7

A PLACE APART
1912–1913

No man can know what power he can call rightly his unless he presses a little.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1913

England, with its vast literary resonances, was the ideal place for Frost to complete the task of bringing himself forward as a poet. Removed from the pressures of his own country, where ghosts of his past hovered discouragingly, he was able to shake free, to make those critical revisions that would loft his poems successfully into the heady atmosphere of early modernism, and to finish the difficult work of shaping his first two volumes.

Frost’s English interlude lasted for just over two years, from September 1912 through February 1915—the tail end of England’s glory days of empire. The genteel Edwardian Age, which began with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and lasted through Edward VII’s death in 1910, had recently given way to the Georgian period, which began gently enough in 1910, when the devastation of the Great War lay only a few years down the road but still seemed unimaginable. One journalist looking ahead at the time could envision only “a prospect of great prosperity and endless peace.”1

The trip over was described by Elinor to a friend back in New Hampshire: “We sailed from Boston to Glasgow, and enjoyed the ocean trip on the whole, though Mr. Frost, Lesley, and I were quite seasick for a few days. The younger children escaped with only a few hours of discomfort.

“The last day of the voyage we skirted along the north coast of Ireland, and thought the dark, wild-looking headlands and blue mountains very beautiful. We landed at Glasgow in the morning, and travelled all day across Scotland and England, arriving at London about seven o’clock. From the station we telephoned for rooms at the Premier Hotel, and after securing them, drove in a cab to the hotel, feeling greatly excited, you may imagine, at being all alone, without a single friend, in the biggest city in the world.”2

Arriving in London on Monday, September 2, 1912, Frost and his family quite naturally found themselves overwhelmed at first, but the anxiety soon passed. Because of their number, they had to take two rooms at the Premier, a large hotel on Russell Square that had seen better days. The brown wallpaper with “a pattern of squirrels and flowers” was loose and musty, the carpets threadbare, and the gaslights dim. But everyone was excited by the notion of life in England. While Frost spent his days searching for a suitable house in the suburbs, Elinor toured the city with the children, who were fascinated by the huge buses which “glide[d] along hooting and tooting” as they threaded their way through the crowded streets. In the evenings, thirteen-year-old Lesley would baby-sit the younger children while her parents visited pubs, walked, or attended plays in the West End. Among the hottest hits in town was Bernard Shaw’s deliciously ironic attack on the English bourgeoisie Fanny’s First Play, which the Frosts both liked a great deal.

The house hunting was not easy; Elinor called it “a tiresome search.” But Frost eventually found a suitable cottage in Beaconsfield, a village in Buckinghamshire, some twenty miles north of London—in those days a train journey of forty minutes from Marylebone Station. The place in question was a recently built cottage on Reynolds Road, a squat stucco house covered with dark green vines. The shingled roof sloped steeply, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. There was a large garden filled with pear and apple trees, as well as a good strawberry patch. Thick laurel and dogwood hedges circled the property, lending an aura of privacy, and a wall at the back of the garden separated this property from a large cherry orchard. Inside, the house was surprisingly spacious, with five bedrooms and a cozy sitting room. There was “room enough for all, if we push together,” Elinor said in a letter home; and the price was right: twenty dollars a month, with a year’s lease. It was called The Bungalow, an unimpressive name for a place that stood near houses called Kingboro, Denmill, Oakden, and Little Seeley’s. But the Frosts did not hesitate to sign a year’s lease.

The house was bare, so the Frosts purchased a number of pieces of used furniture from local shops. “We bought enough furniture to get along with for about $125,” Elinor wrote home, “and shall sell it again when we leave.” She added, “Our plan is to stay here for a year, and then go over to France for a year, if our courage holds out.”3 The sense that she and her husband were embarked on a perilous adventure is evident (at times overwhelming) especially during the first months of their English sojourn.

The goods brought on the ship from America soon arrived, having slowly made their way down from the docks in Glasgow: four crates of oddments that included several carpets as well as the family’s trusty Blick typewriter. Frost quickly reassembled two favorite items, a long-cherished Morris chair, which he always used for writing (with a lapboard), and a rocker for Eleanor. Before long, everyone felt at home in The Bungalow.

