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ROBERT FROST IN CONTEXT

Th is new critical volume off ers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost’s life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet’s career is treated: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public fi g-ure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and diffi cult relation to religion; his investments, as thinker and writer, in politics and war; the way he dealt with problems of mental illness that beset his sister and two of his children; and, fi nally, the complex geopolitical contexts that inform some of his best poetry. Contributors include a number of infl uential scholars of Frost, but also such distinguished poets as Paul Muldoon, Dana Gioia, Mark Scott, and Jay Parini. Essays eschew jargon and employ highly readable prose, off ering scholars, students, and general readers of Frost a broadly accessible reference and guide.

MARK RICHARDSON is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is the author of Th e Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997); coeditor, with Richard Poirier, of Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995); and editor of Th e Collected Prose of Robert Frost (2007). He is also a coeditor of Th e Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920 (2014), the fi rst volume of a new, comprehensive four-volume edition of the letters.

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ROBERT FROST IN CONTEXT

MARK RICHARDSON Doshisha University

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pages cm. – (Literature in Context) Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-107-02288-1 (hardback) 1. Frost, Robert, 1874–1963 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Richardson, Mark,

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In the Clearing , Th e Secret Sits, Once by the Pacifi c, Bereft, Two Tramps in Mud Time, Th e Birthplace, Afterfl akes, Design, Directive, On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep, Clear and Colder, Voice Ways, A Mood Apart, A Masque of Reason , Build Soil, All Revelation, Provide, Provide, Th e Cow in Apple Time, Not To Keep, To E.T., U.S. 1946 King’s X, Our Hold on the Planet, A Leaf-Treader, I Could Give All to Time, Th e Flower Boat, From Iron: Tools and Weapons, Desert Places, Th e Bear, Skeptic, Take Something Like a Star, Accidentally on Purpose, New Hampshire, Th e Runaway from Th e Poetry of Robert Frost , edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1916, 1923, 1928, 1947, 1949, 1962, 1968, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Copyright © 1934, 1936, 1940, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1951, 1956, 1960, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1947, 1964, 1970, 1973, 1975, 1977 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Copyright © 1988 by Alfred Edwards. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from the essay “Th e Figure a Poem Makes” from the book Th e Selected Prose of Robert Frost , edited by Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1939, 1967 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts and defi nitions from the brochure Robert Frost: Th e Man and His Work. Copyright © 1920–1930 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from Th e Selected Letters of Robert Frost , edited by Lawrance Th ompson. Copyright © 1964 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from Th e Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer , edited by Louis Untermeyer. Copyright © 1963 by Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Frost’s essay on Amy Lowell is reprinted courtesy of the Estate of Robert Lee Frost, as are extracts from the poet’s unpublished letters. Chapter 1 is adapted from an essay originally published in Raritan ; Chapter 7 appeared fi rst in Virginia Quarterly Review .






v

Contents

Contributors page ix Editor’s Preface by Mark Richardson xvii Abbreviations xxiii

Part I Stylistic Contexts

1. Th e Fate of the Frost Speaker 3 Margery Sabin

2. Th e Figure Frost’s Prose Makes 14 Joseph M. Th omas and Mark Richardson

3. Robert Frost and Sports: Pitching into Poetry 29 Alec Marsh

4. Robert Frost as a Man of Letters 38 Robert Faggen

Part I I L iterary–Historical Contexts

5. Robert Frost’s Design 49 Paul Muldoon

6. Th e Lay of the Land in Frost’s Steeple Bush 62 Jay Parini

7. Robert Frost and the Modern Narrative Poem 72 Dana Gioia

8. Robert Frost and Modernism 85 John Xiros Cooper






Contentsvi

9. Frost and Modern Drama 92 Yasuko Shiojiri

10. Frost and the Masque Tradition 99 David Chandler

11. Frost and Anthologies 107 Mark Scott

12. “Measuring Myself against all Creation”: Robert Frost and Pastoral 114 Robert Bernard Hass

