9

HOME AGAIN
1915–1916

Locality gives art.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1910

The crossing from Liverpool to New York was unusually rough, with stormy seas and slantwise, icy rains. The St. Paul pitched and rolled, and the children were continually seasick. Nevertheless, Frost had every reason to feel optimistic about his prospects. He had made considerable headway in England as a poet, and his reputation had already filtered home. He could not, however, anticipate the full extent of the success that awaited him upon disembarkation.

As they departed, Frost’s mind was on German submarines more than where the family would settle, but as the ship broke free of European waters, the debate over where they would live when they got home began in earnest. The children had fond memories of the farm in Derry (although Irma and Marjorie, now eleven and nine, were relying on their older siblings for impressions). Frost suggested a farm in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where they had been so happy in previous summers. What better place to get “Yankier and Yankier”? The idea of going first to stay with John and Margaret Lynch in Bethlehem, an idyllic town in the Franconia region of New Hampshire, seemed a plausible course of action.

Once ashore, the Frosts checked into a hotel and went for a brisk walk. On Forty-second Street, Frost was leafing through a copy of the New Republic at a newsstand when, to his amazement, he discovered within its pages a prominent review of North of Boston by Amy Lowell; she called his book “the most American volume of poetry which has appeared for some time.”1 While there were caveats and chidings, Lowell essentially admired the volume for its realistic portrayal of rural New Englanders. Frost could not have been more pleasantly surprised.

He would have accompanied his family to New Hampshire at once were it not for the fact that Mervyn Thomas had been detained on Ellis Island because of immigration complications that might take a few days to sort through. Frost sent Elinor and the children ahead and decided to put his time in New York to good use. He went straight to Henry Holt’s offices at 34 West Thirty-third Street, where he met Alfred Harcourt, head of the trade department. Harcourt informed Frost that not only did he have a check from the New Republic for “The Death of the Hired Man,” which had been published a couple of weeks before, but that orders for North of Boston were coming in fast.

While in the city, Frost also met with Mrs. Henry Holt, who had been his advocate with her husband’s firm. She had written an enthusiastic note to Frost in England, praising his poetry for its vivid sense of place, and he had responded warmly, well before there was any publishing connection between them. Mrs. Holt now urged Frost to consider Vermont as a place to settle, and her description of the Stowe region (where she and her husband owned a summer house) was so convincing that Frost scouted this area quite seriously in his pursuit of a farm.

With some difficulty, he managed to extricate poor Mervyn Thomas from Ellis Island and put him on a train to New Hampshire, where his relatives would meet him. Frost’s own northbound journey was circuitous, with a brief detour to see his sister, Jeanie, in South Fork, Pennsylvania, where she was teaching. Frost had certain trepidations about seeing Jeanie again, given their erratic history, but the visit went extremely well, with Frost playing the role of big brother more generously and thoughtfully than he had in the past. He encouraged Jeanie to return to college to finish her degree, and rather quixotically (for a man without an income) he offered to provide financial help if she needed it.

Stopping in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Frost paid a call on the family lawyer, Wilbur Rowell, and managed to extract an advance payment of two hundred dollars on his grandfather’s annuity. In Boston, he called on the venerable editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgwick—a literary gatekeeper of considerable power. Publication in Sedgwick’s magazine had long been one of Frost’s aspirations, and he had been rejected countless times over the past decade, often with vaguely snide notes. Now Sedgwick was all bonhomie, greeting Frost like an old friend. He had heard about the success of North of Boston from Amy Lowell, he explained. Frost told him about his English adventures, and Sedgwick was charmed; he invited the young man home for dinner that very night. One of the guests at his table was William Ernest Hocking, a Harvard philosopher, whom Frost liked immediately.

News of Frost’s arrival in Boston circulated quickly, and soon two other Bostonians with literary inclinations were keen to meet him: Nathan Haskell Dole and Sylvester Baxter. They had both read North of Boston and, indeed, were going to talk about Frost at an upcoming meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club. Sedgwick served as intermediary, and the next day Frost met both men.