This part of Buckinghamshire was rich in literary associations, as Frost noted. John Milton had written Paradise Lost only a couple of miles from their house, while Thomas Gray and Edmund Burke lay buried nearby. The poet Edmund Waller had once lived here, but the most prominent writer in the village now was G. K. Chesterton, the author of poems, mystery stories, literary criticism, and Christian apologetics; Frost knew his work well (he had recently read The Heretics) and often passed the older writer’s house on Grove Road, only four streets over from Reynolds, although he never actually met Chesterton, much to his disappointment.

In many ways, life in The Bungalow resembled life in Derry. The Frosts, especially in the early months, were thrown upon themselves. Family life blossomed, and the children felt well tended. Once again, the choice was made to educate at least the two younger children at home, largely because Frost himself disliked the crowded conditions in the local schools, where as many as forty pupils crammed into each classroom. The pupils themselves, the children of local farmers and shopkeepers, appeared “undernourished and without energy,” he observed in one letter home. Writing to Harold Brown, an acquaintance who worked for the state school system back in New Hampshire, he offered an account of the school: “One would have to go to the slums of the city for their like in face and form in America. I did not see the sprinkling of bright eyes I should look for in the New England villages you and I grew up in. They were clean enough—the school sees to that. But some of them were pitiful little kids.”4 Lesley and Irma, the older daughters, were sent to St. Anne’s, a private school located on Baring Road, not far from Reynolds Road—the sort of school commonly attended by middle-class children in those days. Elinor wrote home in October: “The children are having a very good time, but they are homesick sometimes. Of course it is quite an education for them to see another land and another people.”5

According to Elinor, Frost settled quickly into a routine that left the morning free for his own writing. Apart from pulling together a collection of poems, he wanted to write a novel as well, a story about two generations of New Hampshire farmers. The plot was to revolve around a contrast between a young man recently out of college and an older farmhand who was skeptical of “book-learning.” This novel quickly changed into a play, which was reduced and reframed in later years as a verse dialogue, appearing in Steeple Bush in 1947. (The notion of conflict between a college boy and an old farmhand had already been explored by Frost in “The Death of the Hired Man,” one of his finest dramatic poems, which appeared in North of Boston but was written seven years earlier, in Derry.)

Walking again became one of Frost’s favorite activities. He explored the countryside around Beaconsfield every afternoon, sometimes venturing to neighboring towns, such as High Wycombe, Jordans, or Gerrards Cross. He occasionally took the train into London; on one occasion he attended a meeting at Caxton Place, near Buckingham Palace, where the featured speaker was Bernard Shaw himself. The event was sponsored by the Women’s Tax Resistance League, but Shaw was typically ironic in his speech; he apparently teased his earnest audience so mercilessly that they “didn’t know whether he had come to help (as advertised) or hinder them,” Frost recalled.

Most mornings, and often into the later afternoons, Frost worked on the manuscript of A Boy’s Will, whose title came from Longfellow’s famous poem “My Lost Youth” (“A boy’s will is the wind’s will / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts”). Elinor worked closely beside him, helping her husband choose and order the poems. Writing to John Bartlett, Frost said that the book “comes pretty near being the story of five years of my life.” The thirty-two poems in the collection (three were dropped at a later date, along with the explanatory glosses that appeared in the original edition in the table of contents) do, in a sense, describe the arc of a sad time, beginning with the abandonment of Dartmouth and his flight into the Dismal Swamp. He told one friend that the book reflected his retreat “into the wilderness.” “The Tuft of Flowers,” a poem that occurs near the end of the sequence, signals his return to society—the period in his life that began when he got the job at Pinkerton. But one is hard-pressed to find a genuine narrative in the sequence.

The settings of the poems shift from autumn through subsequent seasons and back to autumn, beginning with “Into My Own,” which only in Frost’s self-mythologizing retrospective sight could be seen as being about the flight from Dartmouth or into the Dismal Swamp. It is a poem about retreat, but a curiously rigid self-confidence suffuses the final couplet: “They would not find me changed from him they knew— / Only more sure of all I thought was true.” This stubborness lies at the heart of Frost’s poetry: a willed resistance to mutability, to any external efforts to produce change. Experience, for him, was largely a mode of confirmation.

