Chapter I: Part 1

THE MURRAY HILL BIOGRAPHIES

ROBERT FROST

Robert Frost]

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

COPYRIGHT, 1927,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

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.

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead:
Save only me
(Nor is it sad to thee!)
There is none left to mourn thee in the fields.

The tentative submission of _My Butterfly_ to the _Independent_ had brought a prompt note of acceptance and a check for fifteen dollars. It happened that William Hays Ward, the editor, was a devout student of Sidney Lanier, a fact that explains his liking for the musical dexterity of this poem, but though he printed some of the subsequent poems Frost mailed him, he never liked another as well. They were not in the Lanier vein, and that was where a young poet should be working. But Frost was obdurate then as now in these concerns, and Ward gave him up.

So at seventeen Robert Frost was looking very much like the Frost of today. He was dipping into literature apparently without system but really reading for his own purposes as a nascent poet. He was assimilating New England and coming close to an essence of its oldest settlers in a girl who was to prove an ideal helpmate through the years of unrecognition that lay ahead. He was displaying literary talent well above the merely good for those of his years. And he was showing a certain “set” character and pertinacity in finding out his own direction in poetry. William Hays Ward tried to divert him and failed. Twenty odd years later in London Ezra Pound at once recognized this “set-ness” and did not try to instigate any changes.

IV. “THE ROAD NOT TAKEN”

From 1892 to 1900 life offered Robert Frost a variety of prospective roads to travel. He refused them all after short reflection and continued to be drawn toward the road he had already peered at as a youth in high school. It was the road on which he should have Love and Poetry as presiding deities.

At the age of twenty he married Elinor White. Her father was a retired Universalist clergyman and she had attended a Universalist college, St. Lawrence University. But in deference to the faith of Robert Frost’s mother, they were married by a Swedenborgian minister.

Robert, too, had been away to college in 1892. It was Dartmouth: he went at his grandfather’s behest: and he stayed only a few months. Interests in him were beginning to ripen and somehow the college did not touch these interests. That was all, and quietly he withdrew to become for a time a bobbin boy in a Lawrence mill.

But he had no ambition to work up in a mill. That, like college, was a road not taken. In his pocket he carried a volume of Shakespeare which he read during rest intervals in the mill.

Somewhat restless, undecided and drifting those days were for him, and perhaps they are best symbolized by a brief tramping tour which he made down South.

His mother was taking pupils in her little school in Lawrence and Robert instructed there for a while in Latin. Previously he had had a spell of making shoes. Finally, he was the reporter-editor of the Lawrence _Sentinel_, a weekly paper. Reporting, however, was against his temperament. One had to be active to get the news, active and prying into the reticences of people. Robert Frost, respecting his own reticences, respected those of others, and the occupation was extremely distasteful. More to his liking was a germinal “column” he inaugurated, one into which he could insert vignettes he had written: the picture of a ragged child coal-picker in a railroad yard, the picture of the stray eagle who lit on the top of the American flag-pole of the Lawrence Post Office until some hours later it was shot down to Frost’s indignation.

Marriage did not precipitate the problem of making a living. Making a living merely continued to be a sort of hazy actuality about which eventually something would be done. But as another preparatory step to meeting this problem, Robert again tried college, again backed up by his uncomprehending but sympathetic grandfather. This time it was Harvard in the year 1897, and in the same class was another poet whose work Frost was to like years later but whom he did not know at the time. The other poet was Wallace Stevens.

Frost picked up something for himself during the two years he stayed at Harvard. He improved his acquaintance with Latin and Greek and particularly enjoyed reading Greek with a young instructor named Babbitt who later went to Trinity College. The ancient classics were much to his liking and it was about this time that he found in Virgil’s _Eclogues_ and _Georgics_ the nourishment his emotional constitution most craved. Philosophy lured him in a general way as it continues to lure him. Santayana gave a course which he recalls with pleasure in the “golden speech” and the “deliberate speed, majestic instancy” of the exposition of this brilliant thinker.

But despite all this, college could not hold him to the end. There was a man in Windham, New Hampshire, he had known in the interval between Dartmouth and Harvard, a man named Charley Hall, whose speech had a racy commonness, and the stimulus of this man’s talks was greater than the correct speech of college instructors. On the basis of this homely, shrewd and living talk, could not poetry be written by a good listener? Frost deserted academic halls for his own peculiar university, a life close to the soil among soil-tinged folk, listening to their turns of thought and feeling and phrase.

Journalism, handicraft, teaching, factory work, college, all were to be roads not taken, and in 1900 his grandfather was still pondering, perhaps more than Robert, on what was to be the career of his grandson.