13. From Th omas Aquinas to Th e Voyage of the Beagle : Frost’s Reading 123 David Tutein

Part I I I Philosophical and Religious Contexts

14. Robert Frost and Pragmatism 135 Jonathan Levin

15. Frost and the Provocation of Religion 142 James Barszcz

16. Frost and the Bible 151 Robert Faggen

Part IV Political and Historical Contexts

17. Frost’s Political Identity 163 Steven Gould Axelrod

18. Frost and the Great Depression 171 David Evans

19. Th e Post-Reconstruction Frost 180 Mark Richardson

20. Robert Frost and the First World War 190 Tim Kendall

21. Robert Frost and the Second World War 198 Grzegorz Kosc






Contents vii

22. Frost and the Cold War 207 Steven Gould Axelrod

Part V Geopolitical Contexts

23. “What Became of New England?”: Frost and Rural Sociology 217 Donald G. Sheehy

24. Figures of the Tourist and Guide in Frost 225 Marit MacArthur

25. Robert Frost and a “Native America” 233 Eric Anderson

26. Reading Robert Frost Environmentally: Contexts Th en and Now 241 Th omas Bailey

Part VI B iographical Contexts

27. Frost and the Problem of Biography 253 William Pritchard

28. Th e Derry Years of Robert Frost 263 Lesley Lee Francis

29. All the Diff erence: Robert Frost in England, 1912–1915 271 Sean Street

Part VI I Vocational Contexts

30. Frost and Education 281 Mark Scott

31. Frost and the Institutionalization of Poetry 288 Mark Richardson

32. Th e Artifactual Frost: Th e Book Trade, Collectors, and Fine Printing 297 Pat Alger

33. Robert Frost in the Magazines 307 Jonathan N. Barron






Contentsviii

34. Meet the Press: Robert Frost as Pundit 317 Lisa Seale

35. Robert Frost and the Public Performance of Poetry 324 Tyler Hoff man

Part VI I I Scientific and Psychiatric Contexts

36. Frost and Astronomy 333 Henry Atmore

37. Frost and “Th e Future of Man” 343 Henry Atmore

38. “Everybody’s Sanity”: Metaphor and Mental Health in Frost 351 Donald G. Sheehy

Part IX Frost and Gender

39. Education by Poetry: Robert Frost, Women, and Children 369 Karen L. Kilcup

40. Robert Frost, Heroic Normativity, and the Sexual Politics of Form 380 Paul Morrison

Further Reading 389 Index 395






ix

Contributors

PAT ALGER , an award-winning songwriter and recording artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, is among the most distinguished private collec-tors of Frost’s manuscripts and books in the United States. He is also the author of an overview of Frost’s relationship with the woodcut artist J. J. Lankes, published by the Friends of the Amherst College Library, which houses one of the largest archives of Frost’s literary manuscripts and books. He was recently inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

ERIC ANDERSON , Associate Professor of English, George Mason University, is the author of American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (1999) and numerous articles in Native American studies. He is currently president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

HENRY ATMORE , Associate Professor of English at Kobe University for Foreign Studies, took his doctorate in the History of Science at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of a number of articles in such journals as Th e Reader’s Guide to the History of Science , Th e British Journal for the History of Science , Th e Journal of Victorian Culture , and College Hill Review .

STEVEN GOULD AXELROD is Professor of English at University of California, Riverside, and the author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art (1978) and Sylvia Plath: Th e Wound and the Cure of Words (1990), as well as a num-ber of essays on American writers.

THOMAS BAILEY recently retired from a forty-eight-year teaching career. He has published widely and has been active in the environmental move-ment, having served for many years as director of the Environmental Studies Program at Western Michigan University.






Contributorsx

JONATHAN N. BARRON is Associate Professor of English at Southern Mississippi University, where he edits Th e Robert Frost Review . Barron’s third book, New Formalist Poets , is coedited with Bruce Meyer of the University of Toronto (volume 282 in the Dictionary of Literary Biography series). His other books include: Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost (2000), coedited with Earl Wilcox of Winthrop University, and Jewish American Poetry (2000), coedited with Eric Selinger of DePaul University. He has published numerous essays on American poets and poetry, including several for Scribner’s American Writers series. His most recent essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Th e Great Gatsby is forthcoming in the MLA Approaches to Teaching Series.

