12

THE MIND SKATING CIRCLES
1923–1925

Since last I saw you I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying.

—FROST TO UNTERMEYER, JUNE 9, 1923

The summer of 1922 ended with an ambitious hike on the Long Trail, beginning in Bennington and following the Green Mountains northward to the Canadian border. Frost eagerly joined Carol, Lesley, Marjorie, and Marjorie’s closest friend, Lillian LaBatt, for the 225-mile trek. They planned to sleep in mountain shelters, and they carried on their backs all the supplies they would need for the journey. Frost kept a small notebook in his pocket for making what he called “wood-notes.”

Like Wordsworth and Dickens before him, Frost was an avid walker, but at Pico Peak he developed a problem with his feet (which he attributed to his boots), so he temporarily abandoned the group and went by train from Rutland to Middlebury. Having bought another pair of boots, he rejoined the hikers at Lake Pleiad—a deep, spring-fed pond in the middle of the woods. He stayed with the younger set for a few more days, making it to Mount Mansfield, where his feet at last gave out, even with fresh boots. The rest of the pack managed to get to the Canadian border without him.

Despite having bailed out early, Frost found the experience a memorable one, and he wrote enthusiastically to John Haines in England: “I did something like 200 miles, most of them painful to the feet, but all beautiful to the eye and mind.”1 He resolved to keep up his interest in hiking, noting that regular movement “stilled the mind” in a way that was productive of poetry.

This heady dose of wilderness was just what Frost needed before plunging back into the academic world of Michigan. Even so, he reentered the academy at his own gingerly pace, attending a reception in his honor held by President Burton on October 11, but then skipping out for a few weeks of “barding around” the country, as he always put it. Having been elected poet laureate of Vermont, he appeared in Rutland and elsewhere in this new guise, prompting a snide piece about his appointment in the New York Times: “Mr. Frost was born in California, and his college days were spent partly at Dartmouth and partly at Harvard. He was a farmer for a while, or Who’s Who says so, though one wonders, and then, after teaching in several New Hampshire schools he finally landed a post as Professor of English Literature in Amherst. His home is set down as Franconia, N.H., but he does have a summer place in South Shaftsbury, Vt., and that seems to be his only connection with the Green Mountain State.”2

Frost also read his poems to a group in Boston, and at Wellesley College, where a professor (who also wrote poetry) named Katherine Lee Bates invited him to read. Another friend at Wellesley was the writer Gamaliel Bradford, whom Frost had met on a visit to Wellesley three years before. He had taken to Bradford, and tried unsuccessfully to get his poetry, plays, and novels published. In his later years, one often sees Frost in the role one associates with Ezra Pound: friend and aide to writers. He regularly went out of his way to help those whose work he admired (although, unlike Pound, he seems to have chosen to promote writers several rungs below him in talent and therefore unlikely to become rivals).

A heated topic for discussion between Bradford and Frost was the anonymously published A Critical Fable, which had recently set tongues wagging in the world of letters. It was modeled on James Russell Lowell’s A Fable for Critics, which had made lighthearted fun of Emerson, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, Poe, and even Lowell himself. Frost knew at once that Amy Lowell had written it, in imitation of her famous ancestor; he had heard enough of her opinions on her contemporaries to recognize them here. It slightly annoyed him to see himself pictured as a “foggy benignity wandering in space / With a stray wisp of moonlight just touching his face.” On the other hand, Miss Lowell had placed Frost among the poets worth teasing—the peer of Robinson, Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay, and herself (Eliot and Stevens, among others, were relegated to a lesser category). One suspects that Frost was not too peeved.

