Chapter III: Part 3

“........ the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work.”

IX. “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL”

_How about being a good Greek, for instance?
That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year._

Some readers,[12] no doubt, were surprised when the poet told them in his last book, _New Hampshire_:

I may as well confess myself the author
Of several books against the world in general.

There had been no protest, no satire, no revolt to be noticed in his poetry. On the contrary, here was quietude, good humor and a certain manly acceptance of circumstance. Yet this author who never whines, who never seems savagely to resent the present state of affairs, this author considers himself to have been writing against the world in general! The surprise was salutary, for the shock directed attention to the implications of Frost’s confession, the implications of his poetry _in toto_, and a study of these implications will lead to the quite sudden realization that the purest classical poet of America today is Robert Frost.

With Frost in the field as a classicist, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, conspicuous rivals for the title, begin to look like something else. Eliot’s poetry, for example, has romantic elements: his sentimental melancholy and wistfulness, the dandyism and obfuscation that cut him off from a more general appeal. Pound likewise seems to be hewing no closer to a norm of thought, feeling and conduct: he does not appear to be making a bridge from the special to the general experience, to be achieving the “grandeur of generality”: he is given up to the irritations and discomforts of a sensitive person. Yet a romanticist tinge does not make a romanticist and _au fond_ Eliot and Pound are nearer to classicism than they are to romanticism. Still there is an important difference in kind between them and Robert Frost.

It is this: Pound and Eliot are in the main loyal to the principle of authority, whereas Frost depends entirely upon personal discovery. Pound and Eliot give allegiance to literary tradition as a governing body, seeking only to produce work that, while molded by tradition, still has sufficient novelty of conception and style to alter somewhat the existing body of letters. Frost is unconcerned with such a theory of dictatorship, adjustment and modification: he does not set up a literary authority to serve. Like the intelligent Greek, he is simply by nature rather positive, critical and experimental. If he manifests the classical virtues, if he achieves a nature, an imitation of it, a probability and a decorum which can suggest those cultivated by the classical world, it is because he has discovered them in, through and by his own direct experience. In comparison with him, Eliot and Pound appear formalistic, and the distinction between them and Frost is the distinction between neo-classicism and classicism.

It is important to see that the classicism of Robert Frost has been evolved in a simplified world, the world of the New England farmer. Such a farmer has a settled routine of living dependent upon the seasons. He leads a village life in which most of the human factors at work have the appearance of being tangible and measurable. The intricacies of commerce and industry, the distress wrought by machines, the flow of vast crowds, the diversity of appeals of a great city, do not reach him. Churches are what they were, intellectual currents do not disturb, and science, arch-upsetter of former values, finds no opening to intrude. Frost tells of a hugger-mugger farmer who burnt his house in order to buy a telescope with the insurance money. He gazed with an unspoiled wonder at the heavens. But for science at large the attitude is indifference.

“You hear those hound-dogs sing on Moosilauke?
Well, they remind me of the hue and cry
We’ve heard against the Mid-Victorians
And never rightly understood till Bryan
Retired from politics and joined the chorus.
The matter with the Mid-Victorians
Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”
“Go ’long,” I said to him, he to his horse.

In Frost’s New England then many of the complex tormenting questions that have arisen since the small city and agrarian communities of old Greece have been lopped away from the problem of living.

“Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.”

With this simplified world given, Frost has built his art, as was pointed out in the preceding chapter, upon the foundation of observation, and it is by positive and critical observation of things conceived as discrete that Frost has discovered his Nature.

The end reached by observation as a method, whether it is a poet or a scientist who employs it, is dualism,--that is, a set of axioms and laws founded on distinctions. The distinctions are based on appearances and both they and appearances are treated as reasonably final data. Of course, something inscrutable remains beyond, “something must be left to God,” as Frost says, but the fundamental truth or error of dualism is not plumbed. At any rate, whether or not the real world is dualistic, certainly the apparent world is.

So in Frost’s poetry we are consistently struck by his acceptance of the dualistic world and his actual contentment with his lot of joy and love “dashed with pain and weariness and fault.” Nature we feel as a sort of friendly antagonist, dangerously strong sometimes, but on the whole a fair opponent. In combat with her one cannot laze or cheat: but honest struggle brings fair returns. Especially is the line between Nature and Man always present in Frost’s mind, though never insisted upon. For example, he spends no time dilating on the aloofness or indifference of nature to man. Such a poem as _The Need for Being Versed in Country Things_ illustrates very well the sense of demarcation between man and nature which Frost preserves, his acceptance of nature as lovely and fair, and his awareness of her unconcern for man’s disasters. In this poem we hear of the burning of a farmhouse and the decay of its barn. The birds nest in the latter.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Frost’s poetry contains no taint of the “pathetic fallacy” of the romanticist which in these days is almost sufficient ground for suspecting Frost’s classical tendencies.

