11

LIVING IN VERMONT
1920–1922

I have moved a good part of the way to a stone cottage on a hill at South Shaftsbury in southern Vermont on the New York side near the historic town of Bennington where if I have any money left after repairing the roof in the spring I mean to plant a new Garden of Eden with a thousand apple trees of some unforbidden variety.

—FROST TO G. R. ELLIOT, OCTOBER 23, 1920

Frost explained his leaving Amherst to Sidney Cox in a letter of July 17, 1920:

I’ve kicked myself out of Amherst and settled down to revising old poems when I am not making new ones.

Teaching is all right, and I don’t mean to speak of it with condescension. I shall have another go at it before the last employee is fired. I believe in teaching, but I don’t believe in going to school. Every day I feel bound to save my consistency by advising my pupils to leave school. Then if they insist on coming to school, it is not my fault: I can teach them with a clear conscience.

We seem on the point of leaving Franconia. The hawser is cast off, in fact, though we lie still against the wharf. They say when you run away from a place it is yourself you are generally running away from and that goes with you and is the first thing you meet in the next place you turn up. In this case it is Frosts we are running away from and Frosts can hardly help going with us since Frosts we are ourselves. If you ever see any talk of me in print you may notice that it is my frostiness that is more and more played up. I am cold, snow-dusted, and all that. I can see that I am in a way or I would write to my best friends oftener. Don’t say amen too fervently if you don’t want to hurt my feelings and your own prospects.1

Frost was desperate for the peace and freedom of country life after leaving Amherst, convinced that his poetry had suffered while he toiled in the academy. He was suddenly intent upon hurling “fistfuls [of poems] right and left,” as he wrote to Wilbur Cross. The Amherst experience had stifled him, as a poet—although he admitted that it had appealed to his “philosopher” side. Now that he had liberated himself from “care and intellectuality,” he could face the blank page again, and listen to the inner voice that was caught, at times accidentally, as he walked in the woods or sat, idly, expecting nothing.

It was a cold, clear summer in Franconia, with ice-blue skies and almost no rain. Frost had wanted to return to growing fruits and vegetables, but the summer’s breezy chill reminded him that northern New Hampshire was not an especially hospitable place for farming. The land was rocky, and the growing season painfully short. He began to think that what he really wanted was fruit trees—apples, in particular, the crop he had most enjoyed harvesting during the years in Derry.

Apple orchards dotted the landscape of southern Vermont, and Frost (with the aid of the novelist Dorothy Canfield Fisher) began searching for a better place to farm. Fisher herself—a stocky, gray-haired woman of forty-one—had a farm just outside of Arlington, Vermont, and she recommended the little towns near Bennington.

After several scouting missions, Frost found a farm near Fisher in the village of South Shaftsbury, halfway between Bennington and Arlington. The Peleg Cole place was a ninety-acre farm, with a rough-hewn house (circa 1779) made of large granite chunks and pine clapboard; a slate roof was pitched steeply to discard the heavy snow. A gable and window hung out over the front door, while the other windows were neatly recessed, with red trimming. Perched on a small rise, the house had views of the Green Mountains to the east and the Taconics to the west. Large maples, oaks, and chestnuts shaded the house in the summer—an attractive feature that appealed at once to Frost. He was most taken by the ancient apple orchard on the property—“as good as they get,” he said. There was also a substantial maple grove, with a small sugar shack for boiling down the precious sap into syrup, a good cash crop. The property also included a brook and plenty of good pastureland, as well as two small barns.

The house itself was in poor condition, without running water or a furnace. Elinor hesitated when she saw the house, but Fisher urged her and Frost to go ahead, offering the temporary use of a house she owned in Arlington called The Manse (where she had lived before her marriage). Marjorie, who was fifteen, could enroll in the ninth grade in North Bennington that fall—a prospect that encouraged Elinor, who (like Marjorie) was unhappy with the school in Franconia. Frost was deeply affected by the natural surroundings, and felt that he could write there. It was much like going back to Derry.

Exactly how Frost saw the move himself is evident from a letter to his English friend John Haines, written on October 10, 1920:

I have been leaving Franconia, New Hampshire (a German-English combination of names) to go and live in South Shaftsbury, Vermont (an English-French combination). Our motives for making the change were not political, however, but agricultural. We seek a better place to farm and especially grow apples. Franconia’s winter killed apple trees—and some years even in July and August frosted gardens. The beautiful White Mountains were too near for warmth. A hundred miles further south and out of the higher peaks as we shall be, we think we ought to be safer.