Before returning to Ann Arbor, he ventured as far south as Louisiana, Texas, and Missouri to read and lecture. By now, his confidence had grown to a point where he rarely showed any degree of nervousness in public, although he privately fretted over each performance. The student paper at one southern college where he spoke reported, “Not only did he give selections from his own works, but he also explained the origin and characteristics of modern poetry, including references to other modern poets, thus giving the audience an intimate glimpse of every contemporary in the art. And besides these things, and something which many will remember longer probably than the context of his lecture, his charming sense of humor.”3

Robert Penn Warren recalled that “Frost came to Vanderbilt to lecture [in 1922], invited by [John Crowe] Ransom. Ransom and Frost admired each other—they were both traditionalists at heart. Frost’s poetics—his unconventional use of conventional meters and forms—appealed to us. He made a strong impression, very open and sincere, but sharp-witted, too. He met Merrill Moore on that visit, and Moore later settled in Boston. That friendship kept going. The same thing happened with Donald Davidson, who went so far as to buy a house at Bread Loaf to be near Frost, who had this way of attracting people.”4

Meanwhile, Frost was working with Lincoln MacVeagh, his new editor at Holt, to pull together his fourth volume, to be called simply New Hampshire. MacVeagh had another idea for a book, too: a selection of the best of the first three volumes. He planned to publish this selection in March 1923. The double impact of a substantial new book of poems with a volume of selected poems was carefully calculated to present Frost as a major contemporary figure.

The reading tour of the South had been more exhausting than Frost had bargained for, however, and he succumbed to influenza upon his return to Ann Arbor. Nevertheless, it was a relief to be home. He and Elinor had moved into a house on Washtenaw Avenue across the street from the larger one they had occupied the year before, but it was more to their liking, “more cheerful and homelike,” Elinor reported. Her dislike of housework was such that she much preferred less space. Furthermore, the children were back in Vermont, “involved with their own comings and goings,” as she wrote to her friend in Franconia, Edith Fobes, who became a regular correspondent.

Frost was not expected to teach any formal classes at the university, but there were still demands on his time: teas and faculty receptions, student plays, dinner parties. He wrote to George Whicher of Amherst that he was “not Mr. Frost formerly of Michigan but Mr. Frost formally of Michigan.” Already planning to play hooky from Michigan, he added: “I expect to spend a lot of my time in South Shaftsbury this year, writing little verses.”5

In November, “The Witch of Coös” won a prize of two hundred dollars from Poetry Magazine—a foretaste of good things to come. “I don’t care what people think of my poetry so long as they award it prizes,” he wrote with some wryness to the editor Harriet Monroe.6 His taste for accolades was whetted, and he seems to have enjoyed the spectacle of his own enjoyment of these approbations. He was ever the fondest spectator at his own show, and was more than willing to forgive himself the occasional lapse in behavior. “I am bad as you imply or openly assert,” he wrote to John Haines, who had teased him about his “wickedness.”7

A good example of this was Frost’s behavior to Joseph Warren Beach, a young scholar from the University of Minnesota who had come to visit him several years before in Franconia. Beach and Frost went for long walks in the woods, and the younger man quickly realized that Frost relished good anecdotes, especially those with a slightly outrageous or lascivious bent. Beach presented himself as a young Don Juan, bragging about his exploits with young women in the university.

A year later, Frost was invited to read at Minnesota, and during this visit he listened to Beach’s tales of adventures with a beautiful young graduate assistant called Dagmar Doneghy, who was considering marriage to the owner of a local circus. Frost (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) insisted that Beach marry the woman at once—or at least propose to her. Beach hesitated, explaining that Dagmar was difficult even to meet these days. When Frost suggested kidnapping her, Beach agreed to go visit her—with Frost tagging along as mentor. They drove (in Beach’s car) up and down the Minneapolis street where Dagmar lived, and when she emerged from the house, they asked her to come with them for a ride. Innocently, she agreed. Soon they were driving deep into the country together. Poor Dagmar had been “kidnapped.”

Beach pulled to the side of a deserted country road and asked the confused Dagmar to go for a little walk. When they returned (a considerable amount of time later), Beach announced to Frost that they were engaged. “Good,” Frost declared. “Let’s get you married today.” They protested that Minnesota law prevented such hastiness, but Frost said Indiana was close enough; you could get married there without delay. Astoundingly, the couple agreed, and they set off for Indiana together, where Frost officially witnessed the marriage before a justice of the peace the very next day. It was a bit of lark for Frost, although as one friend later observed, “He seemed to delight in the company of young couples, and encouraged their relationships, taking an almost proprietary interest in their affairs.”8