The man that Frost treats is situated in a tamed wilderness and is disciplined by it. In New Hampshire the mountains are not high enough, there is nothing extravagant or unduly wild about nature, nor are the people of Frost’s poems grandiose or expansive. Their bodies have been contracted and hardened by sweating toil, their emotions are rock-like, and their minds achieve a good dogged horse sense.

For art’s sake one could wish them worse
Rather than better. How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?
There is the pinch from which our only outcry
In literature to date is heard to come.
We get what little misery we can
Out of not having cause for misery.
It makes the guild of novel writers sick
To be expected to be Dostoievskis
On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.

* * * * *

It’s Pollyanna now or death.
This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;
And very sensible. No state can build
A literature that shall at once be sound
And sad on a foundation of well-being.

Out of a settled social framework, an honest necessary struggle for existence, and a fair amount of well-being, something like a representative man can emerge. There are balances and checks to trim down his uniqueness while at the same time there is permitted a moderate scope for his emotional and reflective life. In such a state the acquisitive impulse gets no favoring head start and instead of haste we find reticence and deliberation characteristic.

Thus Frost discovers what Professor Irving Babbitt would call a sound model for imitation. Professor Babbitt has labored to show that imitation as the ancients understood it was a fresh and imaginative process. It is just so with Robert Frost. His choice of words, his rhymes, always escape the commonplace: we are awakened by the exact perceptions of a new discoverer. But the more important point is that this stirring-up is followed by a conviction of the naturalness or the obviousness of Frost’s statements. Why, we murmur, has this not been said before? Again we are repeating Poe’s useful test question for the workings of the imagination.

One cannot be certain just what content the term, the imagination, contains today. Modern psychology has cleared away some of the rank underbrush which has cluttered our view of the imagination, though it has planted other bushes to confuse us at the same time: but at least we habitually distinguish imagination from fancy. Perhaps by pure imagination we mean something not far from a total sweeping flash-like view taken by a human being at unusual moments. At any rate Frost’s imagination is based on the view of a man who is using _more_ of his equipment than most of the moderns do. The meaning is simply that Frost does not seem to write almost exclusively from one of three centers,--from the intellect or the emotions or the instinctive center,--but from a sort of rude partnership of all three. The conditions of his erstwhile livelihood (farming) brought into at least partially coördinated play his body and his emotions, and in addition he is capable of thought. In this growth he is again a parallel, though distant, to the ancient writers, and gives a start to the speculation as to how far the conditions of modern mechanized life throw into disuse portions of the necessary equipment of a fully aware human being. Certainly, Frost’s lines give one more of an impression that a whole man is writing them than do the sharply intellectualized or bubbling emotional lines of most of his contemporaries.

The moot interpretation in the doctrine of imitation has always been the meaning to be attached to universals. One may rightly be skeptical as to the coincidence of the views of the idealists with the original meaning of Aristotle. But whether Aristotle is interpreted idealistically or not, Frost’s use of universals arising from a welter of particulars is covered in the minimum definition that could be offered. His poems, _Mending Wall_ and _The Grindstone_, are prime examples: in these poems the particulars are vividly and concretely seen and they can stand the most rigid literal interpretation. Yet no less present and vivid in them is a wider significance or rather there are wider significances. Thus, among other things conveyed in _The Grindstone_, we are deeply aware that a sense of the inertia of nature has been induced. We are aware of the aching strain of making nature malleable and the tear and wear made on the straining human being by time. For readers of Frost it is not necessary to add that this creation of universal significance is accomplished directly without an atom of didacticism.

Although the doctrines of nature and imitation as exemplified in the works of Robert Frost have been so briefly dwelt upon, does it seem requisite to develop the contiguous statement that Frost is an observer of the law of probability and the law of measure or proportion or decorum? It is simply stating an easily recognizable fact which any reader may verify by going through Frost’s writings that it is the probable sequence and not the improbable but possible sequence that he develops. He is a poet of the customary in man and nature, not the exploiter of the remarkably arresting and wonderful. Nor does his feeling for decorous proportion require argument beyond saying that he does not commit the mistake of the neo-classicists who have been properly accused by Professor Babbitt of confusing the language of the nobility with the nobility of language. Frost’s people are humble, but they speak a language and utter feelings appropriate to them: they are restrained by conventions which are inherently worthy of respect, and the result is decorum in the true sense.