V. “NEW HAMPSHIRE”

Grandfather Frost reached a decision that to American poetry at any rate was fortunate. With $1800 he purchased a farm at Derry, New Hampshire, for his grandson and thither Robert Frost transported his family in 1900. The family now numbered four: a son, Eliot, had been born in 1896, and a daughter, Lesley, in 1899. Eliot, however, died in the middle of 1900.

Derry, which is in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire almost on a line northward from Lawrence to Kingston, New Hampshire, an old birthplace of Frost’s ancestors, was apparently the right locality for the nurturing of Robert Frost’s bents. Like a true New England village it had its academy, Pinkerton Academy, standing on a hill with Derry Village spread out below it. A mile away from that was the comparatively recent “Depot” where most of the five thousand inhabitants lived. But there was a breakage of character between the village proper and the “Depot.” The latter was developing, rapidly of course, along the lines of present-day industrial New England: it had several shoe factories and foretold in its little way a new and confused order of society. But Derry Village was then very much as it had been in 1880. Its families were conservative and regarded their religion and inherited culture very stolidly, entrenched in the feeling that twenty or thirty years ago the satisfactory elevation in religious thought and education had been achieved and now required only maintenance. It had its local small scale industries, founded upon Yankee inventiveness, particularly the Chase mill, a woodworking plant which among other specialties turned out in large quantities the wooden tags that nurserymen employ to identify their stock.

All this was right for Robert Frost: a settled rooted community, its life persisting in the presence of an enveloping alien and noisy industrialism which has not yet succeeded in totally smothering its vitality, and the academy on the hill as a sign, however inadequate, that culture should keep conservatism a little worried about the large questions of life lest conservatism fall into complacency. “I believe in tradition and accident and a bit of an idea bothering tradition,” Frost once remarked years after the Derry period, and Derry itself appears to have been a living pattern of this traditionalism affected by accident and ideas.

Frost’s small farm was a couple of miles “down the turnpike.” Like scores of other farms in Rockingham county it was a farm out of which even a very experienced farmer would have had difficulty in extracting a living. For Frost it was a downhill dogged battle. The unprolific character of the soil was unfairly aided in its resistance to success on the tiller’s part by the hay-fever which attacked Frost in the middle of August each year and made him wretched for two months. In addition, it was the child-bearing and rearing phase of his married life. A son, Carol, born in 1902, a daughter, Irma, in 1903, and another daughter, Marjorie, in 1905 naturally increased the strain of his struggle.[3] In spite of all that, there was a good deal of play, too: botanizing, making wood paths, inducting the children into outdoor life. His farming neighbors, probably correctly, did not approve of Frost’s methods (he could be caught milking the cows at ten at night in order to sleep later in the morning) and the end of this venture came in 1905 when he drove up to the butcher’s to make further purchases on credit. The fattish butcher came brusquely out on the porch of his store, cocked an appraising eye at Frost’s horse and inquired, none too delicately, if anyone had a lien on it. Then Frost, with four children, a rundown farm, and a bundle of unpublished poems (including _Black Cottage_ which he had just written) on his hands, decided to apply for a position at Pinkerton Academy.

If the farm had not grudgingly yielded him a living, it had done something else; it had toughened his respect for nature, it had disciplined him by its immalleability to aught but extremely hard labor. It put, in short, a fibrous quality in his living which has been expressed in the poetry.

It was almost literally with a poem that Robert Frost secured his position at Pinkerton. The incident was this: he had been invited to read a poem before the Men’s Club of the Central Congregational Church at Derry. The reading aroused the interest of the Pinkerton trustees, among them, John C. Chase, the head of the mill; and the pastor of the church, Reverend Charles Merriam, used his influence in crystallizing this interest into an offer. And so Robert Frost came to worry and modify the traditional state of affairs at Pinkerton Academy during the years 1906 to 1911.

The reports of eye-witnesses have a superior validity in biography as well as in courts of law, and the author of this study is grateful to Mr. John Bartlett of Boulder, Colorado, for the privilege of utilizing portions of his letter on this period in Robert Frost’s life. Mr. Bartlett wrote:

“I joined the class of 1910 in the fall of 1907, being rated then as a member of the Junior Middle Class. Pinkerton had a student body of one hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and its equipment consisted of a modern brick building on a hill-top and facing to the east, and a little lower on the hill the ‘old academy’ of wood, well preserved and painted white.

“There were several fine old teachers, excellent representatives of the school that believed that thoroughness and hard work were the beginning and the conclusion of the educational process. Great store was set by Latin which was taught by George W. Bingham, the stern and aged principal, and by Greek in which Mary Parsons, maiden member of a distinguished Derry Village (and New Hampshire, too) family, gave instruction.