The fierce refusal to relinquish control of the self becomes, poem by poem, the unspoken subject of this collection. In looking for a larger narrative, Frost faced what all poets face when it comes to gathering a volume for publication. Poems are written sporadically, and rarely in sequence; while they may be related in theme or texture, there is rarely any “plot.” The larger narrative that readers expect from a book of poems is often imposed, with more or less success. The lyrics of A Boy’s Will do, however, play together rather well, tonally and stylistically. The poet-speaker generally assumes an implied listener, which lends a dramatic quality to their presentation. One can usually hear a dialectic at work as the poet-speaker attempts to reconcile his various moods, whether hopeful (as in “A Late Walk”) or, more often, despairing (as in “Storm Fear”). The poet’s nearly solipsistic reveries are, at times, interrupted by an intruder, as in “Love and a Question.” Mostly, he is left to himself—as he prefers.

The poems often drift toward the interior, which is reflected in the isolation of the woods and fields. Even the heavens offer little but “Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes / Without the gift of sight” (“Stars”). The most intense dramatic moment in the sequence occurs with “Storm Fear,” where the poet and his family are boarded up inside their isolated house in the woods during a storm as the wind “works against us in the dark.” Nature is hardly welcoming; instead, it poses a threat, wishing to unravel or undermine home and hearth. Even the warmer wind of “To the Thawing Wind” is unpredictable and threatening (although the poet here seems to catch the anarchic mood and almost welcome the wind’s rough treatment, its urge to “Scatter poems on the floor”).

A series of mild, late Victorian–sounding poems follows: “A Prayer in Spring,” “Flower-Gathering,” “Rose Pogonias,” “In a Vale,” and others. An important turn comes, however, midway through the book, with “The Vantage Point,” where Frost declares: “If tired of trees I seek again mankind.” He wanted his readers to see and feel that turning outward, to acknowledge the poet’s reacquaintance with the social world. This is a far cry from that easy Romanticism wherein the natural world becomes a place of calm retreat from the madding crowd. But even “The Vantage Point” returns to the isolated self, with the poet smelling the earth, “the bruisèd plant,” and gazing into “the crater of the ant.” This isolation is reinforced by the next poem, the magnificent “Mowing,” where the poet cultivates a private motion, leaving “the hay to make” and the chips to fall where they may. The speaker in that poem, like Frost in general, knows that he cannot control the world beyond the book.

Each of the poems in the original edition of A Boy’s Will was given an explanatory epigraph, but these glosses were regarded by Frost as unnecessary in later editions. They did, however, serve their original function, as William H. Pritchard has said, providing “both a teasingly suggestive and gracefully reticent atmosphere in which to read the poems.”6 Most of them were softly ironic: “The youth is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world”; “He is in love with being misunderstood”; “He resolves to become intelligible, at least to himself.” These headings provided, as it were, an innoculation against ruthless English reviewers who might cry sentimentality. “But look,” the glosses seem to say, “I am poking fun at the poor young man!”

The sequence moves back to autumn with poems such as “October,” and “Reluctance,” where “The leaves are all dead on the ground / Save those that the oak is keeping / To ravel them one by one.” Ever the observant naturalist, Frost knew that the oak is among the last trees to release its leaves, and he uses the image to good effect here. The tense “heart of man” does not want to give in, to scatter its leaves, to abandon life. Nobody really wants to go “with the drift of things” or “yield with a grace to reason.” The life force is irrational (in the Bergsonian sense of nondirected, vital) and overpowering. It refuses to let “a love or a season” pass.

Frost often adopts a wistful tone commonly heard in Edwardian and Georgian verse. But in the best of these poems, he rises above the period manner, finding his own clear attitude toward the material at hand. “Into My Own,” “My November Guest,” “A Late Walk,” “Storm Fear,” “Mowing,” “Revelation,” “The Trial by Existence,” “October,” and “Reluctance” are each filled to the same brim, declaring to the world that a genuine, highly distinct, and original poet has entered the world. “We make ourselves a place apart,” Frost wrote in “Revelation,” and indeed he had made himself “a place apart” in this volume, if only somebody would notice.

With Elinor’s encouragement, Frost approached the publishing house of David Nutt. It was a small but well-established firm, especially well known in the field of poetry. They published the late W. E. Henley, who remained among the popular poets of the day, as well as John Drinkwater, who served as poetry adviser to the firm’s current head, a melancholy Frenchwoman called Mrs. M. L. Nutt, who had inherited this role from her late husband, Albert Trubner Nutt, whose father had founded the house. Frost personally carried the manuscript to Mrs. Nutt, “a woman dressed all in black, as if she had just risen from the sea.”7

It must have taken considerable courage for him—an unknown foreign writer—to plunge into a London publisher’s office and present himself as a poet worthy of publication. Mrs. Nutt emerged from a back room and took the manuscript from Frost, giving no encouragement but promising she would read the book carefully. She may have shown it to Drinkwater, although no record of this exists. In any case, Frost did not have long to wait for her response.