The study of these considerations should explain why Frost declares that he has written several books against the world in general. For since Rousseau romanticism has been in the ascendency. A new conception of nature as impulse and temperament has supplanted the old nature as a strict model, a “return to nature” has come to mean “letting one’s self go.” For imitation has been substituted the self-expression of the spontaneous original genius, for the law of probabilities has been exchanged the law of wonderful possibilities, and for decorum we have the doctrine of expansiveness. Science has abetted the growth of naturalistic emotionalism, and neither humanism nor religion has been able to stop the tide of writing designed for the expression of uniqueness rather than of generality.

Against this efflorescence of the interior world, the neo-classicists have striven in vain, for their position does not rest solidly enough upon experience and personal discovery. They have been debilitated by the blight of Scaliger’s rhetorical question, why imitate nature when Virgil is a second nature?

Frost however quietly takes his place beside the antique Greeks and against the modern world. He proves that a species of classicism resting on personal discovery is still possible.

Pictorially, Frost’s apartness from contemporary currents is striking.... He came on our literary scene, this intensified and intelligent and subtilized “ordinary man,” in very queer company. There was Carl Sandburg with his love of the blur, his dreamy slothfulness, his drifting impressionism, there was Vachel Lindsay, sentimental, picturesque and declamatory, there was Amy Lowell, shallow and decorative, there was Edgar Lee Masters, protestant and disillusioned, and these were the poetic vanguard of Frost’s generation. In the novel Theodore Dreiser was working up a public appetite for naturalism, and Sherwood Anderson, recoiling in disgust from American business life, was starting toward his present trust in objectless wandering and instinctive laughter. Romantics all, and so were the new critics, J. E. Spingarn with his gusty estheticism, H. L. Mencken, braying out his prejudices, and Van Wyck Brooks with his humanitarian approach. Frost came on with this troop, and they hailed him as a brother. He was contemporary with them in age and public appearance, and a mistake was made: it was taken for granted that he belonged in attitude and spirit and general aim to the so-called “new poetry.”

Today the Middle Generation is beginning to recede whereas Robert Frost emerges more and more and as a poet differing at the root in substance, craft and direction from the romantic movement of the last decade. Where is his kinship in America? Not with that other New England poet of parts, Edwin Arlington Robinson, for Robinson exemplifies a withering and retrospective New England and Frost exemplifies the New England that is still sturdily alive. No, it is rather in the Eldest Generation in American letters that one finds a similar temper and approach to Frost’s. One imagines that the elder critics, Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, casting skeptical eyes over our literary life today, might single out Frost and say: “Here is a poet who has not succumbed to the ‘law for thing’: here is a poet who has not bleached himself with neo-classical dogma: here is a poet who sings afresh in the great classical tradition.”

Ultimately More and Babbitt diverge, as More seeks to sustain the religious tradition of classicism and Babbitt to revitalize the humanistic tradition. It is the latter tradition that includes Robert Frost.

For speaking in terms of psychology rather than of literature, what distinguishes Frost is simply good sense. Good sense avoids extremes both in what it denies and in what it accepts. It does not, for instance, deny the bulky evidence of the senses and the man of good sense, therefore, will not accept the lies of idealism. The external world he will try to see and feel and otherwise sense as clearly and tangibly as he can: “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” At the same time the man of good sense will not in his acceptance of the practical instinctive fact as such fly to an extremely narrow materialism and atheism. Something inscrutable and ordering very likely remains: there are overtones in the observer of the fact that he cannot ignore. Thus, he neither denies God nor the world: he accepts the latter as demonstrated and the former as probable or at least possible.

What he does trust is his own experience (having good sense he knows that there is nothing else to trust) and his own experience happens in Frost’s case to be mediatory in character. Being intelligent, being deeply emotional, being obliged to make terms with practical life, the man of good sense casts up a rough balance of the three aspects of his life and travels, so far as he is permitted so to do, in the center of the highway.

A fair-minded description of a poet ought to be in itself a placement and therefore a criticism of that poet. If Frost’s qualities pertain to good sense, we must not expect him to write on the religious level. In _The Trial By Existence_, one of the poems in _A Boy’s Will_, he took up a religious theme, the gathering in heaven of the souls ready for birth, “the trial by existence named, the obscuration upon earth,” and the conclusion reached is sensible. As Llewellyn Jones has stated it, it is “a recognition that suffering is always in terms of what we are, not an alien something hitting us by chance from without but somehow or other implicit in our very constitution.” But _The Trial By Existence_ is exceptional in theme and treatment in all of Frost’s range.