Arlington, Shaftsbury, Rupert, Sunderland, Manchester, Dorset, Rutland: the towns all round us are named after courtiers of Charles the Second. It looks as if some gunpowder plot had blown them up at a ball and scattered them over our map. I might wish they rang a little more Puritanically to my ear, but as you know I make a point about not being too fastidious about anything but the main issue.2

The old problem of how to make a living also returned, now that Frost had thrown over his Amherst job (which, in his last academic year, had brought in $4,000). Although he was greatly in demand as a lecturer, these performances rarely netted more than a hundred dollars; published poems brought in anywhere from fifteen to thirty dollars, but Frost had not been prolific in the past few years: under half a dozen poems had appeared between 1917 and 1920.

Frost’s immediate financial crisis was relieved by a well-off young man called Raymond Holden, a New Yorker who summered in Franconia. Holden had known Frost for a few years, and he had shared his own poetry with the older poet. They had corresponded for several years while Holden was serving with the cavalry sent by President Woodrow Wilson to protect the Mexican border during the uprising of Pancho Villa. When he (and his new wife) returned to Franconia in 1919, he bought half of the Frost farm in Franconia for $2,500, with a promise to buy the other half for the same price if Frost should decide to move. Thus, Frost increased his original investment in the Franconia farm fivefold; he had plenty of money left to buy the Peleg Cole place, with cash to spare. Lawrance Thompson, ever eager to impugn Frost’s motives, suggests that the poet took advantage of young Holden, who admired him and certainly hoped to settle near him.

But Holden was hardly forced to buy the Frost property—and there is plenty of correspondence to suggest that Frost genuinely liked Holden and acted as a kind of mentor to him. Holden remained a great admirer to the end, although he briefly felt that Frost had used him for his convenience.3 In an unpublished memoir, he recalled:

The happiest and most memorable days of my friendship with Robert were in spite of the difficulties which arose there for me and for him—those at Franconia between 1915 and 1920. I can point to many of his poems and say, “This was written after we did such-and-such.” He had the habit, when he finished a new poem, of writing out a copy of it in longhand, signing it, and giving it to me. I remember particularly the appearance of one called “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” and of another entitled “A Hillside Thaw,” both of which were written in the early spring of 1919 [Holden may mean 1920], after he and I had sat up all one night tending the fire and keeping the sap flowing in the sugar orchard close to Robert’s house.4

In his search for capital to fund his move to South Shaftsbury, Frost also borrowed $1,000 from Louis Untermeyer. This loan, which is more a sign of Frost’s deep anxiety about money than an indication of genuine need, was repaid a few months later. As usual, Untermeyer was glad to be of use to Frost, and he encouraged the man he admired to depend on him in this way.

The release from academic life appears to have worked at once. Frost wrote half a dozen important poems in the summer and fall of 1920, including “A Star in a Stoneboat,” “The Star-Splitter,” “Maple,” “The Grindstone,” “Two Witches” (which includes “The Witch of Coös” and “The Pauper Witch of Grafton”), “Wild Grapes,” and “Fire and Ice”—a remarkable run of creativity. He was also able to complete several poems begun earlier, such as “Paul’s Wife,” a fanciful poem about Mrs. Paul Bunyan, wife of the legendary lumberjack, which had been started in 1912 and left unfinished. Within a few months, he had a good start on a new collection.

The range of this work is startling, from the narrative invention of “Paul’s Wife” to the lively verse drama of “The Witch of Coös” to the fierce, aphoristic compactness of “Fire and Ice.” This latter—an attempt to write in the epigramatic style of the classical poets—is rightly celebrated:

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

The poem was roughed out in Amherst the previous fall, but in July Frost pulled it together, lacing the rhymes as tightly as a boot. At once whimsical and fierce, the poem contains a bold admission: “I think I know enough of hate.” Indeed, Frost delighted in his own prejudices, these “hatreds” that were his way of staking out the boundaries of selfhood. William Pritchard quotes a letter Frost wrote to B. F. Skinner (a recent college graduate) in 1926: “All that makes a writer is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invicible personal prejudice.”5