Frost delighted in retelling the story of Dagmar’s kidnapping and the abrupt wedding, exaggerating what was already a fantastic tale. He especially enjoyed painting Beach as the worst sort of rake and scoundrel; eventually these tales got back to the English department at Minnesota, where Beach was coming up for tenure. A friend of Beach’s, as well as Beach himself, pleaded with Frost to curtail his gossip. The friend went so far as to visit Frost in Ann Arbor to ask him to write directly to the chair of the English department to reassure him that Beach was an upstanding fellow. Frost complied, confessing that in his gossiping he had done Beach “a grave injustice.” He added: “This is merely a hasty note to undo at once any harm I may have done him in your estimation.”9

Frost adored playing the Lord of Misrule and caused a little trouble whenever he could. This occasionally brought hard feelings (as it did in the case of Joseph Warren Beach, who broke off relations with Frost from that point on), although these hard feelings often seem to have surprised and hurt Frost, who always claimed he meant no harm.

Another tiff, this one of a literary nature, occurred in midwinter. Frost went to New York to visit Louis Untermeyer and Ridgely Torrence, and was taken to a cocktail party where he encountered Burton Rascoe, a well-known columnist for the New York Tribune. This was 1922, of course: the annus mirabilis of modernist literature. T. S. Eliot had just published The Waste Land, and Joyce had brought out Ulysses. Frost had never liked the work of either, and he got into a furious debate with Rascoe at the party over the “modern school” of writers. To Frost’s chagrin, Rascoe repeated their conversation in his column the next week.

“Robert Frost in voice and demeanor reminds me much of Sherwood Anderson,” Rascoe said. “He has the same deliberate and ingenuous way of speaking; he is earnest, earthy, humorous, without put-on, very real, likable, genuine. I admire him very much as a person. I regret that I find almost nothing to interest me in his poems. They are deft, they are competent, they are of the soil; but they are not distinctive.

“Frost and I left the party together and went to Grand Central Station, where we talked for half an hour about Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, and Amy Lowell.… Frost has little sympathy with Eliot’s work, but then he wouldn’t naturally; his own aesthetic problem is radically different from that of Eliot’s.… ‘I don’t like obscurity in poetry,’ he told me. ‘I don’t think a thing has to be obvious before it is said, but it ought to be obvious when it is said. I like to read Eliot because it is fun seeing the way he does things, but I am always glad it is his way and not mine.”10

In a pique, Frost wrote a scathing letter to the columnist, calling him “You Little Rascol.” Fortunately, he sent the letter to Untermeyer first, who talked him out of responding at all. It was Untermeyer’s sound opinion that Frost should not respond to critics; the only fit reaction, Untermeyer said, was “to write poems and more poems.” Frost noted to Untermeyer: “You and Jean [Untermeyer] think such wrath ill becomes me. I’m over it now anyway.”11

Frost understood that keeping his poetry before the public was essential to keeping his reputation alive, and he determined to finish soon the volume he was calling New Hampshire. He huddled with his family in South Shaftsbury through December and January, working on the manuscript, which now seemed destined for a November 1923 publication date. Unfortunately, he was hampered by what Elinor described to a friend as “wracking coughs and fevers.” Ill health of a minor sort would often interfere with his work in the coming decade.

Frost spent as little time as possible in Ann Arbor, returning in February and leaving in April (although he reappeared in late May to give a farewell reading to a full, enthusiastic audience at Sarah Caswell Angell Hall). Even when he was supposedly in residence, he took countless side trips for readings and lectures. His peripatetic life was now established, and he actively sought well-paid public appearances. Elinor commonly acted as his agent, responding to those who invited him to speak, negotiating the fees, making arrangements for his travel.

*   *   *

Back in Amherst, the crisis over the presidency of Alexander Meiklejohn finally came to a head, and he was dismissed by the Board of Trustees. The chief complaint against him (made by a phalanx of conservative professors and trustees) was that he discouraged religion on campus—a complaint often voiced by Frost himself (who, despite his personal rejection of all forms of conventional worship, at least notionally supported the idea of traditional religious practice).12 Meiklejohn also suffered from embarrassing financial problems: he was heavily in debt, having borrowed large sums from wealthy trustees, and could not repay these loans. Nor had he looked after the college’s finances well. “He could inspire but could not manage,” observed Walter Lippmann in the New York World.