JAMES BARSZCZ , editor in chief of College Hill Review , has taught litera-ture and composition at Rutgers University and the William Paterson College of New Jersey. He works in the telecommunications industry and pursues literary studies as an independent scholar.

DAVID CHANDLER (D.Phil., Oxford University) is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto. He has published extensively on the lit-erature and culture of the British Romantic period, though most of his recent work has been on opera and musical theatre, including the edited volume Americans on Italo Montemezzi (2013).

JOHN XIROS COOPER is a Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He has published fi ve books on T. S. Eliot, modernism, and the early twentieth-century British novel. He has just completed a new book on modernism and has begun research for a new biography of T. S. Eliot. He is also working on a translation of the Maximes of the seventeenth-century French writer La Rochefoucauld.

DAVID EVANS is Associate Professor of English at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada. He is the author of “Alien Corn: Th e War of the Worlds, Independence Day, and the Limits of the Global Imagination,” Dalhousie Review (2001); “Guiding Metaphors: the Path from William James to Robert Frost,” Arizona Quarterly (2000); “Teaching Faulkner Pragmatically,” in Teaching Faulkner: Approaches and Contexts, Methods and Strategies , ed. Stephen Hahn and Robert W. Hamblin (2000); “Taking the Place of Nature: ‘Th e Bear’ and the Incarnation of America,” in Faulkner and the Natural World , ed. Donald Kartiganer and Ann Abadie (1999). Professor Evans was also the recipient of a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities.






Contributors xi

His current work focuses on mid-twentieth-century literature. His William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition was published in 2008.

ROBERT FAGGEN is Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of Ken Kesey: An American Life (forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux); editor of Th e Notebooks of Robert Frost (2006); author of Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (1997) and of Th e Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost (2008); editor of Th e Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (2001) and Striving Towards Being: Th e Letters of Th omas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz (1997); author of the “Introduction” to the f ortieth anniversary edition of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (2002); and editor of the Selected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1997) and the Early Poems of Robert Frost (1998). He has interviewed Ken Kesey, Czeslaw Milosz, and Russell Banks for Th e Paris Review . He is also a coeditor of Th e Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920 (2014).

LESLEY LEE FRANCIS is the granddaughter of Robert Frost. Having retired from the professional staff of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in Washington, DC, she continues teaching and writing. Currently she lives in Arlington; her three daughters and six grandchildren live nearby. Dr. Francis received her A.B. degree from Radcliff e College and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages from Duke University. She became a professor of Spanish language, literature, and history at a number of colleges and universities and ran a sum-mer program in Spain. She has lectured and published extensively on her grandfather; her biographical study, Robert Frost: An Adventure in Poetry, 1900 – 1918 , is available in paperback.

DANA GIOIA , former head of the National Endowment of the Arts, has authored four distinguished volumes of poetry: Interrogations at Noon (2001) (winner of the 2002 American Book Award); Th e Gods of Winter (1991); Daily Horoscope (1986); and Pity the Beautiful (2012). He is also the author of a number of books of criticism, including, most recently, Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (2004). Gioia is now Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.

ROBERT BERNARD HASS , Associate Professor of English and Th eatre Arts at Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, is the author of Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Confl ict with Science (2002), named a Choice






Contributorsxii

Outstanding Academic Book in 2004. He is also the author of a volume of poetry, Counting Th under (2008).

TYLER HOFFMAN is Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University–Camden. He is author of Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (2001), Teaching with the Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005), and a number of articles on a wide range of American poets including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville, Frances E. W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Elizabeth Bishop, Gary Snyder, Th om Gunn, and contemporary “slam” poets. He is currently at work on a book about American “public poetry.”

TIM KENDALL , Professor of English at the University of Exeter, is author of Th e Art of Robert Frost (2012), Modern English War Poetry (2006), Paul Muldoon (1996), Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study (2001), and Strange Land: Poems (2005). He is an editor, with Peter McDonald, of Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (2004) and of Th e Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (2007).

KAREN L. KILCUP is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro and the author of the MLA Lowell Book Prize–nominated monograph Frost and the Feminine Literary Tradition (1998) and also of Fallen Forests: Emotion, Embodiment, and Ethics in American Women’s Environmental Writing, 1781–1924 (2013). She has also edited Native American Women’s Writing, c. 1800 – 1924: An Anthology (2000), Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: A Critical Reader (1998), and Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers: An Anthology (1997). Currently she is president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.