Nor must we expect from Frost that rarest and most difficult of virtues that goes by the prosaic name of commonsense. Commonsense is a _community_ of judgments, intellectual, emotional and practical, upon life. It is an exact balance demanding the utmost strenuousness to achieve and the perfection and harmony of our faculties. Good sense is a gift: commonsense must be deliberately arrived at, as witness the efforts of Socrates.

There are certain all-important questions which only the greatest literature raises and attempts to answer, and these questions it is not appropriate to ask of every poet. Frost makes no pretense of great inclusiveness and great profundities. The canniness of good sense forbids such rash over-reachings of one’s self. But what we have always a right to demand is that the poet should be skilled in his craft, alive in his sensibility, and at least sensible in his conclusions. Robert Frost is all of these, and to those questions that it is proper to ask of him, those questions, that is, that are covered in his own experience, he returns always an answer in true currency equal to the demand.

His comprehensive answer is the _natural_ (not romantic and not religious) vision of life, and it is natural in the sense that it is fitting to man _as he is_. “The poetry of a true real natural vision of life,” said Goethe, “demands descriptive power of the highest degree, rendering a poet’s pictures so life-like that they become actualities to every reader,” and that is what Robert Frost, man of good sense and fine sensibility, has succeeded in writing, and for that he will be treasured in what we hope, against many odds at present, will be the long and noble course of American literature.

APPENDIX A

SELECTED BRITISH OPINION ON ROBERT FROST

The following quotations are taken from a little leaflet distributed by David Nutt. Historically, the leaflet is interesting for showing the quick captivation of English critics by _North of Boston_. But more than that, the English writers appear to have succeeded better in stating the emotional character of Frost’s verse than the Americans who have undertaken the same task.--G. B. M.

* * * * *

... A unique type of eclogue, homely, racy, and touched by a spirit that might, under other circumstances, have made pure lyric on the one hand or drama on the other. Within the space of a hundred lines or so of blank verse it would be hard to compress more rural character and relevant scenery; impossible, perhaps, to do so with less sense of compression and more lightness, unity and breadth. The language ranges from a never vulgar colloquialism to brief moments of heightened and intense simplicity. There are moments when the plain language and lack of violence make the unaffected verses look like prose, except that the sentences, if spoken aloud, are most felicitously true in rhythm to the emotion. Only at the end of the best pieces, such as _The Death of the Hired Man_, _Home Burial_, _The Black Cottage_, and _The Wood Pile_, do we realize that they are masterpieces of deep and mysterious tenderness.--_The English Review._

* * * * *

... To start with, Mr. Frost is an American poet who noticeably stands out against tradition.... We find very little of the traditional manner of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work; scarcely anything, indeed, save a peculiar adaption, in his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse.... It elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation does. It is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words--to put them, that is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected virtue comes out of them; it is, in fact, poetry composed, as far as possible, in a language of things.... We have heard a great deal lately of the desirability of getting back again into touch with the living vigors of speech. This usually means matters of vocabulary and idiom; and Mr. Frost certainly makes a racy use of New England vernacular. But he goes further; he seems trying to capture and hold within metrical patterns the very tones of speech--the rise and fall, the stressed pauses and little hurries, of spoken language. The kind of metrical modulation to which we are most accustomed--the modulations intended for decorations or purely esthetic expressiveness--will scarcely be found in his verses. But, instead, we have some novel inflections of metre which can only be designed to reproduce in verse form the actual shape of the sound of whole sentences. As a matter of technique, the attempt is extraordinarily interesting.... Naturally, this technical preoccupation bears strongly on the general form of Mr. Frost’s poetry. He uses almost entirely dialogue or soliloquy; he must have somebody talking. We might call these poems psychological idylls. Within their downright knowledge, their vivid observation, and (more important) their rich enjoyment of all kinds of practical life, within their careful rendering into metre of customary speech, the impulse is always psychological--to set up, in some significant attitude, a character or a conflict of characters. The ability to do this can turn a situation which is not very interesting at first into something attractive, as when a rather protracted discourse of two distant relations on genealogy gradually merges into a shy, charming conversation of lovers; or, in a more striking instance, when the rambling speech of an overtasked farmer’s wife works up into a dreadful suggestion of inherited lunacy. If, as we have said, we cannot quarrel with this deliberate method of exposition, it can scarcely be questioned that Mr. Frost is at his best when he can dispense with these structural preliminaries as in the admirable soliloquy of a farmer mending his wall, or in the exquisite comedy of the professor sharing his bedroom with a talkative newspaper-agent, or in the stark, formidable tragedy called _Home Burial_. Though it is difficult to state absolutely the essential quality of Mr. Frost’s poetry, it is not difficult to suggest a comparison. When poetry changes by development rather than by rebellion, it is likely to return on itself. Poetry in Mr. Frost exhibits almost the identical desires and impulses we see in the “bucolic” poems of Theocritus.--_The Nation._