Fourteen of the college’s fifty faculty members resigned in protest (including Stark Young), and thirteen seniors refused to accept their diplomas at the graduation ceremony. A large portion of the junior class announced that they would not return in the fall for their senior year. This was a shattering situation, but Frost was elated by the news, aligning himself firmly with the anti-Meiklejohn group. It did, however, surprise him when a telegram arrived from the trustees offering him another job at Amherst, on similar terms to the one he had previously held there; with the resignations of so many faculty members, there was obviously a great need to replenish the ranks.

A venerable member of the classics department, George Daniel Olds, was selected as the new president, and he personally drove up to see Frost in South Shaftsbury in May, hoping to entice him back to Amherst. Olds and Frost knew each other well, and Frost admired him for his commitment to educational norms that Meiklejohn had been determined to ignore or subvert. Olds sweetened the offer by saying that Frost could teach any two courses he liked each semester; otherwise, he would serve as poet-in-residence, and his chief duty would be to write his own poems.

With this offer, the same old conflicts arose in Frost, as might have been expected. “I ought to have been poet enough to stay away,” he wrote to Wilbur Cross.13 But he explained that he found the opportunity to shape the direction of a liberal arts college irresistible. In general, he and Elinor simply preferred being in Massachusetts to Michigan; it was, after all, closer to home.

In June, Frost received an honorary degree from the University of Vermont. This degree meant more to him than the ones from Amherst and Michigan, he said, because the others had “strings attached.” He had intimate connections with those institutions, and the degrees were part of the wooing process. The University of Vermont had nothing to gain by giving Frost this degree, and he was pleased. The public recognition of Robert Frost was now under way with a vengeance.

In September, the Frosts moved into a faculty house in Amherst at 10 Dana Street, a wood-frame dwelling with a glorious western view, surrounded by maple, oak, and apple trees. Huge lilacs bushed against the southern side, just below the Frosts’ bedroom window. Elinor liked the new place, considering it “spacious enough but easy to look after,” as she wrote to Edith Fobes. The house was sparsely furnished, but this appealed to the Frosts, who liked the bare, hardwood floors and the abundant woodwork throughout the house. Frost’s study window was shaded by the apple trees.

As promised by the new president, he was assigned two courses of his own devising that fall: one a writing course (a small seminar of carefully selected students), the other simply called “Readings.” The literature course gave free range to his imagination, and he assigned a variety of texts that included Melville’s Typee and Thoreau’s Walden—always a favorite book. The former is a thinly disguised autobiographical memoir about a young man who jumps ship in the South Seas to investigate life among the cannibals; the latter, of course, is the classic American memoir of retreat and self-discovery, subtitled Life in the Woods. On a deep level, Frost identified with these rebels and iconoclasts, Melville and Thoreau, men of quirky independence, fierce opinions, and unconventional approaches to what Emerson called “the conduct of life.” Another interesting choice for this course was Edward Gibbon’s Autobiography, which includes a detailed account of his eccentric education.

As usual, Frost preached independence of mind and unconventionality in all his classes—ironically, he remained very much in the Meiklejohn mold, despite his objections to the man and his frequent complaint that Amherst was still suffering from “Meiklejaundice.” As President John Sloan Dickey of Dartmouth later recalled, “I don’t think Frost realized how out-of-the-mainstream his approach was. He was highly eccentric, highly original, as a teacher. He encouraged a kind of rebellion against the standard approaches to life. He was almost aggressively self-determined, self-determining.”14

A good deal of Frost’s thinking in the fall of 1923 concerned the relationship between a man’s writing style and his sense of himself. In a letter to Untermeyer, Frost explained the evolution of his philosophy on this topic: “Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. Some fair to good writers have no style and so leave us ignorant of how to take themselves. But that is the one important thing to know: because on it depends our likes and dislikes.” He did not regard the Wildean notion that the style is the man as adequate, however. “The man’s ideas would be some element then of his style. So would his deeds. But I would narrow the definition. His deeds are his deeds; his ideas are his ideas. His style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds.… It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward.”15