In “Fire and Ice,” the poet-narrator seems to have been through the torrid and frigid zones, to have loved and hated. The Yankee pose is apparent in the easy generalizations (“Some say”) and the self-consciously elevated diction one might hear at a Vermont town meeting (“I hold with those”). The speaker uses reticence at times (“From what I’ve tasted of desire”) to imply vast worlds of experience, but there is also the hint that he has experienced great bitterness (“I think I know enough of hate”). Rhyming with “hate,” the word “great” in the penultimate line is wonderfully general, even offhand, given the context: “To say that for destruction ice / Is also great / And would suffice.” He is even wryly comic, wittily rhyming “ice” with “suffice.” One can scarely imagine a more complex linking of tones in such a short space, or such compacted fury combining with such quiet, effective comedy.

By 1920, Frost had become thoroughly at ease in the role of spokesman for rural New England, getting (as he said) “Yankier and Yankier” as he aged. He had begun to understand the range of subjects and tonalities possible within his tiny territory, seeing there were few limits to where he could go in this persona, or how deeply he could inhabit it. By now—he was forty-seven—the mask and the man were closely bound. From this point on Frost would rarely distance himself from the mask, and would wear it freely—even defiantly—in public. He could play at being something that, in fact, he was, taking pleasure in the possibilities of his persona. As Seamus Heaney has noted, his “appetite for his own independence was fierce and expressed itself in a reiterated belief in his right to limits: his defenses, his fences, and his freedom were all interdependent.”6 Yet he also recognized that his fear of chaos, of the abyss into which he periodically fell, urged upon him these limits, and that self-containment was a kind of defense against those darker, threatening forces barely held in abeyance.

*   *   *

Frost’s relationship with his sister, Jeanie, had taken an unhappy turn the previous spring. A letter from Wilbur Rowell, the family attorney (who had remained in closer touch with Jeanie than had her brother), was full of bad news: “Last Thursday morning the Police Department of Portland, Maine, telephoned to me saying that they had Jeanie Frost in confinement and that she was demented. They wanted me to come there and take her off their hands. This I declined to do. I have neither the authority nor the means to take care of her.”7 Rowell explained that she had been moving from place to place, drawing advances on her grandfather’s annual annuity. The money was almost gone by now, and Frost would have to step in.

He had come to his sister’s aid when, in 1916, she’d enrolled as a mature student at the University of Michigan, following up on his promise to assist her in getting some credentials. By chance, he had recently met, in Franconia, an English professor from Michigan called Morris P. Tilley, whom he had asked to help his sister in any way possible. Tilley later reported to Frost that Jeanie had “made last year upon two of her instructors and two of the college officers … the impression of extreme eccentricity.”8 One senses a degree of delicacy in Tilley’s phrasing.

Jeanie had been quite unable to adjust to college life—or life in general, as her police detention suggests; by April 1920 she was a permanent resident of the State Hospital in Augusta, Maine, where she would spend the last nine years of her life in a confused state, dying in 1929 at the age of fifty-three. It was an abiding tragedy for her brother, who saw traces of insanity in himself and his children that often led to fits of anxiety. As it was, he rarely saw her again, finding visits too painful to withstand. As he later confided to John Bartlett, he believed the situation with Jeanie was brought on partly by her own “poor choices in life.” He thought that everyone’s sanity, or “soul,” as he liked to call it, hung by a thread—not literally, as his New England ancestor Jonathan Edwards argued in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but figuratively. It is up to each of us, as Frost once wrote, to “save ourselves unaided.” Jeanie had (by her brother’s reckoning) made the wrong decisions, and she had paid dearly with her sanity.9

*   *   *

The renovations were completed on the house in South Shaftsbury by mid-November, and the Frosts moved in. There was no real farming to be done at this time of year, so Frost settled into a sustained period of writing; he was self-consciously trying to recapture the feeling he had had in Derry, and in Beaconsfield. He began, as usual, by revising poems that had long sat in rough form in his notebooks. These included “Nothing Gold Can Stay”—one of his most affecting lyrics:

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

A poem like this is the product of close natural observation, a passionate sympathy for the processes of nature, and a finely tuned awarness of nature’s metaphorical potential. There is an aphoristic brilliance in the first line, compounded by the subsequent lines. The poem takes a remarkable turn in the fifth and sixth lines: “Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief.” Here is the Emersonian move: to associate patterns of natural imagery with the cycles of human life, to find the correspondences between these parallel worlds. The minute natural observation of the first four lines gives way, suddenly, to the Fall of Man—a dramatic widening of the poem’s sphere of meaning as Frost appears to suggest that the mere passage of time, and the organic unfolding of “leaf subsid[ing] to leaf,” brings about this disaster. In the last two lines, the sphere widens to include the cycles of the cosmos: “So dawn goes down to day.” The poet takes the reader to a rarely visited place—the slide from dawn (often associated in classical poetry with the color of gold) to day. Everything is flux, the poem suggests; the bloom of Eden withers. The gold of beginnings becomes the more durable green of summer, which is nothing but a stage on the way to autumnal fire and wintery blankness.

This arresting lyric was coaxed from a fragment written in 1900. A version was sent on March 20, 1920, to George Roy Elliott, a recent friend who in 1919 had written an article on Frost in the Nation that he’d liked a great deal and that had sparked a lifelong friendship between the two men (indeed, the last letter Frost ever wrote was to Elliott).10 This version contained twenty-four lines, divided into three octets. The first two octets were compacted into the current poem. The final octet was rescued and expanded decades later to be published in A Witness Tree as “It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand”:

To start the world of old

We had one age of gold

Not labored out of mines,

And some say there are signs

The second such has come,

The true Millennium,

The final golden glow

To end it. And if so

(And science ought to know)

We well may raise our heads

From weeding garden beds

And annotating books

To watch this end de luxe.

A fatal cuteness (“this end de luxe”) makes the later poem so much less affecting and interesting than “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” although something of the original fire still smolders here and there, especially in the aphoristic first four lines.

Another important poem of this period was “Two Look at Two.” Frost had managed a rough draft during his last year at Amherst, and he sent a version of the poem to Cox in a letter of July 17, 1920.11 It is one of Frost’s most successful ventures into dramatic poetry, complicated by the presence of a narrator who at times conflates with the characters in the poem, a couple who are wandering in the woods:

Love and forgetting might have carried them

A little further up the mountainside

With night so near, but not much further up.

They must have halted soon in any case

With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was

With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;

When they were halted by a tumbled wall

With barbed-wire binding.…

Note how the poem opens with four lines of conventional blank verse (made somewhat less regular by the reversal of the first foot). It’s that jagged fifth line that upsets the rhythmical motion, setting up a complex range of rhythmical expectations and possibilities. As in “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches,” Frost is good at portraying indecision; when the couple meet the barbed wire and “tumbled wall,” they hesitate:

                        They stood facing this,

Spending what onward impulse they still had

In one last look the way they must not go,

On up the failing path, where, if a stone

Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;

No footstep moved it.…

One could not hear a more Frostian note than “Spending what onward impulse they still had / In one last look the way they must not go.” These lines recall the pivotal moment in “Storm Fear,” one of his earliest poems: “It costs no inward struggle not to go, / Ah, no!” Frost’s characters, literally as well as figuratively, seem endlessly forced to calculate the costs of movement, trying to predict the weight of various consequences that can only be guessed at.

The couple think their journey is over, when suddenly a doe “from round a spruce stood looking at them / Across the wall, as near the wall as they.” The drama is heightened when a buck appears, too:

“This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?”

But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.

A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them.

Frost dares repeat “from round the spruce stood looking at them / Across the wall, as near the wall as they.” This repetition, or echo, contributes to the wavelike motion of the narrative, with its rise and fall. “But no, not yet” is spoken by the invisible narrator, but it might as well be contained in the quotation that precedes it. The poem moves toward an intense lyrical denouement in which the Emersonian correspondence is fully satisfied, as if inner and outer worlds have merged in a moment of affirmation quite unusual in Frost (and powerfully rebutted in a later poem, “The Most of It,” from A Witness Tree). “It was all,” Frost writes:

A great wave from it going over them,

As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor

Had made them certain earth returned their love.