* * * * *

... There is such a thing as vers libre, which is an excellent instrument for rendering the actual rhythm of speech. I am not in the least suggesting that Mr. Frost should write vers libre; I am only saying that it seems queer that he does not. There was Whitman--But Mr. Frost’s achievement is much finer, much more near the ground, and much more national, in the true sense, than anything that Whitman gave the world. I guess he is afraid of the liberty of vers libre; to shackle himself probably throws him into the right frame of mind. It is another form of the New England conscience.... He does give you a very excellent, a very poetic, a very real sense of his meadows and woods and rocks and berries, and of night and of showers and of wildnesses--of an America that really matters far more than the land of endless trickery, make-believe, and lying and empty loquacity. That is the face that--Heaven knows why!--America seems to like to present to these parts of the world; but those are the least desirable features. Anyhow, Mr. Frost has called in on us to redress the balance of that particular New World.... He is not a remains of English culture grown provincial and negligible. He is not, in fact, a sentimentalist. Not to be a sentimentalist is to be already half-way towards being a poet--and Mr. Frost goes the other half-way as well, though to describe what that other half is beats me. Here is the little poem--rhymed for a change--in which, as it were, he proffers his invitation to read _North of Boston_.

THE PASTURE

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away--
And wait to watch the water clear, I may;
I shan’t be gone long--You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
He totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long--You come too.

Why is that beautiful and friendly and touching and all sorts of things? I don’t know. I suppose, just because Mr. Frost is a poet.--Ford Madox Hueffer in _The Outlook_.

* * * * *

This is an original book which will raise the thrilling question, What is poetry?... Few that read it through will have been as much astonished by any American since Whitman.... He has trusted his conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply.... In his first book, _A Boy’s Will_, there is this piece, entitled _Mowing_:--

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself:
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound,--
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Those last six lines do more to define Mr. Frost than anything I can say. He never will have “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf”: he can make fact “the sweetest dream.” Naturally, then, when his writing crystallizes, it is often in a terse, plain phrase, such as the proverb, “Good fences make good neighbors,” or--

Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build;
From the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone;

or

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

But even this kind of characteristic detail is very much less important than the main result, which is a richly homely thing beyond the grasp of any power except poetry. It is a beautiful achievement, and I think a unique one, as perfectly Mr. Frost’s own as his vocabulary, the ordinary English speech of a man accustomed to poetry and philosophy, more colloquial and idiomatic than the ordinary man dares to use even in a letter, almost entirely lacking the emphatic hackneyed forms of journalists and other rhetoricians, and possessing a kind of healthy, natural delicacy like Wordsworth’s, or at least Shelley’s, rather than that of Keats’.--Edward Thomas in _The New Weekly_.

* * * * *

In its quiet and unsensational way, Mr. Robert Frost’s _North of Boston_ is the most challenging book of verse that has been published for some time.... Mr. Frost has turned the living speech of men and women into poetry.... To me it seems that _Home Burial_ and _The Fear_ are the most absolute achievements in the book; but that may only be because they come nearest to the kind of thing I wish to see done in poetry; and the other pieces in the book all contain notable qualities, and qualities which have been too long absent from English verse. Mr. Frost has a keen, humorous sense of character.... Tales that might be mere anecdotes in the hands of another poet take on a universal significance, because of their native veracity and truth to local character.--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson in _The Bookman_.

APPENDIX B

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

BOOKS BY ROBERT FROST

_A Boy’s Will_. London: David Nutt. 1913

_North of Boston._ London: David Nutt. 1914

_North of Boston._ New York: Henry Holt. 1914

_A Boy’s Will._ New York: Henry Holt. 1915

_Mountain Interval._ New York: Henry Holt. 1916

_Selected Poems._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923

_New Hampshire._ New York: Henry Holt. 1923

PRINCIPAL ESSAYS ON ROBERT FROST

Amy Lowell: _Robert Frost_ in _Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_.