Frost was obviously describing himself here: his mind seemed to swirl, skating circles around itself as it moved forward. Many recalled the fascination of listening to him in class, how he “would take an idea, play with it, knock it around, retreat, often picking up on earlier themes that one thought he’d forgotten, but gently progressing toward some further point.”16 Thus Frost began to take himself a certain way, to carry himself toward his ideas, even his deeds, with a certain bemused, canny self-confidence that might, ungenerously, be taken for arrogance. Even in conversation, his approach to thinking stood out. “He sees ideas from many angles,” noted an early colleague at Bread Loaf, “and he illustrates everything to himself as he thinks, in specific instances and anecdotes. His talk is full of digressions, as one thing suggests another to him.”17

*   *   *

One of the major events of 1923 for the Frost family was the marriage of Carol and Lillian LaBatt. Lillian, of course, had been Marjorie’s closest friend, but she and Carol had gotten to know each other well in the past year. Hiking the Long Trail had added to their closeness. Now, after Lillian’s abrupt decision to drop out of college before her first semester was over (she had been attending the University of Vermont), Carol decided to push for an immediate wedding. Frost explained the situation in a letter to Lincoln MacVeagh: “It was all done in a week. I may be frosty, but I rather like to look on at such things. And I like children to be terribly in love. They are a nice pair. Lillian is an uncommonly pretty little girl. She is pretty, quiet and unpractical. She has been a great friend of the girls in the family for some years. All she has done is transfer herself from the girls to the boy. We’ll see how completely she deserts the girls.”18

Leaving the children to themselves on the farm in South Shaftsbury, the Frosts returned to Amherst. The invitations to lecture and read his poems hither and yonder continued to pour in, although Frost felt he could not easily abandon his classes at Amherst. He did, however, manage to get away half a dozen times, reading or lecturing in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In 1924 he spent spring break as the special guest in Ann Arbor of President Burton, who reported to Frost that he was authorized by the Board of Regents to offer him an astounding deal: a permanent position as fellow in letters. He would be required to teach no courses at all, just to give occasional seminars or private conferences. The salary would be $5,000 a year.

Frost, after much agonizing, accepted this offer on the condition that it would not be announced until the following autumn; he needed time to work things out with Amherst. In effect, he would teach a further year at Amherst; that way, he could leave with a clear conscience—although few at Amherst, including President Olds, would see it this way, as he knew only too well.

Meanwhile, New Hampshire was making its way among readers. It had been published on November 15, 1923, in an edition of 5,350 copies, with another 350 copies appearing in a limited signed edition. The book, wittily organized in three sections, was subtitled A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes and carried woodcuts by J. J. Lankes. The structure was meant as a satirical jab at Eliot’s The Waste Land, published the previous year with famously pedantic footnotes. Among the notable lyrics in this collection are “Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “The Aim Was Song,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “For Once, Then, Something,” “To Earthward,” and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” Each of these poems is distinct and peerless, representing another crest in Frost’s development—like a jagged mountain range with numerous peaks.

“To Earthward,” in Frost’s mind, had been a pivotal poem. “One of the greatest changes my nature has undergone is of record in ‘To Earthward,’” he said.19 He remembered that in his school days he could not proceed with a copybook if he had once blotted it; that perfectionism had led to great misery. Now he found himself able to accept the imperfect, even to “crave the flaws of human handiwork.”

The poem itself, which Frost virtually never read in public because he found it too painful, is astonishing:

Love at the lips was touch

As sweet as I could bear;

And once that seemed too much;

I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,

The flow of—was it musk

From hidden grapevine springs

Down hill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache

From sprays of honeysuckle

That when they’re gathered shake

Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those

Seemed strong when I was young;

The petal of the rose

It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt

That is not dashed with pain

And weariness and fault;

I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark

Of almost too much love,

The sweet of bitter bark

And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred

I take away my hand

From leaning on it hard

In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:

I long for weight and strength

To feel the earth as rough

To all my length.