GRZEGORZ KOSC , Associate Professor, University of Lodz, Department of American Literature and Culture, Lodz, Poland, is the author of Robert Lowell: Uncomfortable Epigone of the Grands Ma î tres (2005) (nominated for the American Studies Network Book Prize, EAAS). He was also a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Literature, from August 2008 to May 2009 and at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, he held a Woodward and Bernstein Fellowship/Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (University of Austin, Texas, 2006–2007).

JONATHAN LEVIN , Provost at the University of Mary Washington, is the author of Th e Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American






Contributors xiii

Literary Modernism (1999) and of articles in such journals as the Yearbook of Comparative Literature and American Literary History . He taught literature at Columbia University, Fordham University, and SUNY-Purchase, and he served for fi ve years as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Drew University.

MARIT MACARTHUR , Associate Professor of English at California State University–Bakersfi eld, is the author of Th e American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop and Ashbery: Th e House Abandoned (2008) and essays and reviews on American poetry in such journals as PMLA , Texas Studies of Literature and Language , Jacket2 , Th e Robert Frost Review , Th e Yale Review , Contemporary Poetry Review , Modern Language Studies , Poetry International , and Poetry Criticism .

ALEC MARSH , Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, is the author of Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jeff erson (1998), winner of the Ezra Pound Award (1999) and the Elizabeth Agee Prize for best manuscript in American Literature (1998). Professor Marsh is currently at work on a manuscript called “Modernist Mentalities: Habits of Interpretation and American Poetry” and is also head of Th e Homer Pound Project, editing and introducing Homer Pound’s memoirs.

PAUL MORRISON is Professor of English at Brandeis University. His books include Th e Explanation of Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity (2001) and Th e Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man (1996). His essays and reviews have appeared in Representations , Genders , Modernist Studies , GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies , Th e Wallace Stevens Journal , the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature , and other journals.

PAUL MULDOON has published more than two dozen volumes of poetry and has won both the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. From 1999 to 2004, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry. Now at Princeton University, he holds the Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professorship in the Humanities and chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. Muldoon is currently poetry editor at Th e New Yorker .

JAY PARINI is D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing and the author of more than a dozen books, including volumes of poetry, novels, and works of literary criticism and biography. Among the last are Robert Frost: A Life (1999), Why Poetry Matters (2009), Promised Land: Th irteen Books Th at Changed America (2010), and One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (2004).






Contributorsxiv

WILLIAM PRITCHARD is Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College and the author of numerous books on American literature, including Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984), On Poets and Poetry (2009), Updike: America’s Man of Letters (2000), Lives of the Modern Poets (1997), English Papers: A Teaching Life (1995), Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life (1992), and Playing It by Ear: Literary Essays and Reviews (1994).

MARK RICHARDSON is Professor of English of Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. He is the author of Th e Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997); coeditor, with Richard Poirier, of Robert Frost: Poems, Prose, and Plays (1995); and editor of Th e Collected Prose of Robert Frost (2007). He is also a coeditor of Th e Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 (2014).

MARGERY SABIN is Lorraine Chiu Wang Professor of English and Codirector of the South Asia Studies program at Wellesley College. She is the author of Th e Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction (1987); English Romanticism and the French Tradition (1976); and Dissenters and Mavericks: Writings about India in English, 1760 – 2000 (2002). Her articles and reviews have appeared in such scholarly journals as Raritan Quarterly , Essays in Criticism , Journal of Comparative Literature , Philological Quarterly , and Prose Studies . She has been the recipient of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute (Radcliff e), the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

MARK SCOTT , Professor of English at Nara Women’s University, is the author of two volumes of poetry, Tactile Values (2000) and A Bedroom Occupation (2007, with a preface by Richard Howard). He has also pub-lished essays in literary criticism on Emerson, Frost, Bernard Berenson, and other writers.

LISA SEALE is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Aff airs and Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Colleges. During 2013–2014, she has an administrative position at Rose State College in Oklahoma. Her work on Robert Frost’s public lectures appears regularly in Th e Robert Frost Review and has also appeared in Th e New England Quarterly and Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost , edited by Earl J. Wilcox and Jonathan N. Barron (2000). She serves on the executive board of Th e Robert Frost Society, with a term as president in 2015.






