, Frost was later instrumental in obtaining Pounds release from long confinement in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital.) Frost was more favorably impressed and more lastingly influenced by the so-called Georgian poets Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert BROOKE, and T. E. Hulme, whose rural subjects and style were more in keeping with his own. While living near the Georgians in Gloucestershire, Frost became especially close to a brooding Welshman named Edward Thomas, whom he urged to turn from prose to poetry. Thomas did so, dedicating his first and only volume of verse to Frost before his death in World War I.
[Footnote: “On the first page, on the corner of the right hand corner, appears the inscription: ‘And the whole of my time in his house was spent in writing some of your poems’. The other pages, written by a friend of Frost’s, do not show where Frost became involved as a writer.[8] The section of the story that appears to mark Frost’s visit to his grave reads: ‘When I was at war with the Germans I wrote a story about him.’. Frost himself had nothing to say about it until recently, when his letters from Britain, England, and France appeared in a few other books. And yet there was not much evidence of Frost’s involvement in the English literary movement before and since his arrival in the United States, particularly in the early nineteenth century. In his new book, Frost and His Friends, published in March, 1915, William Foster states: “William Frost was well known;[9] his name was familiar among the writers of such works as I wrote about, and he was probably among the best writers of the year. To any other person he would have been a small boy.” This is consistent with the accounts of the “Father of the English Poets,” E. E. Hulme, with whom Frederick Frost wrote an autobiography in 1936.[10]
One of Frost’s key interests in the early twentieth century was, in many respects, the American poet of that time, J. H. BISHOLM, who flourished with Frost. Bisholm’s own first poem The Great Poets, the first collection of the nineteenth-century poems, was published in New York in 1910. It was Frost’s last poem before being published, in 1928, from the French poet Jean-Yves Marat’s new memoir. The poem was first published in 1939, and it was one of only three poems which included Bisholm’s original name and appeared for the first time in 1927 under the title The Great Poets. In 1925, he and his mother, Jeanne, published The Wretched of the Earth. The poem of course included the poem FEARLESS LIVES WITHOUT DREAM. The book itself was the first of its kind and was a long-awaited success.
In the 1930s, one of Bisholm’s letters to Frost appears to have come from J. BISHOLM, then on his way to New York from London. (He was a journalist who worked for a London-based publishing house, which had come under the influence of anti-Semitic organizations, especially the American Communist Party.) Bisholm’s letters to Frost, dated July 5, 1941, tell of an emotional discussion with Frederick Frost in which they discuss the recent persecution of Jews who were working for Frederick Frost in “Germany.” From the outset of the conversation, Bisholm says, there appears to be some concern from Frost about the plight of Jews who were persecuted in Germany. The writer of this letter “exposes to the world a kind of anti-Semitic hostility which would destroy the country, but which never quite destroys itself.”[11]
With Frost in New York Frost spent an increasingly more active period in the American literature. He began an American work in 1947 named, “An American Biography,” and the book came out in 1954. Frost had published his other autobiographical biography, Poems from the Wilderness, in 1948. The book ended in a September 1956 incident on the
The Frosts sailed for the United States in February 1915 and landed in New York City two days after the U.S. publication of North of Boston (the first of his books to be published in America). Sales of that book and of A Boys Will enabled Frost to buy a farm in Franconia, N.H.; to place new poems in literary periodicals and publish a third book, Mountain Interval (1916); and to embark on a long career of writing, teaching,