The poem swerves, as Seamus Heaney notes, “from living and walking on air to living and enduring on earth,” a motion in contrast to that of “Birches,” where the boy climbed up in order to descend. In the complex gravity of this poem, the lover is buoyed even as he attempts to descend; the more he submits to the gravitational force, the more he is lifted. In the last stanza, the paradox is exquisitely balanced, as Heaney says: “Pictorially, we are offered an image of the body hugging the earth, seeking to penetrate to the very humus in humility, wishing the ground were a penitential bed. But the paradoxical result of this drive toward abasement is a marvel of levitation: in spite of the physical push to earthward, the psychic direction is skyward.”20

There are also a number of narrative poems that count among Frost’s best: “The Grindstone,” “The Ax-Helve,” “The Witch of Coös,” and “Wild Grapes.” The voices in the narrative poems are vivid and fresh, ready to engage the reader with wit, as in the opening of “The Grindstone”:

Having a wheel and four legs of its own

Has never availed the cumbersone grindstone

To get it anywhere that I can see.

These hands have helped it go, and even race;

Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,

Not all the miles it may have thought it went,

Have got it one step from the starting place.

Frost dwells on the nature of his pastoral art in this poem, picking up and elaborating themes raised in the title poem, “New Hampshire.” His overall use of colloquial, regional language reached new heights in this collection. In a poet of lesser talents, this language might well have seemed no more than a turn on the idea of regionalism. Yet “Frost understood that the colloquial language was something more than pungent and something greater than quaint,” says James M. Cox. He points out that Frost understood in a deep way the sense of free play characteristic of the dialect spoken by people in the northern New England region: “This free play, which seems to me close to the heart of so much colloquial speech, is surely the sign of a deep grace of life residing in those who naturally speak such language. Frost heard better than any American poet the sound of that deeper sense.”21

New Hampshire was respectfully reviewed by many of Frost’s acquaintances in the literary world: Padraic Colum, Mark Van Doren, Mark De Wolfe Howe, and—as always—Louis Untermeyer. (A negative review in the Freeman prompted Frost to write to Untermeyer with his suspicions that somebody was consciously out to get him: “It just shows how hard it is for an American publication, however lofty its pretensions, to keep from lending itself to blackmail and corruption.”)22 Among the shrewdest responses was one by John Farrar, who wrote of New Hampshire that it contained “the loveliest of his lyrics.… An almost rigid adherence to the colloquial prevails; where Lowell and Whittier observed and reported the New England peasant, Frost has become one. He writes stories of their most vivid moments with unswerving power of dramatic presentation. Some of the best pictures are of grim and terrible events, and the whole body of his writing indubitably shows a decaying and degenerating New England. That he fails to see the other side of life is untrue. Passages of great beauty shine from drabness. His events and his characters have moments of warmth and happiness. Always, however, is manifest the sense of fairness to events as he sees them.”23

Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1924—a major turning point in the public recognition of a poet whose reputation would continue to grow by extraordinary leaps throughout the next few decades. This Pulitzer was the first of four that he would be awarded in his lifetime—a record number, in fact. New Hampshire was, by any standard, a success in its day, though in subsequent years it has attracted less attention than Frost’s other collections.

*   *   *

As usual, the Frosts returned to South Shaftsbury for the summer of 1924. Frost wrote very little poetry that summer but spent a good deal of time with Carol, whose talent for farming impressed him mightily. “The farm goes rip-roaring as no farm ever went with me,” he wrote to Untermeyer. “Carol has hired almost nothing done this year. He has ploughed and done all the haying himself. Fun to look on at—I always dreamed of being a real farmer: and seeing him one is almost the same as being one myself. My heart’s in it with him.”24

Frost did make a short trip north that summer to Ripton (near Middlebury), where he read his poetry and lectured at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English. (After 1939, he would habitually spend his summers in Ripton near the Bread Loaf campus.) Among the members of the summer faculty whom Frost knew was George Whicher of Amherst College, but Frost apparently felt awkward in his presence, perhaps because he was soon to abandon Amherst for Michigan.

He returned to Amherst in the fall with a certain nostalgia, knowing (as none of his colleagues yet did) that he would soon be gone. He was also tense about carrying such a big secret, although some relief came in November when the nature of the post at Michigan was made public. “His fellowship at the University of Michigan has been created especially for him,” reported the Boston Evening Transcript, “and will exist for life. The fellowship entails no obligations of teaching and it provides for all living expenses. He will have his entire freedom to work and write.” Nobody at Amherst could possibly chide him for accepting an offer this bountiful.