Buoyed by the enthusiasm for his work that seemed to come from every quarter, Frost could not put a foot wrong. The charm that had served him so well in English literary circles seemed to be working at home, too. Nathan Dole became one of Frost’s most ardent supporters, and he soon introduced Frost to William Stanley Braithwaite, a minor poet who edited the Evening Transcript, who leaped at the opportunity to interview Frost for his paper. (Braithwaite had just begun to edit the yearly Anthology of Magazine Verse, and he would regularly include Frost in this important collection.)

Quite by chance, Frost ran into Professor Hocking at the railway station in Boston and was immediately invited to come and spend the night in Cambridge. Though eager to get back to his family, Frost accepted. He was obviously making great headway in Boston literary society, and he rightly guessed that extending his trip a little further could be useful. The person he most wanted to meet was Amy Lowell, and at Hocking’s suggestion he telephoned to thank her for the review in the New Republic. She insisted that he come to dinner that evening at her mansion in Brookline.

The sister of Harvard’s president, Lowell belonged to an intellectual dynasty that included James Russell Lowell, one of the most popular poets of the previous century. She was imperious and eccentric but eager to gather younger poets into her circle. Among the handful of guests at her house that evening was John Gould Fletcher, a poet reared in Arkansas and educated at Harvard. Frost knew his work and was glad to make his acquaintance.

Though a formidable talker, Frost met his match in Amy Lowell, who held forth entertainingly the whole evening while Frost “sat on her sofa and said little,” according to Fletcher. Perhaps listening was good for him that night, for he learned a great deal about the current poetry scene in the United States. The air was full of long-forgotten names, such as Gertrude Hall (who had recently died), George Sterling, Josephine Peabody, and Theodosia Garrison. Frost realized that his own work could not be easily classified, and that he was neither “modern” nor “conventional”—the pigeonholes into which Amy Lowell seemed determined to put everyone.

Frost enjoyed the evening with Lowell, and realized that he had made a definite mark in Boston literary society. Sylvester Baxter, for instance, wrote enthusiastically about his homecoming in the Boston Herald, reporting that Ellery Sedgwick was telling everyone that Frost was “another Masefield.”2 Baxter presented Frost to his readership as “a most agreeable personality,” describing him as follows: “He is still in his thirties, but remains youthful in face and figure; dark brown hair, handsome gray-blue eyes, a well-modelled head and mobile features.”

With a quiet sense of triumph, Frost made his way northward, arriving full of stories at the Lynch farm, where he spent several days walking in the local woods. It felt good to get away from the urban literary world, where jockeying for position was part of the daily routine. “I wish I could describe the state I’ve been thrown into,” Frost wrote to John Bartlett as the tasks of finding a suitable house and getting the children into local schools lay before him.

Slotting the children into schools would not be simple, since there was yet no certainty about where they would live. On the other hand, Frost—unlike Elinor—was quite willing to let the children stay out of school until the next fall, “safely out of the hands of schoolmarms,” as he wrote to John Haines. Elinor proposed a school in Franconia, the largest town in the valley, but Frost’s mind was on higher things: a house in the hills, with a view of Mount Lafayette’s snowy peak. He wanted to look out over the whole Franconia Range, which included Garfield, Lincoln, Haystack, and Liberty peaks—a view much like the one described so crisply in “‘Out, Out—’”: “Five mountain ranges one behind the other / Under the sunset far into Vermont.”