“At such moments,” says Seamus Heaney, “a fullness rebounds back upon itself, or it rebounds off something or someone else and thereby creates a wave capable of lifting the burden of our knowledge and the experience to a new, refreshing plane.”12

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Frost’s money problems were further subdued in November by an offer from Holt to serve as consulting editor for a salary of a hundred dollars a month, an amount that Frost acknowledged to another friend was “small but large for a poet.”13 This had been the idea of Lincoln MacVeagh, a young Harvard graduate who had taken over as Frost’s editor from Alfred Harcourt, who had left Holt to found his own company with Donald Brace, another colleague from Holt. (Harcourt had vigorously tried to take Frost with him, but Frost—though sympathetic at first—finally stayed with Holt because the company owned the rights to his earlier volumes, and he had been warned that Holt would not let these books appear in any future collected edition issued by another publisher.)

Frost had been “barding around,” as he put it, through the Amherst years, but now he pursued this course aggressively. The South Shaftsbury home became a base of operations, and Frost traveled to far-flung corners of the continent, reading poems wherever anybody was willing to invite him: Bryn Mawr, New York City, Texas, Michigan, Princeton. At Princeton, in March, he met Paul Elmer More, author of the Shelburne Essays. More’s biographer, Arthur Hazard Dakin, records a letter from More that recalls the encounter with Frost:

I have always rather admired his poetry, which is modern in some respects, but has balance and measure and deals with the real things of life. It was a pleasure to talk with him—we sat up until about one—and hear how sound his views on art and human nature are. He knows all the wild men now snorting up the sides of Parnassus, has heard the infinite scandals of their life, and can prick them out in epigrams to the king’s taste. It was rather exhilarating to listen to him, and I think too he went away somewhat encouraged from his contact with a kindred soul.14

Frost occasionally stayed overnight in Manhattan at Mrs. William Vaughn Moody’s redbrick townhouse in Greenwich Village, which she maintained as a kind of watering hole for writers. There, in 1919, he had met the midwestern poet Ridgely Torrence, who became a good friend. (Torrence was appointed as poetry editor of the New Republic in 1920, and Frost wrote to him jestingly: “You’ll begin to think I don’t see the beauty of having a friend on the editorial staff of the New Republic. But I do and I mean to show it by sending you some poems I have on hand just as soon as I can.”)15

Perhaps inevitably, Frost began to cast about for another academic affiliation almost as soon as he was free of Amherst. What he had in mind was something extremely free-floating: a poet-in-residence position. He had recently heard that Middlebury College had just begun a new School of English at Bread Loaf Mountain, on a glorious summer campus roughly eight miles from the main campus in the village of Middlebury. Professor Wilfred E. Davison was the head of the program, which offered graduate study in English and American literature. Frost wrote to Davison suggesting that he come and lecture for a week or so: “I might fit into your summer plan with a course on the Responsibilities of Teachers of Composition,” he wrote.16 This inquiry led to a visit to Stone Cottage (as the Frosts now called their house in South Shaftsbury), and—after some haggling over money—an arrangement was made for Frost to visit the School of English the following summer. Thus began Robert Frost’s connection to Bread Loaf, which would remain a vital aspect of his life.

Not quite out of the blue came an offer from the University of Michigan for Frost to spend a year as visiting fellow for $5,000—a tidy sum for very little work. Frost had been recommended for this fellowship by Percy MacKaye, a poet and dramatist who was also a friend of Ridgely Torrence’s. The invitation was not unwelcome, though it would mean that the Frost family would again have to uproot itself; furthermore, Frost was anxious about cutting himself off from the region that had been his home for so long. Despite these objections, he was also becoming conscious of his need for a live audience and a community of intelligent friends. He had sorely missed those aspects of the Amherst job since coming to South Shaftsbury.

The Frosts planned to return to Franconia during the August hay-fever season. “I am beginning to sniff the air suspiciously, on the point of taking flight from these weedy regions,” he wrote to Raymond Holden. “It can’t be long before you hear me come crashing through the woods in your direction.”17 The period of awkwardness between Frost and Holden had passed, and in Franconia they quickly resumed the friendship, taking long walks together into the nearby forests and spending late nights on the open porch of Holden’s house “discussing poetry and philosophy, history and natural science,” as Holden recalled. Frost’s mind was “all sparks, fanning wide.”

The Frosts returned to South Shaftsbury in September to make arrangements for the Michigan adventure. Marjorie was to stay in North Bennington with her best friend, Lillian LaBatt, during her junior year at North Bennington High School. Carol would stay at the farm, tending to the crop of apples, although he would soon join his parents in Ann Arbor. Lesley, who had been working in New York, decided to accompany her parents to Michigan and audit a few courses at the university. Irma would also audit courses, although she planned to focus on her painting and sculpture, working at home in a studio at the top of their large Victorian house at 1523 Washtenaw Avenue—a furnished house owned by the widow of a deceased professor of classics. The most substantial house that the Frost family had thus far occupied, it gave Frost a sense of his importance as a visiting fellow.