Waldo Frank: pages 158-162 in _Our America_.

Louis Untermeyer: _Robert Frost_ in _A New Era in American Poetry_.

Edward Garnett: _Robert Frost_ in _Friday Nights_.

Clement Wood: _Robert Frost_ in _Poets of America_.

Llewellyn Jones: _Robert Frost_ in _First Impressions_.

Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant: _Robert Frost_ in _Fire Under the Andes_.

Percy H. Boynton: _Robert Frost_ in _English Journal_, Oct., 1922.

G. R. Elliott: _The Neighborliness of Robert Frost_ in the _Nation_, vol. cix, p. 713-715.

Carl Van Doren: _Quintessence and Subsoil_ in the _Century_, February, 1923.

John Freeman: _Frost_ in the _London Mercury_, vol. xiii, pages 176-187.

Charles Cestre: _Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson_ in _Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine_, vol. xiv, pages 363-388.

Jean Catel: _La Poesie americaine d’aujourd’hui_ in the _Mercure de France_, March 15, 1920.

Albert Feuillerat: _Robert Frost_ in _Revue des Deux Mondes_, tome xvii, pages 185-210.

APPENDIX C

ROBERT FROST ON EDUCATION

The following extracts are from a talk which Robert Frost gave at Wesleyan University in December, 1926. They were taken down in shorthand by a reporter for the _New Student_ and thus preserve the exact verbal flavor of Frost’s conversation as well as the best direct statement of his educational aim that I have encountered.--G. B. M.

“The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have. That is much harder than anything else in the world to get--it’s the freedom of my material. You might define a school boy as one who could recite to you, if you started him talking, everything he read last night, in the order in which he read it. That’s a school boy. That’s just the opposite of what I mean by a free person. The person who has the freedom of his material is the person who puts two and two together, and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time, and brought together. One little thing mentioned, perhaps, reminds him of something he couldn’t have thought of for twenty years. That’s the kind of talk I’d rather give.

“I’d rather be perfectly free of my material--reach down here in time and off there in space, and here’s my two and two put together. Here’s my idea, my thought. That’s the freedom I’d like to give.

“It depends so much on the disconnection of things. There’s too much sequence and logic all the time, of reciting what we learned over night. There’s an attempt in the honor courses to get toward what I mean. I don’t know what the honor courses will do toward it.

“I think what I’m after is free meditation. I don’t think anybody gets to it when he’s in anybody’s company--only when his soul’s alone. I do it when I wake up in the morning, when I’m starting an idea, and restarting. Sleep is probably a symbol of the interruption, the disconnection that I want in life. Your whole life can be so logical that it seems to me like a ball of hairs in the stomach of an angora cat. It should be broken up and interrupted, and then be brought together by likeness, free likeness.

“You might ask me this question: how am I going to find time? I would so run a course by self-withdrawal. I would begin a course by being very present, and then slowly disappear. A sort of vanishing act. I’d rather melt away just as I stood there, and leave a fellow more and more alone, and let him feel deserted, like a baby in a room alone.

“I know a good story, with a man’s name. I don’t mind using names. A fellow named Conrad Aiken, one of our very best poets, though not one of our most read, was once told in school to interpret something from some French dramatist. He went home and got so much interested in doing it that he didn’t come back to class for three weeks, but by that time he had the whole play done in verse. He was sent to the office, on the matter of cuts. He ran away on that. He came back afterwards to please an uncle, he told me. We always pleased our uncles. Is that freedom to do more than you ought to? He’d done more than a man might be asked to do in his whole college course. If a man did that for me, I’d give him A in every course.”