Lesley Frost later recalled the moment when Frost first learned that his book was taken. “It was not until a morning in 1912,” she said, “when a card came … that we knew A Boy’s Will had been accepted for publication. That was splendid. We were pleased because our elders seemed pleased. We couldn’t comprehend … what resolve, what hope, what patience in waiting, had gone into that first book: what a climax, what a beginning, was signified by such a recognition coming at last.”8 The long and painful search for acknowledgment had finally come.

Frost was eager to settle the details of the contract with Mrs. Nutt as quickly as possible. It surprised him when she wanted an option to publish his next four books, poetry or prose; this suggested astounding faith in him. In those days, it was not uncommon for a publisher to insist on a subvention from the poet to cover the initial printing costs—just in case the book didn’t sell. By contrast, Mrs. Nutt readily agreed to pay Frost a royalty of 12 percent after the first 250 of the first edition of 1,000 were sold—a generous offer.

As an American, Frost could not avoid certain misgivings about bringing out his work in England first; indeed, he could not help feeling some resentment that his work had not been eagerly greeted in his own country—even though he had never made significant attempts to get published there. In any case, it was gratifying to find such enthusiasm for his work in the country that had produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.

This encouragement from Mrs. Nutt’s firm seemed to fuel his creativity. Back in Beaconsfield, he entered upon what in retrospect was his most sustained, productive stretch of composition. The poems that make up the core of North of Boston were written over the next eight months as Frost worked steadily, day after day, often beginning early and ending late. Elinor was amazed, as was Frost himself. The decision to move to England could not have been more compellingly affirmed. By late spring, nearly a dozen finished poems lay on his desk, including “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “Birches”—four of the best-known poems in the whole of American literature. (The latter remained in his file of unfinished poems until it was included in 1916 in Mountain Interval.)

*   *   *

The Frosts had made almost no friends in Beaconsfield during their first autumn in The Bungalow, apart from Effie Solomon, a young wife who lived four houses down the road. In later life, Solomon could still recall visiting the Frosts and hearing Robert read aloud from his new work.9 For the most part, Frost had little contact with anyone outside his family in those early months abroad. A turning point came in the new year, however. After signing his contract with Nutt, a buoyant Frost decided to test the waters of literary England by attending the opening of the Poetry Bookshop on Devonshire Street in London.

On January 8, 1913, the opening was hosted by the shop’s energetic owner, Harold Monro. It was an elegant bookstore, resembling a country drawing room, with thick carpets and built-in shelves of dark oak. The building itself was on three floors, and above the bookshop were meeting rooms and accommodations for writers and artists. Over three hundred people crowded the lower floor on the day of the opening—a mixture of writers, artists, critics, book editors, bohemians, and literary hangers-on. Almost immediately Frost met Frank (F. S.) Flint, a poet, and T. E. Hulme, a poet-critic. Both would have considerable influence on Frost. He also met Mary Gardner, another poet, who was married to Ernest Gardner, a professor of archaeology at University College, London.

Flint looked the part of a dry civil servant in his dark, pin-striped suit and wire-framed glasses. His first volume of poems, In the Net of the Stars, had appeared three years earlier to respectable reviews. When Frost told him, proudly, that his first book had just been accepted, Flint was duly interested. After Frost discovered Flint’s book in the shop, he immediately bought it and asked for a signature. Flint was pleased by this attention, and asked Frost if he knew Ezra Pound, another American poet living in England. Frost replied that he did not, and Flint offered to bring them together. He also offered to review Frost’s book when it appeared—a remarkable gesture of friendship on such brief acquaintance. Frost left Harold Monro’s party dazzled by his good luck. In his first attempt to break into English literary life, he had succeeded beyond his hopes.