Exactly what Frost would do was left open by the president of the university, Dr. Marion L. Burton. Because the job of poet-in-residence was still highly experimental in American education, there was no clear vision of how Frost might function with the university. To his credit, Frost was able to invent this role for himself, and for generations of writers-in-residence to follow. He understood that the point of having a writer on a campus was “to say something to the world for keeping the creative and erudite together in education.”18

Having made his way at Amherst bumpily, he was prepared for the pitfalls and possibilities of the Michigan fellowship. He knew perfectly well that certain members of the faculty would resent him; indeed, a few complained that the university was wasting $5,000 on a poet who sat around doing nothing while they slaved in the classroom. But these voices were insignificant, dwarfed by the general enthusiasm for Frost, who proceeded carefully, taking considerable pains to get to know faculty and students alike.

He was guided through the thickets of faculty politics by Morris P. Tilley, his old friend from summers in Franconia. One member of the English department, Roy Cowden, took the trouble to introduce Frost to undergraduate writers, especially those associated with the school literary magazine, Whimsies. Frost was also careful to make himself available to the townspeople, and gave regular public readings and lectures, using his considerable charm to good effect.

An important function of any writer within a university setting is to bring other writers to the campus, and Frost worked hard behind the scenes to see that Michigan had a strong series of visiting speakers, including Carl Sandburg (whom he vaguely disliked, joking that he spent most of his time “washing his white hair” and strumming his “mandolin,” as Frost referred to the poet’s guitar), Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Padraic Colum, Witter Bynner, and—of course—Louis Untermeyer. On these occasions Frost played the role of host energetically, often keeping the visitors up well past their bedtimes.

One of the essential features of the Michigan fellowship was that Frost should have time to work on his own poems, and—as at Amherst—he found the distractions of the position such that relatively little free time for writing could be uncovered. He did, however, revise some poems to his satisfaction. “Evening in a Sugar Orchard” (which he gave to Whimsies to publish in their issue of November 1921) and “A Hillside Thaw” were among these—two vivid snapshots of rural New England life. Frost had in mind a new collection, and spent time contemplating its arrangement, but he lacked a central poem or defining notion for this hypothetical volume.

Carol, Lesley, and Irma decamped from Ann Arbor in the spring, for various reasons (Carol had quarreled with his father over his farming plans and stormed out of the house without even saying that he was going home to South Shaftsbury). Frost and Elinor were left to close up the house and say good-byes. President Burton had already intimated that he hoped Frost might return for another year of this “fine experiment” and suggested that Frost was as popular in the town as the university’s well-known football coach, “Hurry-Up” Yost. Frost, amusingly, then suggested that this comparison be put to the test, and that Burton schedule a poetry reading by Frost at the same time as a Michigan football game. He added, “If you come to my poetry reading, you will be the only one there, because I shall be at the football game!”19

Frost made it clear to Burton that he would accept an offer to extend the fellowship at Michigan. Nevertheless, by the time he arrived back in South Shaftsbury, in mid-June 1922, he was tired of academic life and toyed with the idea of giving it up altogether. He wanted to reconnect to the farm, to turn over the soil, to sit under a tree with a notebook on his lap. As on the farm at Derry, he often worked at the kitchen table late at night, enjoying the solitude of a house in which everyone else was asleep, “with the crickets outside, like a metronome.” He recalled one vivid night when two of his most celebrated poems, “New Hampshire” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” came in one great rush. He later recalled to Louis Mertins:

There had been days of terrific strain on the farm. You see, I can manage a poem in the singular very well and not feel the strain, not too much. In the midst of my work at the farm I could handle such a task. Sometimes one would grow out of an idea, leaving me relaxed. At other times the idea would produce a second growth, coercing itself as a Siamese twin on its predecessor. That would bring trouble of spirit, and more than likely right in harvest time. I would be in a terrible stew, fever, likely. My legs would ache, my head would ache. Eating was out of the question. Sleep? There wasn’t any.… “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was written just about that way, after I had been working all night long on “New Hampshire.” But I must admit, it was written in a few minutes without any strain.20

The whole poem may have come to Frost in a flash, but he had great trouble with the last stanza. It was some time before he thought of solving the problem by simply repeating the last line: “And miles to go before I sleep.” This famous repetition gives the poem a peculiar, haunting quality.