Within a matter of days, Frost found a little farm near the village of Sugar Hill—a resort town in summer—and knew immediately that this was for him. Unfortunately, the farm was owned by a man who had no mind, at first, to sell. After a brief conversation, however, the owner took to Frost, and agreed that for a thousand dollars, he would turn over the farm. Frost brought the whole family to inspect the property, and they responded well to the little house. It was primitive, with no indoor plumbing or electricity. A woodstove in the kitchen provided heat for the house, which was smaller than the house in Derry, and an uphill spring supplied water. There was an upper pasture and hay field, and a barn for hens and a few cows. Among several woodlots were stands of birch, maple (a sugar orchard), poplar, tamarack, and spruce. The deal was closed with a handshake, although the Frosts did not move in until June because a carpenter was busy with renovations.

Meanwhile, Frost found himself the continuing object of interest within the Boston literary community. Urged on by Dole and Baxter, Tufts College and the Boston Authors’ Club both invited him to read his poetry in April. Frost used the opportunity to further his connections in the literary world. Among those he was eager to meet was Louis Untermeyer, a young poet and critic who was friendly with Lascelles Abercrombie. Abercrombie had told Untermeyer in a letter that he should “look out for Frost,” a poet “whose work is pitched like that of nobody else.”3 Untermeyer duly wrote a warm letter to Frost in late February, and the two met at Sylvester Baxter’s house in Malden, Massachusetts, when Frost came down to the Boston area in early April. This was the beginning of a long and close friendship between the two men; indeed, it would be the most sustained literary friendship of Frost’s long life.

Untermeyer lived in New York, where he worked as a junior member in his family firm of jewelry manufacturers. He was also a prolific book reviewer and a contributing editor of the Masses, a socialist magazine published in Greenwich Village. Untermeyer was present at some of Frost’s very early readings in the Boston area and later recalled, “He was painfully aware and somewhat frightened of audiences, a self-consciousness from which he rarely freed himself—he never would dine or even converse with his hosts before a lecture. Actually, he never lectured. He talked and, as he grew more at ease with people, talked in what seemed a haphazard assortment of comments that developed into a shrewd commentary on poetry as it related to the state of the world. He never ‘recited’ his poems, he ‘said’ them—sometimes, especially if they were new or short, he ‘said’ them twice. ‘Would you like to hear me say that one again?’ he would inquire.”4

Untermeyer wrote a fiercely partisan review of North of Boston in the Chicago Evening Post on April 23, declaring, “I have little respect—literary respect—for anyone who can read the shortest of these poems without feeling the skill and power in them.”5 Frost realized, of course, that having a critic of Untermeyer’s stature and enthusiasm on his side was a great boon, and he responded as one might expect, with appreciative letters. Untermeyer sent a copy of his own second volume of poems, Challenge, and Frost wrote back with enthusiasum; he was “full of the large spirit of it,” he said.

In Boston, Frost gave two detailed interviews to Braithwaite for his newspaper. This was Frost’s first opportunity to get across his notions of “the sound of sense” to a wider public, and he seized it. He talked about “writing with your ear to the voice,” and singled out Wordsworth as a key predecessor: “This is what Wordsworth did himself in all his best poetry, proving that there can be no creative imagination unless there is a summoning up of experience, fresh from life, which has not hitherto been evoked.”6

At Tufts College, after the reading, Frost met George H. Browne, from the Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, who invited him to give a series of readings at four private schools in the Boston area for two hundred dollars. This was a fifth of the cost of the entire farm in the White Mountains, and Frost eagerly accepted. He also attended a meeting of the newly formed New England Poetry Society, where he met (for the second time) Edward Arlington Robinson, whose career had been steeply ascending for the past decade. Robinson was considered by most critics the leading poet of New England, and Frost felt keenly a sense of rivalry. Nevertheless, he admired Robinson, and a friendship based on mutual admiration began. (Robinson followed up this meeting by sending Frost his newly published play, The Porcupine, to which Frost replied, “It is good writing, or better than that, good speaking caught alive—every sentence of it.”7

The reading at the Browne and Nichols School went extremely well. One of Mr. Browne’s students was adept at speed-writing and kept a close account of Frost’s performance. One gets the full flavor of Frost in performance in the student’s verbatim record of Frost talking:

I want to call your attention to the function of the imagining ear. Your attention is too often called to the poet with extraordinarily vivid sight, and with the faculty of choosing exceptionally telling words for the sight. But equally valuable, even for schoolboy themes, is the use of the ear for material for compositions. When you listen to a speaker, you hear words, to be sure—but you also hear tones. The problem is to note them, to imagine them again, and to get them down in writing. But few of you probably ever thought of the possibility or of the necessity of doing this. You are generally told to distinguish simple, compound, and complex sentences—long and short—periodic and loose—to vary sentence structure.…

I always had a dream of getting away from it, when I was teaching school; and, in my own writing and teaching, of bringing in the living sounds of speech. For it is a fundamental fact that certain forms depend on the sound; e.g., note the various tones of irony, acquiescence, doubt, etc. in the farmer’s “I guess so.” And the great problem is, can you get those tones down on paper? How do you tell the tone? By the contact, by the animating spirit of the living voice. And how many tones do you think there are flying round? Hundreds of them—hundreds never brought to book.…

The vital thing, then, to consider in all composition, prose or verse, is the ACTION of the voice—sound-posturing, gesture. Get the stuff of life into the technique of your writing. That’s the only escape from dry rhetoric.

When I began to teach, and long after I began to write, I didn’t know what the matter was with me and my writing and with other people’s writing. I recall distinctly the joy with which I had the first satisfaction of getting an expression adequate for my thought. I was so delighted that I had to cry. It was the second stanza of the little poem on the butterfly, written in my eighteenth year. And the sound in the mouths of men I found to be the basis of all effective expression—not merely words or phrases, but sentences—living things flying round, the vital parts of speech. And my poems are to be read in the appreciative tones of this live speech.8

When he got home, Frost wrote to Browne: “I see now that I could have gone a good deal deeper in my talk to the boys on images of sound and you would have had no quarrel with me. I can see a small textbook based on images of sound particularly on the kind I call vocal postures or vocal idioms that would revolutionize the teaching of English all the way up.”9 Frost’s interest in pedagogy had not relented, although it had been several years since he had taught on a regular basis.

He now settled into life on his new farm, and began to listen once again to the “live speech” of local people. With work to be done, there was no excuse for his sitting on the porch with a lapboard across his knees, a pen in hand; this meant that, being Frost, he liked nothing better. “The whole point of farming was shirking duties,” Frost later recalled. “You can’t put your mind on farming. It won’t stay there.” He found he could work well, “as a poet, in the margins of farm life.”10

*   *   *

The first summer in Franconia was memorable. Elinor liked having a home of her own again, after so many years, and the children immersed themselves in country pleasures: blueberry picking, long walks in the woods, swimming in the Ham Branch of the Gale River, which ran nearby. Frost often played baseball with the children, and he began playing sandlot ball again with local farmhands. Of course he also indulged in his private hobby, which he referred to as “botanizing.”

He had not been writing poetry seriously for several months, ever since the return from England, but he quickly found his rhythm again. Among the poems written over the summer were “Brown’s Descent,” “The Gum-Gatherer,” “The Vanishing Red,” and “‘Out, Out—’.” The latter, one of his most affecting poems, was based on a true story. In 1910, the tragedy at the core of the poem befell a neighbor’s child on the South Road out of Bethlehem. The Littleton Courier reported the incident on March 31, 1910:

Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, one of the twin sons of Michael G. and Margaret Fitzgerald of Bethlehem, died at his home Thursday afternoon, March 24, as a result of an accident by which one of his hands was badly hurt in a sawing machine. The young man was assisting in sawing up some wood in his own dooryard with a sawing machine and accidentally hit the loose pulley, causing the saw to descend upon his hand, cutting and lacerating it badly. Raymond was taken into the house and a physician was immediately summoned, but he died very suddenly from the effects of shock, which produced heart failure.