INDEX

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 65, 81

_Academy_, 64

_Alastor_, 29

Amherst, 73, 75, 81

Anderson, Sherwood, 110

Aristotle, 107

_Arms and the Man_, 54

_Atlantic Monthly, The_, 58, 66, 70

_Axe-Helve, The_, 72

Babbitt, Irving, 34, 106, 109, 111, 112

Bartlett, John, 40, 51, 57, 59

Baseball, interest in, 56

Beerbohm, Max, 60

Bennett, Arnold, 60

_Black Cottage_, 39, 80

_Blueberries, The_, 90

“Bobbie,” the London, 61

_Bottle Imp, The_, 53

_Boy’s Will, A_, 18, 30, 62, 64, 65, 69, 70, 80, 113

Bridges, Robert, 74

Broadsheets, autographed, 82

Brooks, Van Wyck, 72, 111

Bryant, W. Cullen, 29

Buckley, blind boss, 26

_Bulletin_, 22

Burton, Pres. of Univ. of Michigan, 74

Cadwalla, Bertha, 13

Canfield, Dorothy, 73

Cannan, Gilbert, 61

Cannéll, Skipwith, 80

Carpenter, E., 60

Catel, Jean, 73

_Century, The_, 58, 83

Chapin, James, 70 note

Chesterton, G. K., 60

Chicken farm, 25

College, 32, 34, 72, 75

Colum, Padraic, 81

Columnist, 33

_Comus_, 47

Conrad, Joseph, 60

Convention talks, 48

_Country of the Blind, The_, 53

Cox, Sidney, 51 _et seq._, 57

_Critic_, 46

Dartmouth, 32, 75

_Death of the Hired Man, The_, 80, 94

Derry, 36 _et seq._

_Dial, The_, 76

Dreiser, Theodore, 110

_Dr. Faustus_, 47

Du Chêne, Aroldo, 83

_Eclogues_, 80

Eliot, T. S., 100, 101

England, trip to, 60 _et seq._

_English Review_, 61

_Emile_, 52

_Endymion_, 29

Farming, 36, 38, 65, 73

_Fear_, 94

Fellowship at Michigan University, 74

_Fire Under the Andes_, 79, 80, 82, 83

_First Impressions_, 71

Flint, F. S., 63

Football, interest in, 43

Ford, Ford Madox, 61

Forst, 11

_Forum, The_, 58

France, Anatole, 72

Frank, Waldo, 71, 72, 86

_Friday Nights_, 70

Frost, Bertha, 15

Frost, Carol, 38, 82

Frost, Elinor Bettina, 38

Frost, Elliott, 36

_Frost Genealogy in Five Families_, 15

Frost, Henry, 12

Frost, Irma, 38, 82

Frost, John, 17

Frost, Lesley, 36, 38, 82

Frost, Lt. Wm., 17

Frost, Major Charles, 13, 15, 16, 77

Frost, Marjorie, 38, 82

Frost, Nicholas, 13, 14

Frost’s Garrison House, 13

Galsworthy, John, 60

Garnett, Edward, 70, 71, 91, 93

George, Henry, 26, 78

Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson, 65, 66

Goethe, 93, 114

_Golden Room, The_, 66

Grahame, Cunninghame, 60

_Grindstone, The_, 107, 108

Hall, Charley, 35, 88

_Hamlet_, 80

Harcourt, Alfred, 81

Hardy, Thomas, 72

Harvard, 34, 72

_Heretics_, 51

Holt, Henry and Co., 69, 81

Holt, Mrs., 66

_House-Keeper, The_, 80

Howe, Mark de Wolfe, 58

Hudson, W. H., 60

Hueffer, Ford Madox, 61

Hulme, T. E., 65

_Independent, The_, 30

International P.E.N. Club, 72

_Into My Own_, 28

James, Henry, 61

Jones, Llewellyn, 71, 89, 113

_Jumping Frog, The_, 53

Lagerlof, Selma, 72

_Land of Heart’s Desire, The_, 47

Lanier, Sidney, 30

Lankes, J. J., 70 note, 83

Lawrence, D. H., 61

Lewis, Wyndham, 61

_Liberator, The_, 83

Lindsay, Vachel, 110

Literary formula, 48

Longfellow, H. W., 84

Lowell, Amy, 69, 71, 110

Mabie, Hamilton W., 59

Mackenzie, Compton, 61

MacVeagh, Lincoln, 81

_Masses, The_, 83

Masters, Edgar Lee, 110

Mencken, H. L., 111

_Mending Wall_, 107

Merriam, Rev. Charles, 39

Michigan University, 74, 75

Mill, worker in, 32

Montpellier University, 73

Moody, Isabelle, 22

More, Paul Elmer, 81, 111, 112

Morrison, Henry, 48

Mosher, Thomas Bird, 82

_Mountain Interval_, 70 note, 73

_Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe_, 53

Munro, Harold, Poetry Book-Shop, 63

_My Butterfly_, 30

_Need for Being Versed in Country Things_, 103

_New Age, The_, 61

_New Era in American Poetry, A_, 71

_New Hampshire_, 70 note, 73, 99

New Hampshire State Normal School, 51

_New Republic, The_, 69, 91

_North of Boston_, 15, 65, 69, 70

Nutt, David, 62, 63, 69

_Old Kittery and Her Families_, 13

O’Leary, Dan, 79

_Once by the Pacific_, 91

O’Neill, Eugene, 96