Contributors xv

DONALD G. SHEEHY , Professor of English at Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, is a coeditor of Th e Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 (2014). He is the author of major essays on the poet in such journals as Th e New England Quarterly and American Literature ; he contributed to Th e Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost , and he edited the CD-ROM Robert Frost: Poems, Life, Legacy (1998). Currently, Professor Sheehy is also at work, with Robert Bernard Hass, on an oral history of Frost.

YASUKO SHIOJIRI is Professor Emeritus, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan, where she taught Shakespeare and modern drama. She is the author of Nature on the Verge of Her Confi ne: Experiencing King Lear (2010) and has published essays on Shakespeare and a wide variety of mod-ern dramatists, including Wilde, O’Neill, Williams, and Beckett. She is now working on a Japanese translation of Richard Gilman’s Making of Modern Drama , an acclaimed classic in the fi eld.

SEAN STREET , Professor of Radio and Director of the Centre for Broadcasting History Research at Bournemouth University, is the author of Th e Dymock Poets (1995), one of the most detailed accounts of the “Georgian Poets,” and editor of Two Plays by Rupert Brooke and Lascelles Abercrombie (2000), for which he also wrote the introduction.

JOSEPH M. THOMAS , Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, has taught at Rutgers, Sam Houston State University (Texas), and Pace University (New York). His scholarship has focused on nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century American writing, especially Emerson and the slave narrative, and on editorial theory and practice. He has served on the board or as a reviewer for academic associations and journals and was a longtime consultant for the Library of America (New York), a nonprofi t publishing venture. He received a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University.

DAVID TUTEIN , recently retired from the Department of English at Northeastern University (Boston) and is the author of Robert Frost’s Reading: An Annotated Bibliography (1997) and Joseph Conrad’s Reading: An Annotated Bibliography (1990).






xvii

Editor’s Preface

Robert Frost was nothing if not a man of parts, as generally able as he was variously engaged. “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling / To get adapted to my kind of fooling,” Frost wrote in his last volume, In the Clearing , published in 1962 in his eighty-eighth year (CPPP 478). Th e best readers of Frost have always known this. Th e present volume, I hope, will widen their circle, allowing for a better understanding of the poet in his many arenas of inquiry and endeavor.

We might speak of several distinct periods during which readers and lit-erary critics have sized Frost up. Th e fi rst, dating from 1913 to about 1922, was a period of uncommon (and uncommonly deliberate) innovation in English and American poetry. Frost’s reviewers regarded him as party to these innovations, particularly when his second volume, North of Boston , appeared in 1914. Ezra Pound championed the book. Edward Th omas saw its novelty at once. Frost seemed thoroughly “modern.” In fact, his affi liations with the so-called Georgian poets situated him such that – had the Great War not intervened – a “modernism” alternative to the one Th e Waste Land consolidated in 1922 might have emerged. Speculative literary history is worth no more than any other sort of speculative history. But let’s imagine what might have happened had the war not come. We might have seen emerge, in the late 1910s and early 1920s, an Anglo-American modernism to rival the conspicuously cosmopolitan “high-modernism” of Eliot and Pound. Th is alternative would have been colloquial in language. It would have been at ease with tradition and form but confi ned by nei-ther. It might have brought about a new kind of drama: short plays of one to three acts, plays of the sort Lascelles Abercrombie wrote, or of the sort Frost himself wrote (and contemplated writing) at about this time – for example, the startling one-act drama A Way Out (1917). Th at play held out the promise of more to come, as did the blank-verse dialogues of North of Boston that drew Abercrombie and Frost together in the fi rst place. (Only while with Abercrombie in Gloucestershire did Frost ever seriously speak






Editor’s Prefacexviii

of producing a book of “out and out plays” [CPPP 678]). It would have been a modernism pragmatic in philosophy, ironical, and wry in tone, with little to none of the portent and sense of cultural crisis Eliot and Pound dealt in, even before the war. It would have been a modernism relaxed enough in its moods and modes to avoid skipping from one -ism to another (Imagism, Vorticism, and so on) – a modernism that carried itself lightly but was nonetheless dark and deep. We might well have had another way out of the impasse to which the mid- and late-Victorian poets had brought English poetry. We might have had a live alternative to what Hugh Kenner later dubbed “Th e Pound Era” – all the more so had Frost succeeded in his quixotic aim, in 1915, to reconstitute in New England, with Edward Th omas and Abercrombie somehow a part of it, what they had had in Gloucestershire.