It’s fascinating to see how Frost was able to dramatize this material. The poem opens lyrically, creating an idyll of New England life on a remote farm:

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

A contrast between the mechanical saw that “snarled and rattled” and the gorgeous view (that nobody has the time to look at properly, given the pressures of survival) is neatly established, adding to the poignancy of the child’s death. This “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart” has been denied many of the pleasures of boyhood.

In a brilliant sleight of thought, Frost declares that the saw “Leaped at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap.” As ever, he seems to enjoy the ambiguity here, the suggestion that perhaps the saw was animate and malicious. “However it was,” he goes on, “Neither refused the meeting.” Frost appears to suggest that the boy has somehow wished, even willed, his own death. He has certainly made the world of technology, here symbolized by the buzz saw, ominous, even rapacious. In this, Frost can be seen reacting against the industrialization of farming.

The poem turns especially poignant in the immediate reaction to the accident:

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand,

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling.…

The “rue” in the boy’s laugh is a familiar Frostian note: a wincing grin in which the fate of the boy is seen—by himself as much as the reader—as painfully ironic. The nakedness of the boy’s gesture is at once pathetic and appalling.

“The boy saw all,” we are told. What he saw was “all spoiled.” His own life has been ruined, of course, but the family dynamic will hereafter be altered as well, “spoiled.” The boy has subliminally come to understand that within the framework of a subsistence economy there is small room for a boy who cannot pull his weight. Circumstances are such that an extra “hand” is essential for survival.

The poem ends with cruel dispatch, clarity, and compression:

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

One is reminded here of “Home Burial,” where the husband who has lost his child turns immediately to the task of digging the grave. His mourning is severe, but it is worked out in the necessity of burying the child. There is a kind of cruelty in the last lines, especially in a time when grief is often unacknowledged, and when accepting the death of a child seems unimaginable. But in 1910, on a farm in rural New England, death was a frequent visitor, and the young were not spared. A cold practicality haunts the ending: “No more to build on there.” Yet there is something noble in the acknowledgment that what has happened has happened, and that one must build where there is something to build on.

The title, of course, alludes to Shakespeare’s famous lines in Macbeth:

                  Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Frost uses this allusion to draw an important contrast between the life of a farm boy and that of a royal personage. The latter, it seems, can see only the meaninglessness of existence, its noise and violence: death seems irrelevant, since life itself is—in a strange sense—irrelevant. Macbeth hangs on to the prophecies of the witches at the outset of the play—a sign of his neurosis and megalomania. He cannot accept his own guilt in bringing about his wife’s death, or in bringing on his own demise.

The boy, on the other hand, lives in a society where mind and body exist in harmonious relation. His work is essential for the community, and for the family, who depends upon his contribution. When he cannot function as worker, his life loses a good deal of its meaning—a point he gathers when he “sees all,” intuitively, in a terrible flash. By contrast, Macbeth, although born into the highest ranks, sees much less. Frost is thus able to exalt the life of this small, organic community, where wisdom is commonplace, and pleasure is taken in small things, such as the smell of the sawdust: “Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.”

On the other hand, Frost also reveals the limitations of this rural world, as John F. Lynen has noted: “The death, after all, is a bitter thing; there is much to be said for a world in which one can survive an accident such as the boy’s. Ironically, it is the very advantages of the rural world that make it, in other ways, inferior: the boy’s conception of life is such that any impairment is fatal; and the rural world is so perfectly organized that any disruption of the natural order may lead to catastrophe.”11

It is part of Frost’s modernity that he refuses to delimit meaning but allows the poem to open into a complex and suggestive ambiguity. “‘Out, Out—’” brings to the fore both the strengths and the weaknesses of pastoral life in this period. In a brief space, one gets a full sense of the pleasures of working on such a farm as well as its obvious burdens and liabilities. The comparison with Macbeth thrusts the poem into a bracing perspective that neither belittles the “small” world of the New England farm nor necessarily suggests that the boy’s world is superior to Macbeth’s. The poem leaves a good deal of interpretive work for the reader to accomplish.