This was, in fact, a pivotal moment for the arts in London, as the novelist Ford Madox Ford later noted. Britain’s capital, he said, “was unrivalled in its powers of assimilation—the great, easy-going, tolerant, lovable, old dressing-gown of a place that it was then, but was never more to be.”10 The two most recognized poets of the day were Yeats and Thomas Hardy; the latter’s first poetry collection, Wessex Poems, had appeared in 1898 and was followed by several much-admired volumes. (Time’s Laughingstocks, which appeared in 1909, was still much on the minds of poetry readers when Frost arrived in England, as were the three volumes of Hardy’s epic drama in verse, The Dynasts—a sequence that made a strong impression on Frost, encouraging him to try his own hand at verse drama.) Among the more popular poets of the day were Rudyard Kipling, Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, John Masefield, Robert Bridges, Laurence Binyon, and Walter de la Mare—all cultivated writers of fairly traditional verse in the Edwardian manner. Younger poets of this era included James Elroy Flecker, Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, W. H. Davies, Edward Thomas, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and J. C. Squire—most of whom were included in Edward Marsh’s popular anthology of 1912, Georgian Poetry, 1911–1912—a collection that went through several later editions. “English poetry is now once again putting on a new strength and beauty,” Marsh wrote in his introduction. Indeed, Frost would find himself extremely comfortable among these poets, and would be considered by the English critics of this period a fairly typical “Georgian.”

Much of the poetry in Marsh’s Georgian anthologies was insipid, trading in facile imagery of rural life, with a kind of forced simplicity that made it the laughingstock of modernist writers. The world of this verse was largely cleansed of urban decay, spiritual angst, and psychological complication. But the best of it, represented by Owen and Thomas, for example, was sinewy and fresh. Frost’s virtues—a rough-hewn simplicity, an ear for dialect, a metaphysical edge—played well in this context, and it is not surprising that his work caught the interest of this school of poets, and that he was quickly assimilated.

A parallel movement had been developing for some years in America. Frost had come to England having read closely his more celebrated contemporaries: E. A. Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Amy Lowell. These poets had taken a step forward from their predecessors, the “genteel” or late-Romantic poets, such as Richard Watson Gilder, Richard Hovey, Bliss Carman, and Louise Imogen Guiney. They favored a closer adherence to colloquial speech, greater realism in choice of subjects for poems, and a more muscular, direct approach. The poeticisms one saw in late-Victorian verse—flowery, artificial diction and distorted syntax, with a fairly circumscribed notion of what subjects were appropriate—were beginning to fade. One actually sees them fading throughout Frost’s early verse.

Frost happened to land in England at exactly the right moment for modern poetry. Ezra Pound had brought with him from America certain principles (gathered mostly from his friend Amy Lowell) that came to be called imagism. The movement might be said to have formally come to England in 1912, when Pound met over tea and buns in a café in Kensington with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and Richard Aldington, and the group declared that they embodied a school called imagisme. The idea of belonging to a school that had an “ism” attached to it was fashionable, vaguely Gallic, and self-flattering. In the August 1912 issue of Poetry Review, an article by Flint celebrates contemporary French poetry, which included such startling movements as unanisme, impulsionnisme, and paroxysme.11

That October, Pound published Ripostes, a critical salvo that included five poems by T. E. Hulme as examples of pure imagism. Hulme, who had been talking for several years about imagism, had met irregularly for some years with several of the more interesting younger poets of the day at a restaurant in Soho called the Eiffel Tower, and Pound was able to thrust himself by force of personality into the center of an already burgeoning movement. In many ways a fierce traditionalist, having been trained in Romance languages at the University of Pennsylvania, Pound maintained that a poet’s duty was to “modernize” himself. “Make it new,” he famously said, taking upon himself the mission of teaching everyone around him to do so in a way that pleased him personally.

The March 1913 issue of Poetry, a little magazine published in Chicago by Harriet Monroe, carried Pound’s imagist manifesto, where three basic principles were put forward:

1. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

Pound was a fervent advocate of concreteness, warning that poets should “go in fear of abstraction.” Richard Aldington, in the June 1914 Egoist, another influential little magazine, added that a poet should “use the language of common speech” and avoid “decorative” words. Poets should strive to “present an image,” and to produce poetry that is “hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.” As it were, the best poets of the day were already moving in the directions outlined by Hulme, Pound, and Aldington, but these younger men took it upon themselves to formulate principles, to create the sense of a unified movement.

The connection between Frost and Pound would follow from that chance meeting with Flint; as soon as Frost returned to Beaconsfield, he wrote fetchingly to his new acquaintance: “I was only too childishly happy in being allowed to [be present] for a moment in company in which I hadn’t to be ashamed of having written verse. Perhaps it will help you understand my state of mind if I tell you that I have lived for the most part in villages where it were better that a millstone were hanged about your neck than that you should own yourself a minor poet.”12

Flint quickly told Ezra Pound about Frost, and a somewhat enigmatic card arrived in Beaconsfield from Pound inviting Frost to visit him in Kensington. “At home—sometimes,” it said. It took Frost a couple of months to get up the courage to try his luck with Pound, but he did eventually call on his fellow countryman in early March, just as the daffodils were beginning to rise in clusters in the old graveyard that ran beside Church Walk, where Pound occupied a tiny flat in a three-story Victorian building near St. Mary Abbott’s Church, at the end of a cul-de-sac.