But the war came. Frost left England for America in February 1915, before German U-boats made the crossing too perilous. Rupert Brooke died on a hospital ship, and Edward Th omas in battle. Abercrombie worked in a munitions factory and labored, in the years after the war, largely in the groves of academe. Frost was left to bear the standard of a modern poetry that retained its connection to “the language really spoken by men,” as Wordsworth put it, but which was also more philosophically complex, and stranger in implication, than many of its readers supposed. By the time Frost published New Hampshire in 1923, winning the fi rst of his four Pulitzer Prizes – unmistakable signs of “popular” success – the borders had been drawn, and the contours of the second period I have in mind were now clear. Th ough thoroughly modern in his embrace of American pragmatism and Darwinism, Frost was no “modernist .” He would remain the poet who wrote, as he put it in a 1913 letter, “for all sorts and kinds” (CPPP 668), while Pound and Eliot wrote for an audi-ence that, though elite and small relative to Frost’s, assumed extraordin-ary infl uence, especially in the more rarifi ed precincts of the academy, in assigning value to “modern poetry.”

A draft of the preface Frost wrote for an English edition of his poetry in 1948 contains the following passage, much of it struck from the text even-tually published under the title “A Romantic Chasm”:

Suppose American to have got as far away from present-day English as present-day English has from Elizabethan or even Chaucerian. Th ere would be the compensation that my verse by being in American would be auto-matically raised to the high rank of having to be annotated. It might be advertised as with glossary. It might have to be translated from American into English. Anyway it would have to be studied. And to be studied is the






Editor’s Preface xix

great thing in life – to be studied at once and not wait for time to make us puzzling. It may be gathered that I would hardly refuse the crown of having to be studied myself if it was pressed on me. But ay me, I fondly dream. (CP 322)

Frost omitted the last six sentences. Perhaps they register too keenly his awareness of the condescension with which critics who favored the “high” modernists treated him. Th ose poets certainly had achieved “the high rank of having to be annotated.” No time had to pass for readers to fi nd them “puzzling,” and therefore obscure, and therefore darkly obscure, and there-fore immensely consequential. Relevant here also are remarks Frost made in the unedited transcript of the talk he would publish as “On Emerson” (1959), likewise omitted from the published text: “It is smart today, you know, to be reading St. John Perse, or T. S. Eliot, or me. No, leave me out. Not smart. ’Cause I’m just the country boy” (CP 322). Similar resent-ments, if they merit that term, turn up in a 1948 talk Frost edited for publication as “Speaking of Loyalty”: “I had a questionnaire the other day from an editor. He asked, ‘What in your opinion is the present state of middle-brow literature in America?’ Th at was new slang to me. I’d got behind a little bit, being off in the country. I hadn’t heard of ‘middle-brow’ before. What he meant to say was, ‘You old skeezix, what’s the pre-sent state of your own middle-brow stuff ?’ Th ere was something invidious, I am sure, in that” (CP 153).

But by the 1950s, Frost’s rustication was nearing its end (even if a great many readers would not realize it until the late 1970s). Frost always had more than merely a wide readership, and more than merely a middlebrow one ( A Further Range was a selection of the Book of the Month Club in 1936). 1 He had Randall Jarrell, whose essays on Frost in Poetry and the Age ( 1953 ) off ered a major (and prescient) reassessment, alert to all we now know of the poet’s immense complexity. Soon enough Frost also had Lionel Trilling who – in an address prepared for a celebration of the poet’s eighty-fi fth birthday in 1959 – said this:

I had best confess as simply as possible that for a long time I was alienated from Mr. Frost’s great canon of work by what I saw in it, that either itself seemed to denigrate the work of the critical intellect or that gave to its admirers the ground for making the denigration. It was but recently that my resistance, at the behest of better understanding, yielded to admiration. (LY 267)