“New Hampshire” is an important poem in the Frost canon, not so much for its effectiveness as poetry but for its sly cogence in putting forward a theory of poetry. It falls into a mode of satirical verse that would, in the later years, seem to overwhelm the more serious lyrics—which remain the best of Frost. Nevertheless, one must pay careful attention to these satires, and to “New Hampshire” in particular. It was not for nothing that Frost chose to put it first in his next collection, New Hampshire, and to make the rest of the poems seem (perhaps in satirical response to Eliot’s The Waste Land) mere “Notes and Grace Notes” in attendance on the title poem.

The slyness is there from the outset. Frost, in the manner of the Roman poet Horace, whom he admired, takes on the role of playful rustic philosopher:

I met a lady from the South who said

(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):

“None of my family ever worked, or had

A thing to sell.”…

Thus begins the first movement of the poem (up to line 60), where Frost argues wittily that only in New Hampshire do people understand the proper relationship between labor, actual goods, and that great, damnable abstraction—money. Frost gives comic examples of false attitudes toward the creation of wealth from California to Arkansas. Only New Hampshire, it seems, has got it right. “The having anything to sell is what / Is the disgrace in man or state or nation,” Frost says. Selling is an activity that suggests, to the wary New Hampshirite, an illegitimate prodigality.

In a shrewd turn, Frost transforms the material poverty of New Hampshire into spiritual wealth. He argues that one can find within these parsimonious state borders “One each of everything,” which makes it a little but perfect world: a Platonic heaven-on-earth. In an age bent on “getting and spending” (as Wordsworth put it), one is relieved to find in New Hampshire such spareness and universality. Indeed, “New Hampshire” moves slowly but inexorably into a meditation on the relationship between the universal and the particular in the context of regionalism.

Typically, Frost embraces every paradox, and wants everything both ways at once. (Katherine Kearns notes that Frost’s joking allusiveness in “New Hampshire” often “countermands the confident, assertive tone” of the poem, providing a dark after-echo. She also notes the dizzying effect of this technique: “For the reader who is in on the joke, the effect is not to reorient meaning but to undermine it.”)21 With regard to regionalism, Frost wants New Hampshire to be utterly distinct yet representative, professing an immersion in the local, an escape into the particulars of a given region, implying that all of life can be found in this specific place.

The central section of the poem dwells on the New Hampshire mountains as suggestive of the imagination as a whole. Frost upbraids Emerson for disparaging New Hampshire and using the mountains to belittle the residents of the state themselves; he chides Amy Lowell for a similar attitude. (Frost is still responding here to Lowell’s chapter on him in her 1917 book, Tendencies in Modern Poetry, where she sees Frost’s rural types as mired in a narrow-mindedness that amounts to degeneracy. “His people are left-overs of the old stock,” she wrote, “morbid, pursued by phantoms, slowly sinking to insanity.”)22

In a clever move that brings his own aesthetic to the fore, Frost examines the idea of New Hampshire in relation to both universals and particulars in lines 228–47, proclaiming himself “the author / Of several books against the world in general.” Any narrow regionalist view of his poetic project is openly denounced because it “restrict[s] my meaning.” His meaning is wide, even universal. “I’m what is called a sensibilitist, / Or otherwise an environmentalist,” he proclaims. While the use of these abstract terms mocks the academic critics who would seek to characterize him, Frost—as always—wants it both ways here as well. He is “an environmentalist” in the sense that he writes out of a specific environment and admits to being shaped by it; that is part and parcel of being a regionalist. But he also affects his environment, even shapes it himself:

I make a virtue of my suffering

From nearly everything that goes on round me.

In other words, I know wherever I am,

Being the creature of literature I am,

I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.

That is, no matter what is “really” happening around him, Frost is determined to see that it conforms to his own imagination, becomes an extension of his ongoing self-mythification (to an extent reversing the Darwinian idea that the environment shapes the individual). The theme of personal progress through trial and suffering, “the trial by existence,” recurs in many of Frost’s best poems, but here it is absorbed into his private ars poetica.