“The faculty was true to the good old Pinkerton tradition. The Academy had been founded in the first years of the nineteenth century and dedicated to the development of cultured Christian character. Old rules governing the student body were still in effect. Card playing, for example, was forbidden, and for a boy to escort a girl to and from an entertainment was still a technical violation of ‘requirements.’ There were compulsory study hours and compulsory attendance at church. Students must be in their homes at seven p.m. and not leave thereafter except on Friday evening when grace was extended to ten p.m. and Sunday evening when the students were expected to attend church services. Once a week the principal called the roll of the assembled student body and each student reported his record of the week, thus: ‘All the requirements,’ ‘One exception, excused,’ ‘Two exceptions.’

“Most of the students came from homes within a radius of fifteen miles. A great many were from farm families, while Derry ‘Depot’ sent the children of factory workers. An Academy-owned dormitory housed the majority of the few boarding students.

“I am sure that when I entered the Academy there was much faculty hostility to Frost, and even among the older students there was some also. I recall that the submission to Frost as the English teacher of all prepared papers in an inter-class debate between Junior Middlers and Seniors was objected to by the Senior team, a grossly offensive act meriting disciplinary rebuke, but such did not follow. And I believe that there were certain members of the faculty who had toward the new English teacher almost a personal animosity.

“Frost came as the representative of new things, and there was collision. He did not arrive at the Academy in time to participate in the morning chapel exercises; he had no classroom; he defied the Pinkerton tradition in the informality of his presence and the free-and-easy way he handled his classes. The fact that he had no college degree would, for a portion of the faculty, keep him forever outside the circle. He was younger than nearly all the others. A dozen things made him an ‘outsider.’ He looked it and acted it.

“The old order of things at Pinkerton went quickly. A new principal, Ernest L. Silver (later principal of the New Hampshire State Normal School), came in 1909. There were new teachers and new subjects--agriculture, domestic science, and this and that. Pinkerton in brief time was doing a lot of catching up. I believe that Frost’s success with his English classes had a great deal to do with the rapidity and completeness of this change.

“No greater departure from traditional Pinkerton teaching methods could be conceived than those of Robert Frost. A boy of sixteen or seventeen isn’t aware in respect to much of a teacher’s pedagogy beyond knowing whether it pleases him or not. But, looking back, I believe I know the first great difference between Frost and the other teachers. He had far greater interest in the individual student. He had a way of manifesting this, of asking questions and of making observations in a few words, all the while getting closer to the boy in question. It was not a professional self-conscious thing, but a desire from Frost’s heart to get closer and learn more.

“A new member of one of his classes, I had handed in a single short theme. Late one afternoon as a group of boys were passing a football about on the athletic field, Frost came up. He was a frequent figure on the athletic field and sometimes he would take off his coat and ‘make a bluff,’ as the boys put it, at playing. This afternoon he happened to come near me. He asked several questions concerning the Pawtuckaway Mountains where the ‘Devil’s Den’ about which I had written was located. I answered them awkwardly: I was a shy boy. In a matter-of-fact way he observed that I was a fellow who had ideas.

“That was all there was to the conversation, for a spinning ball came my way, but I can still see Frost and the fall mud and the football bucking machine and the boys on that afternoon. He seemed to show in this conversation several hundred times the interest in me that other teachers had.

“He really had this interest, I am sure, and it was not directed toward me alone, but toward all his students. He asked them personal questions, drew them out.

“In those days Frost was always asking questions of people. Not the mechanical questions of politeness, but questions that would get at things Frost was interested in ... and he was interested in a great deal. If we took a winter walk toward Londonderry and met a logging team, which stopped as we came abreast, there would be a conversation right there. Frost would have the teamster talking about logging things and horses and wood roads and such matters. He talked with his students in somewhat the same way. There was always something to be learned from these New Englanders, and Frost learned it.

“And he was interested in the boy’s problems of individuality. Seemingly, he could like any sort of boy. He might not win a boy in the first few months of his contact with him, but nearly always he won him in the end.

“The most excited boy over an English paper I ever saw was Dave Griffith, the athlete of ’10, a magnificent halfback and sprinter. He had written on a sport subject and had earned commendation from Frost. Breaking the study hour rule of the dormitory, Dave stealthily went from room to room to announce grandly his accomplishment. Dave had a haughty disregard for scholastic honors in general (few of which he ever received), but he knew when he had something to be proud of.

“We had a boarding student in the Junior class, Arthur Eastman, who was neither among the scholars on one hand nor the athletes on the other. Arthur suddenly was famous for a four-line stanza which Frost was commending to his classes. I believe the boy never again wrote a verse which was praised. On the other hand, one of the older students who turned out verse with great abundance and prided himself on his ability received no approval whatever. The school knew that Frost considered this student’s verse of no merit.