Trilling then added that Frost was a “terrifying poet.” “Call him, if it makes things any easier, a tragic poet,” Trilling said, “but it might be useful every






Editor’s Prefacexx

now and then to come out from under the shelter of the literary word. Th e universe that [Frost] conceives is a terrifying universe. Read the poem called ‘Design’ and see if you sleep any better for it. Read ‘Neither Out Far Nor in Deep,’ which often seems to me the most perfect poem of our time, and see if you are warmed by anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived” (LY 267–78). Trilling then concluded with remarks that must have startled the man he celebrated:

I hope that you will not think it graceless of me that on your birthday I have undertaken to say that a great many of your admirers have not under-stood clearly what you have been doing in your life in poetry. I know that you will not say which of us is in the right of the matter. You will behave like the Secret whose conduct you have described:

We dance around in a ring and suppose But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

And I hope that you will not think it graceless of me that on your birthday I have made you out to be a poet who terrifi es. When I began to speak I called your birthday Sophoclean and that word has, I think, controlled eve-rything I have said about you. Like you, Sophocles lived to a great age, writ-ing well; and like you, Sophocles was the poet his people loved most. Surely they loved him in some part because he praised their common country. But I think that they loved him chiefl y because he made plain to them the ter-rifying things of human life: they felt, perhaps, that only a poet who could make plain the terrible things could possibly give them comfort. (YT 268)

Th e record shows that some of Frost’s middlebrow readers, to whom Trilling had forthrightly condescended (“a great many of your admirers have not understood clearly what you have been doing”), rankled at the epithet now applied to their cherished poet: “terrifying.” Nevertheless, Trilling made possible new ways of thinking about “modern” American poetry that placed Frost, if not at the center, then somewhere near it.

But the new dispensation did not take root at once, or in quite the form Trilling might have preferred. And this notwithstanding such antic-ipations of what would later come as Reuben Brower’s fi ne 1963 volume, Th e Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention . What distracted many readers from a fresh engagement with the poetry, and what tar-nished Frost’s reputation most as the next decade or two unfolded, were the fi rst two volumes of Lawrance Th ompson’s biography of the poet, published in 1966 and 1970 . Th ompson, an embittered one-time admirer of the poet, single-handedly created what has been called “the monster myth”: Frost, he averred and implied, had been a terrible father; a poet






Editor’s Preface xxi

obsessed with fame and reputation, willing to manipulate anyone to achieve the one and to protect the other; and a cold, jealous man, who harbored (yes) homicidal impulses. One need only consult the topical indices whereby Th ompson dismembered his subject: Anti-Intellectual, Baffl er-Teaser-Deceiver, Brute, Charlatan, Cowardice, Enemies, Escapist, Hate, Insanity, Murderer, Myth-Maker, Pretender, Rage, Retaliations, Revenge, Self-Centeredness, Vindictive, and so on. Now the poet, not the poetry, was terrifying. William Pritchard deals ably with the ensu-ing biographical controversies in the present volume. Another indispens-able treatment of them is Donald G. Sheehy’s “Th e Poet as Neurotic: Th e Offi cial Biography of Robert Frost,” published in 1986. 2 Suffi ce it to say that Th ompson’s three-volume assault on his subject, its value as a primary record notwithstanding, shifted debates about Frost from the poetry to the life.