An elderly landlady directed Frost to a narrow stairwell that led to Pound’s flat at the top. He knocked at a heavy oak door, and Pound yelled in a high-pitched voice that the visitor—whoever he was—must wait; he was taking a “bird-bath,” as he called it. When eventually the door opened, Pound was dressed flamboyantly in a blue-and-green silk dressing gown, sporting a ring in one ear; he was barefoot, with his carrot-colored hair brushed back like a waterfall going the wrong way, his red beard damp and glistening. He told Frost that he had been rude not to answer the card or visit him sooner. “Did you bring the book?” he asked, eager to see A Boy’s Will. No, Frost said. It was still being bound, and he did not have a spare copy of the manuscript. Pound could not accept this and insisted that they go immediately to David Nutt’s office to get a copy of the book.

They did so, and Frost that day got his first glimpse of the lovely book, with its pebble-grained covers. The two poets then returned to Church Walk, where Pound began to read the book to himself at once, tossing Frost a magazine to keep himself busy. After a short while, a grinning Pound said, “You don’t mind our liking this, do you?” Frost replied, “Oh, no, go right ahead.”13

Relations between Pound and Frost were artificial and strained, with Pound playing the teacher (though he was eleven years younger than his latest catch) and Frost the slightly dazzled, even uncertain, student. He was smart enough to realize, however, that Pound was a useful connection. Indeed, Pound offered that very day to review A Boy’s Will, and he kicked Frost out of the flat so that he could begin writing the review at once! A couple of days later Pound noted with typical bravura to Harriet Monroe in Chicago: “Have just discovered another Amur’k’n. VURRY Amur’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace.”14

A few weeks later Pound invited Frost to meet Yeats, who had seen A Boy’s Will courtesy of Pound. The Irish poet called this volume “the best poetry written in America for a long time,” and said he was interested to meet “the young man from New England.” With Pound as go-between, Frost and Yeats met at Yeats’s apartment in the Woburn Buildings, just off Russell Square, on the evening of March 31, a Monday. Yeats had been living there for twenty years, occupying a small, candle-lit apartment. It was a thrilling moment for Frost, who had admired the great Irishman for many years.

Frost said to Yeats that he could usually tell if a poem had come quickly, or if it had been labored over. In his own experience, the best poems came swiftly, almost miraculously, riding like ice on a griddle “on their own melting,” as he would often say. Frost ventured to suggest that “The Song of Wandering Aengus” was such a poem, one “given” to the poet by the Muse. Yeats demurred. No, he said. He had labored nine hours over that poem, and it had been the product of a terrible period in his life. At the end of the evening, Yeats told Frost that he often held gatherings on Monday evenings, when he was in London, and that Frost should always feel welcome. (Frost quickly reported all of this to John Bartlett in a letter in which he tried his best not to sound impressed with himself.)

A Boy’s Will was not granted a resounding welcome in the world. “These poems are intended by the author to possess a certain sequence, and to depict the various stages of a young man’s outlook on life,” wrote a critic in the Athenaeum, on April 5, 1913. “The author is only half successful in this,” the reviewer continued, suggesting that Frost’s poems “do not rise above the ordinary, though here or there a happy line or phrase lingers gratefully in the memory.” As the first review that Frost ever received, this must have been exceptionally disappointing. Five days later the Times Literary Supplement weighed in with a more cheerful assessment: “There is an agreeable individuality about these pieces: the writer is not afraid to voice the simplest of his thoughts and fancies, and these, springing from a capacity of complete absorption in the influences of nature and the open air, are often naively engaging. Sometimes, too, in a vein of reflection, he makes one stop and think, though the thought may be feebly or obscurely expressed.” Not marvelous, but better.