The mountains of New Hampshire are elevated in this poem to the level of a poetic symbol as Frost contemplates (with increasing fury) Emerson’s remark that “The God who made New Hampshire / Taunted the lofty land with little men.” Frost does not wish to belittle the people of New Hampshire but to raise the mountains even higher. All that is required, he suggests, is enough imagination to get the job accomplished. The distance that must be crossed between reality (the actual mountains) and Reality (the imagined mountains) becomes, in Frost’s aesthetic, a point of honor. The poet challenges reality, then modifies it; he “cannot rest from planning day or night / How high I’d thrust the peaks in summer snow.”

The poem concludes with an elaborately comic musing on the use of realism in literature, the argument put forward in the context of an argument between the poet and a “New York alec / About the new school of the pseudo-phallic.” This urban intellectual supposedly makes the case that the writer must describe reality warts and all or retreat into “prudery.” Frost responds frostily: “‘Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.’” That is, he will escape to his region, and to regionalism-as-universal-ground, a place where he can have it both ways: the concreteness of locality and the universality of a world where things are typical.

There is nothing escapist about this attitude. Frost actually dismisses the prudery of those who wish to escape from nature, making fun of those who run “for shelter” from nature “quoting Matthew Arnold”—who represents (to Frost) a kind of disembodied, bloodless humanism. “I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer,” the poet declares toward the end of the poem. But even here, he backs off this statement with a wry parenthetical remark suggesting that his money would come from “a publisher in New York City.” The last three lines are, in fact, a model of wryness:

It’s restful to arrive at a decision,

And restful just to think about New Hampshire.

At present I am living in Vermont.

This is called having your cake and eating it, too.

While not one of Frost’s best poems, “New Hampshire” is central to the poet’s work of this period, typifying the ironic use of the pastoral mode in his work and laying out an argument for a poetry that at once celebrates the specifics of rural life while maintaining a certain rueful distance. The doubleness of Frost’s vision is put forward explicitly, as Kearns suggests, by the joking references throughout, which create a counterargument. The narrative proceeds by anecdote and rumination, a mode that again suggests a rural persona; as if to confound this mode, the range of allusion (from Greek metaphysics to Matthew Arnold) is such that nobody would mistake this for an uneducated farmer’s voice. New England is taken as representative, but there is nothing subjective about this choice; Frost moves through the local into the universal.

The morning after the all-night session in which Frost wrote “New Hampshire” at his kitchen table in South Shaftsbury, he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” his most famous lyric. “Having finished ‘New Hampshire,’” he said, “I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn’t disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o’clock went back in and wrote the piece about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had an hallucination.”23 “Stopping by Woods” represents the perfection of Frost’s art in the straight lyric mode, his “best bid for remembrance,” as he told Louis Untermeyer. He remarked to Reginald Cook that it contained “all I ever knew.” And in countless readings of the poem in public, he would leave it open to the listener to decide what was meant by the poem’s suggestive final stanza:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

To an audience at Bread Loaf, he once said that the ominous-seeming last lines don’t necessarily mean that “you’re going to do anything bad” when you get home. On the contrary, he found something comforting in those lines, a promise of coming in from the cold, from the solitude, threat, and wilderness of icy woods, into good company.

The aphoristic quality of this little poem, which seems so natural that one cannot imagine its having been invented, is such that one can hardly not memorize it. Even thematically, it is typical of Frost’s art: a poem about a loner, a man against nature, in the dark, on a frozen winter night. He stops suddenly, mystifying his horse, who “gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake.” In a brilliantly compressed image of rural winter, Frost writes: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.” Those lines, with their strange, alluring modulation of vowels and consonants, possess an eerie perfection. The final stanza, with its haunting repetitions, gives the poem that doubleness required of all good Frostian lyrics; had Frost written the line once, the reader might have taken it to mean only that the traveler had a long way to go that night; the repetition adds an element of wonder, giving the line a numinous glow. One begins to question what Frost really meant, which is the point: Frost’s traveler in “Stopping by Woods” does not know where he is ultimately heading, just as travelers in life are often uncertain of their final destination. The sigh heard in the last stanza of “The Road Not Taken” (“I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”) recurs, invisibly but unmistakably, between the last two lines here, signaling a shift of tone, a slight modulation into doubleness and irony.