But fortunately Frost did not need Lionel Trilling to make him intel-lectually respectable, and, ultimately, he emerged relatively unscathed by Th ompson’s eff ort to make him personally unrespectable. 3 For decades, through his presence in classrooms at Amherst College, Frost had, wit-tingly or not, been doing work that would produce his best readers, Reuben Brower, William Pritchard, and Richard Poirier among them. 4 Poirier opened up a new era in Frost studies with the publication, in 1977, of Robert Frost: Th e Work of Knowing . Th at book and the two that fol-lowed – Th e Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Refl ections and Pragmatism and Poetry – place Frost in the main line of a thoroughly “modern” American poetry. Th is poetry, though not “diffi cult” to the point of forth-rightly requiring annotation, is “dense” in a way, and to a degree, that rivals the work of any of Frost’s contemporaries (the terms quoted here are Poirier’s). To this list I would add Frank Lentricchia’s Modernist Quartet (1994); my own Th e Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997), at least insofar as it derived from a dissertation written under Poirier’s direction (I make no particular claim for it here); Robert Faggen’s Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin (1997), the fi rst major study to take the measure of Frost’s com-mitments to Darwin; Katherine Kearns’s Robert Frost: A Poetics of Appetite (1994), an unusual and provocative book, indebted to literary theory as that had developed in the 1970s and 1980s; Robert Bernard Hass’s Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Confl ict with Science (2002); Tyler Hoff man’s Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry (2001); and Tim Kendall’s Th e Art of Robert Frost (2012). We will certainly never speak of the fi rst half of the twentieth century as Th e Frost Era. But few in the academy still think of it as Th e Pound Era, while Eliot’s peculiar infl uence, from 1922 down






Editor’s Prefacexxii

through the 1960s, has come to seem a thing more institutional in force than defi nitive in character.

Now we enter upon yet another era, not merely in Frost studies but in the study of “modern” American poetry generally, occasioned by the pub-lication of new and long-overdue editions of Frost’s writings by Harvard University Press. Th e Notebooks of Robert Frost appeared in 2006 , bringing to light hundreds of pages of material never before published. Th e Collected Prose of Robert Frost followed in 2007 . Underway now is the fi rst compre-hensive edition of the poet’s letters, scheduled for release in four volumes, the fi rst of which appeared in 2014. Th is edition will more than treble the number of available letters. And it will allow (among many other things) for a better assessment – an assessment from the vantage point of a poet no longer consigned to middlebrow-dom or to a Lawrance Th ompsonian Purgatory – of precisely the developments leading to the consolidation of a “high modernism” that, from 1922 until the 1970s, largely excluded Frost from its syllabus. Should Robert Frost in Context – appearing more or less coincident with Volume 1 of the letters, and in the wake of the Notebooks and the Collected Prose – spark off its own novelties in responses to the poet, my hopes for it will have been answered.

Notes

1 For a detailed treatment of the role the Book of the Month Club played in American literary culture, see Joan Shelley Rubin, Th e Making of Middlebrow Culture (Charlottesville: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).

2 American Literature 58.3 (October 1986): 393–410. 3 It took some thirty years to undo the damage Th ompson wrought, but the

job has been ably undertaken by (in addition to Poirier and Pritchard) Stanley Burnshaw, Donald G. Sheehy, Lesley Lee Francis, John Evangelist Walsh, and Jay Parini. However, I should note here that the “monster myth” still persists outside the circle of those well acquainted with the poet.

4 See Brower , Th e Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press , 1951 ) and Th e Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intentions (Oxford University Press, 1963); Poirier and Brower , eds., In Defense of Reading: A Reader’s Approach to Literary Criticism (New York: Dutton , 1962 ) ; and Pritchard , Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (Oxford: Oxford University Press , 1984 ) . See also Margery’s Sabin’s essay in the present volume.






xxiii

Abbreviations

References to works listed here are given throughout the volume as abbreviations followed by page number.

CP Collected Prose of Robert Frost . Mark Richardson, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

CPPP Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose and Plays . Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, eds. New York: Library of America, 1995.

EY Th ompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: Th e Early Years: 1874 – 1915 . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966.

FL Grade, Arnold, ed. Th e Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost . Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972.

INT Latham, Edward Connery, ed. Interviews with Robert Frost . New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

LRF Sheehy, Donald, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen, eds. Th e Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I: 1886–1920 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

LY Th ompson, Lawrance, and R. H. Winnick. Robert Frost: Th e Later Years: 1938 – 1963 . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1976.

NB Th e Notebooks of Robert Frost . Robert Faggen, ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

RFJB Anderson, Margaret Bartlett. Robert Frost and John Bartlett: Th e Record of a Friendship . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963.

RFLU Untermeyer, Louis. Th e Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963 .

RFSC Evans, William R., ed. Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship . Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1981.






Abbreviationsxxiv

SL Th ompson, Lawrance. Th e Selected Letters of Robert Frost . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964.

YT Th ompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: Th e Years of Triumph: 1915 – 1938 . New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970.






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