Frost was outwardly stoic, suggesting in a letter to John Bartlett that he buy up twenty copies of the book to give the impression to the publisher that something was occurring, but he was described by Elinor in a letter to Margaret Bartlett as being “altogether discouraged.” “I am very glad you and John like Robert’s book,” she said. “Of course I love it very much, and have been somewhat disappointed that the reviewers have not been more enthusiastic. How can they help seeing how exquisitely beautiful some of the poems are, and what an original music there is in most of them?”15

Pound’s eagerly anticipated review in Poetry appeared in May, but the praise was not full-throated. These verses had in them “the tang of the New Hampshire woods,” Pound wrote. He praised the “utter sincerity” of the poems, welcoming a poet who “has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it.”16 But the review was illogical, hastily written, and condescending. As Frost observed to Flint: “If any but a great man had written it, I should have called it vulgar.” Fighting snideness with snideness, he referred to Pound as “that great intellect abloom in hair.” But he perfectly understood the importance of this review for his career; he was now a player in the larger game of modern poetry, and having the backing of Ezra Pound—the ringmaster of modern literature—meant a lot.

A clutch of brief but complimentary reviews followed in both England and America, lifting Frost’s spirits a little. But he was generally depressed by the lukewarm reception of his first volume. Nevertheless, the door to literary success was now ajar, and Frost could peer into that great sunlit room and imagine himself a genuine presence there.

*   *   *

The early spring of 1913 had been particularly chilling, with weeks of drizzle mirroring Frost’s mood. A succession of sun-drenched, almost summery days in May, however, changed the atmosphere considerably. Elinor began to work each morning in the garden, and Frost often joined her. It was heartening to stand amidst flowering apple and pear trees. A long row of currant bushes in the back of the garden suddenly “went aflame,” as Elinor wrote to a friend, their bloom “improbably bright.” The Frosts had never been closer, it seemed, and they took long hikes in the countryside together. On weekends, the family often packed a lunch and set off merrily into the surrounding meadows and woodlands. Elinor would later refer to this period as “perhaps the best time ever.”

Frost was not writing now at the same pace as earlier, but the poems continued to come, if more slowly. Meanwhile, his foothold in English literary society grew firmer. The friendship with Mary and Ernest Gardner, whom he had met at Harold Monro’s party, had developed, with several visits back and forth between the two families; that summer, the Frosts were invited to spend a couple of weeks on the east coast of Scotland near the Gardners. Given Frost’s heritage, this seemed like a fine idea, and they readily agreed to rent a small cottage in Kingsbarns, on the East Neuk of Fife, for the last two weeks in August.

The Frost family loved the setting. Kingsbarns is a coastal village near St. Andrews, which in medieval times was the ecclesiastical capital of Scotland. The tiny fishing villages along the East Neuk were them, as now, picturesque, with narrow stone houses and cobbled streets. Kingsbarns is particularly attractive, and the Frosts settled happily into life there, with long shoreline walks every morning. They often took their meals with the Gardners or picnicked with them on the furze-covered rocks overlooking the North Sea. Unfortunately, Frost soon began to resent the attitude of the Gardners, who felt they had “discovered” him, and his resentments are evident in letters to John Bartlett. “The Gardners don’t like me anymore,” he wrote. “They despise my judgement and resent my tactlessness.”17 He was eager to get back to Beaconsfield.

There was good news upon his return. Several new and highly laudatory reviews of A Boy’s Will had appeared, including one in the Academy, an influential English journal, in which the anonymous reviewer singled out Frost among a clutch of other poets: “We wish we could fitly express the difference which marks off A Boy’s Will from the other books here noticed. Perhaps it is best hinted by stating that the poems combine, with a rare sufficiency, the essential qualities of inevitability and surprise. We have read every line with that amazement and delight which are too seldom evoked by books of modern verse. Without need of qualification or trimming of epithets, it is undoubtedly the work of a true poet.”18

Frost had every reason to imagine that his career as a poet was well under way, although he remained hesitant, uncertain—as though he could not shake off the sense of inferiority that had for more than a decade held him back. His next book, under contract to David Nutt, was still unfinished, and his financial situation was still shaky. Apart from everything else, Frost appeared to suffer from a growing sense of homesickness, a feeling that surfaced in his letters in late spring and seemed to worsen through the summer. As he wrote to Flint in June, whenever he walked about London he saw “lots of Americans … with their box-toed shoes.” Even though he did not like their manner, he could not resist them: “I yearn towards them just the same. I’m a Yank from Yankville.”19 But he knew, in his heart of hearts, that he must not give in to such nostalgia. He had come to England to make his name as a poet, and he would not give up until he had done so.