“Frost’s English classes were always ‘easy’ classes. Frost had none of the taskmaster’s attitude, yet his classes did a great deal of work and covered fully as much ground as any ordinary class. Any feeling for literature displayed by a student was cultivated: any talent for writing was nursed along. A few in each class were gradually developed who could always be counted on for lively discussion. Very frequently departures from the regular routine were made. Often, for example, Frost, slumped down in his chair, would read to the class. And every time a new _Critic_ was out, Frost would discuss it with his classes.

“The _Critic_ was the student publication, and it was better than it had been for many years before Frost’s engagement. He let the boys and girls run it largely themselves: faculty supervision of it was much less than formerly. There was a good deal of comradeship between Frost and the _Critic_ staff. Unconventional things occurred ... the _Critic_ files may contain at least one poem the distinguished authorship of which is not generally known. I believe the _Critic_ sometimes contained, because of his ‘hands off’ policy, things that he would not have passed for publication. But he knew that his policy was right and held to it.

“He was philosophical, too, when one of the honor members of the Senior class, given liberty in connection with his Commencement essay not in keeping with Pinkerton practice, read a paper at Graduation which was a wretched failure. This boy had not been required to submit his essay for faculty approval. And he messed the job, actually writing the final paragraphs two hours before he was due on the platform. Frost remarked later, ‘It sounded as though you had read one book or article and then written your essay.’ That was all that was ever said between us, and it was enough! Frost had divined the fact.

“Out of the English classes came during those years several plays coached by Frost. In one year I remember we had Marlowe’s _Dr. Faustus_, Milton’s _Comus_ and Yeats’ _The Land of Heart’s Desire_. The plays were a success on both sides of the footlights. Frost liked to have his fun as much as any of the students, and the rehearsals brought us all together in a fine way. These plays were a new thing at Pinkerton. The Academy had presented several of Shakespeare’s plays since the century came in but no cognizance of other drama had been taken.

“In 1909 the state began to be interested in Frost’s classes. He talked at conventions, booked by Henry Morrison, the New Hampshire State Superintendent. And from time to time educators visited our classes. These convention talks were ordeals, and Frost always came back from them in a condition of exhaustion. Once he made an experiment before a talk given at Exeter, I believe. He put sharp pebbles in his shoes and walked about for hours, painfully, hoping that physical pain would alleviate the mental torture he was in. But it didn’t!

“The student body was with him one hundred per cent as the fall term of 1909 opened. There was a new order of things in the school and Frost was recognized as a big figure.

“I do not recall just when it was that Frost first wrote a formula, famous with his classes, upon a Pinkerton blackboard. He put forward the following kinds of matter used for literary purposes:

Uncommon in experience--uncommon in writing.

Common in experience--common in writing.

Uncommon in experience--common in writing.

Common in experience--uncommon in writing.

The last was the kind of material to search for, he told us.

“We celebrated a football victory over our rival school, Sanborn Seminary, in November, 1909, with a supper provided by the new domestic science department. Frost was the hit of the evening with a string of verses he put on the blackboard. This was one:

In the days of Captain John,
Sanborn Sem had nothing on,
Pinkerton, Pinkerton.

“A few of the boys spent considerable time with Frost out of school hours. I remember a walk over the turnpike to Manchester twelve miles away in the late afternoon, an hour spent in a bookstore, an oyster stew, and then a ride home on the electric railway. Our conversation on walks touched books only now and then. They might include reminiscences of Frost’s early life, discussion of school affairs, aspects of farm life in New Hampshire, some current news happening of importance, and nearly anything else. If in passing a farmhouse the aroma of fried doughnuts came out to us, Frost might propose that we buy some. Down around the corner we might encounter a fern he hadn’t seen since he was last in the Lake Willoughby region. And if darkness overtook us and it was a favorable night for observation, Frost would be sure to take at least five minutes to study the heavens and attempt to start our astronomical education.

“There was always an abundance of conversation, but almost never any argument. Frost never argued. He knew what he knew, and never had any interest in arguing about it. In the same way he was always willing to let others think what they wanted to think.

“He had a Woodrow Wilson sense of loyalty. I never knew a person who was more sensitive to slights, rebuffs and acts of unfriendliness than Frost or who seemed to carry the scar of them longer, and I have never met one whose loyalty was more thoroughly of the lasting kind.

“I remember how I came back to Derry late in 1910, having left college ‘between two days,’ defeated and defiant, meeting disapproval and condemnation. I was a boy getting hit by life and receiving no friendly overtures when I needed them most. Frost heard I was back and walked miles to see me and take me over the country roads for a talk. I remember how a few months later he speeded me on my way to British Columbia with a handshake and a look in the eye. There was a book at that parting, Chesterton’s _Heretics_. I read it three times on the way out. I remember letter after letter as I sought a way to fit in at Vancouver, and the frequent letters as I finally started in newspaper work. Letters all about me, my problems. That was what friendship meant to Robert Frost, help to the maximum when a boy needed it.”

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.