Oppenheim, James, 72

Orage, A. R., 61

_Our America_, 71

Pebble incident, 48

Pepperell, Sir William, 17

Phi Beta Kappa, 72

Pinkerton Academy, 36, 39, 40-51, 80

Plato’s _Republic_, 52

_Playboy of the Western World_, 54

Poe, Edgar A., 29, 106

Poet Laureate, 72

_Poetry; A Magazine of Verse_, 60, 70 note

_Poets of America_, Politics, 25

Pound, Ezra, 31, 59, 61, 63, 64, 80, 100, 101

Princeton, 81

Production of plays, 47, 54

Pulitzer Prize, 70 note

Quarter, the lost, 78

Reporting, 33

Revolvers in San Francisco, 23

Robinson, Edward A., 111

Rolland, Romain, 72

Rousseau, J. J., 109

_Runaway, The_, 90

Sandburg, Carl, 81, 110

San Francisco, 22, 77, 78

Santayana, G., 34

_Saturday Review of Literature_, 99

Scaliger’s rhetorical question, 110

_Scribner’s_, 58

Sergeant, Elizabeth S., 77, 79, 82, 83

_Selected Poems_, 70 note, 73

_Sentinel_, 33

_Seven Arts, The_, 72, 94

Sex hygiene, 53

Shaw, G. B., 60

Shoe-making, 33

Sill, Edward R., 29

Silver, Ernest L., 42, 51

_Sohrab and Rustum_, 53

Sorbonne, 72

South, tour through, 33

Spingarn, 110

Stackpole, Everett S., 13, 15

Stevens, Wallace, 34, 84

Storer, Joseph, 16

Swedenborgianism, 26, 32

Swinburne, A. C., 89

Teaching, 33, 40-51, 55, 73, 74

_Tendencies in Modern American Poetry_, 71

Tennis, interest in, 56

Thomas, Edward, _Poems_, 67

_Times Literary Supplement_, 65

_Tom Brown’s School Days_, 29

_T. P.’s Weekly_, 61

_Trial by Existence, The_, 113

_Tuft of Flowers, The_, 80

Untermeyer, Louis, 71, 81

Valedictorian, 27, 28

Van Doren, Carl, 83

Vassar College, 81

Virgil, 34, 80

Ward, W. Hays, 30, 31

_Way Out, The_, 72, 94

Week-end party, 55, 56

Wells, H. G., 60

Wesleyan University, 75

White, Elinor, 27, 28, 32, 79

Williams, W. Carlos, 76

_Witch of Coos, The_, 70 note, 94

Wood, Clement, 71

_Youth’s Companion_, 58

FOOTNOTES

[1] That of Elder Edmund Frost of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[2] _Frost Genealogy in Five Families_ by Norman Seaver Frost.

[3] Elinor Bettina was born on June 20, 1907, and died on June 21.

[4] See Appendix A.

[5] Five printings of _North of Boston_ were called for in its first year, and ten more have been needed since. Its sale has been phenomenal for a book of poetry, and in 1926 it even led the author’s later books, though each of them has been steadily in demand ever since it appeared. _New Hampshire, A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes_, which was issued in 1923, comes next in popularity to _North of Boston_, requiring five large printings. This book won the Pulitzer Prize for that year, while one of the poems included in that volume, namely, _The Witch of Coos_, won the prize offered by _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_ in 1922. _Mountain Interval_ has also required five printings, and the _Selected Poems_ are now in their fourth printing.

In London _New Hampshire_ has appeared under the imprint of Grant Richards, Ltd., and the _Selected Poems_ under that of William Heinemann.

In addition to their regular editions, a de luxe volume of _North of Boston_, illustrated in line by James Chapin, appeared in 1919, and a de luxe edition of _New Hampshire_, with woodcuts by J. J. Lankes, who also decorated the regular edition, came out in 1923.

[6] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.

[7] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.

[8] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.

[9] Quoted from _Fire Under the Andes_ by Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.

[10] Quoted from an interview in the New York _Times_, October 21, 1923.

[11] Published in the _New Republic_, December 29, 1926.

[12] Page 99 to 110 appeared originally as part of an essay on Frost published in _The Saturday Review of Literature_ for March 28, 1925. The text has now been slightly altered.