On March 26, 1925, a dinner was held in celebration of his fiftieth birthday at the Hotel Brevoort in New York City.25 It was arranged by Frederic G. Melcher, a New Englander who had migrated to Indianapolis, where he set up a bookstore. (He later edited Publishers Weekly.) At Frost’s bidding, Melcher worked with Untermeyer to bring together the appropriate friends. Carl Van Doren acted as master of ceremonies. Other speakers included Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Wilbur Cross. A message from Amy Lowell was read aloud; in it, she described her “profound attachment to the man” and her admiration for his work. Lowell was terribly ill at this time, and would die six weeks later, but Frost did not realize how badly off she was and resented her absence. It was Amy Lowell, after all, who had written that important, early American review in the New Republic—the one that had greeted Frost on his first day back in America after the British sojourn.

Somewhat spitefully, Frost decided not to attend a dinner in Boston the next month in honor of Lowell, who had recently published a two-volume biography of John Keats to great acclaim (it had already gone into a fourth printing by the time of the dinner). Frost had Elinor write to Lowell and claim exhaustion on his part. When Lowell died shortly thereafter, Frost felt guilty. Covering over the guilt with levity, however, he wrote to Untermeyer (who had also not attended what Frost called her “Keats Eats”): “She got it on us rather by dying just at a moment when we could be made to feel that we had perhaps judged her too hardly.”26

Frost actively disliked Amy Lowell’s poetry, and said so in private, but now the need for public tributes to her verse was upon him, and he rose on several occasions to the task. His formal statement to the press is memorable:

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound, that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It has not to wait the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it. There was a barb to it and a toxin that we owned to at once. How often I have heard it in the voice and seen it in the eyes of this generation that Amy Lowell had lodged poetry with them to stay.27

The truth is that Frost admired few of his contemporaries and felt certain rivalries more keenly than others. One can also see that Frost (having suffered decades of near-total eclipse) was especially eager for the spotlight. He did not, however, have much to worry about in this regard. Recognition came in wave after wave, including honorary degrees from Middlebury College and Yale in 1924 and another from Bowdoin College (offered in 1925 but delayed until 1926 because of Elinor’s health).

Elinor’s illness in the spring of 1925 added a new element of uncertainty to family life. Frost sent a telegram to explain to the president of Bowdoin his forthcoming absence at the graduation ceremony. “Elinor had a serious nervous collapse early last week,” he wrote. He put the blame for her condition on himself: “The amount of it is, my way of life lately has put too much strain on her. All this campaigning goes against her better nature and so also does some of this fancy teaching, my perpetual at-home charity clinic for incipient poesis, for instance. Time we got back into the quiet from which we came.”28

The astonishing fact is that Elinor, herself over fifty, had suffered a miscarriage—much to the surprise of everyone concerned. Her nerves were quite bad, too; she found the pace of life, with the constant travel, the demands of people coming and going from the house, and the general hubbub connected with Frost’s “campaigning,” almost too much to bear. She longed for the days on the farm at Derry, when nobody knew who Robert Frost was, and when the longest trip was the occasional visit to a neighboring village. Elinor was hesitant about the Michigan appointment, which she feared would result in only more public activity of the kind she disliked. Furthermore, she did not like being away from her children. But she lacked the will to go against her husband’s wishes.

At least the summer of 1925 was a pleasant one on the farm in South Shaftsbury, with Irma and Marjorie gathering around. Carol and Lillian were present, as always, and Lesley was a frequent visitor; she was now working as a bookseller in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, some forty miles to the south. Frost wrote to John Haines in late July: “Yesterday we were haying in America. We got in about two tons of timothy not unmixed with clover. We sold to people passing in their cars some five hundred stems of sweet peas at a cent a piece.”29

In August, the Frosts accepted an invitation from Joseph and Edith Fobes to use their guest cottage on their summer estate in Franconia—an attractive offer, since Frost was desperate at this time of year to get as high into the mountains as possible because of his hay fever. This was the first of what would prove an annual retreat to the Fobes’ cottage in Franconia at this time of year. They remained in Franconia until the last week in August, when they set off (with considerable regret at leaving the children and abandoning the farm in South Shaftsbury just as the fruit trees were heavy with apples, cherries, and pears). They had barely started on their journey when Frost, quietly, resolved to stay in Michigan for a limited period.