That first summer in the Franconia region was made all the more pleasant by the news, from Ellery Sedgwick, that he was going to publish a laudatory essay on Frost in the Atlantic, as well as three poems: “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Sound of Trees.” There was additional good news from Holt, saying that North of Boston was rising steadily in sales. While Holt had originally imported only 150 copies from David Nutt in London, they quickly printed 1,300 more copies of their own; a year later, after four printings, the book had reached 20,000 sales—almost unheard of for a book of poetry.

Frost’s ride was not entirely smooth, however. The trouble came from Mrs. Nutt, who refused to let her newly popular American poet publish some poems in a chapbook that Harold Monro proposed to edit; furthermore, she ignored every request by Frost for a report of his English sales, a clear breach of contract on her part. In frustration, Frost turned to Alfred Harcourt, who tried without luck to get Mrs. Nutt to let Frost go. Even after Frost wrote asserting that he considered their contract of December 16, 1912, void because she had not paid royalties or provided an accounting of sales, she refused to acknowledge an end to their partnership. Not until Mrs. Nutt’s publishing house went bankrupt in 1921 was Frost ultimately free of all her claims on him and his work.

Another bit of trouble came from a small handful of reviewers who, as Frost had predicted, took offense that an American poet had gone to England to seek affirmation. Among these was Jessie B. Rittenhouse, an influential officer of the Poetry Society of America, who wondered in her snide review of North of Boston in the New York Times Book Review why “a made-in-England reputation is so coveted by poets of this country.”12 Urged on by Frost, Alfred Harcourt defended Frost in the same paper: “That Mr. Robert Frost’s volume … made its first appearance under the imprint of an English instead of an American publisher has disturbed some of our reviewers and revived the old complaint that we are unappreciative of true excellence when it knocks at the door of our native literature. Mr. Frost’s poems are preeminently worth while, they are thoroughly original in theme and treatment, they are genuinely interpretive of certain phases of American life—why, then, were they published first in England? The query has suggested dire possibilities by way of answer. But now Mr. Frost himself comes to the rescue with an explanation the simplicity of which should allay at once any international jealousies or suspicions.” Harcourt explained that Frost in fact had “never offered a book to an American publisher” before he went to England and “didn’t cross the water seeking a British publisher.”13 This was literally true. Frost had never actually sent a book of poems to an American publisher and been rejected, although he had been turned down repeatedly by magazine editors; he had gone to England to seek an appreciative audience, though not explicitly to find a British publisher; that was merely a happy consequence of moving to England just as he was pulling together his first volume.

In September, a boost came from an unexpected source. William Dean Howells was the most influential man of letters in the country, a novelist and critic who had helped further the careers of Henry James and Mark Twain. He edited Harper’s, and his “Editor’s Easy Chair” was widely read. In a vigorous essay, he took a few sideswipes at vers libre poets, saying they “lacked all rigor,” then turned his attack on both Amy Lowell and Edgar Lee Masters (whose Spoon River Anthology was popular at the time); he singled out Frost as one of the most promising developments in current poetry, praising his “very sweet rhyme and pleasant rhythm.” With unusual insight, he noted Frost’s ability to penetrate “to the heart of womanhood.”14 One sees this extraordinary empathy in the portrait of Mary in “The Death of the Hired Man,” Estelle’s mother in “The Housekeeper,” and the mentally shaky farm wife in “A Servant to Servants.” Indeed, Frost could enter a woman’s consciousness with uncanny ease, intuit her needs and sympathies, find and exploit her vocal range.

Just half a year back in the United States, Frost found himself a real contender for that small quantity of attention devoted by the reading public to new poetry. Reviewers compared him, usually to his benefit, to Carl Sandburg (whose Chicago Poems had just been published), Edgar Lee Masters, and others. In Braithwaite’s Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1915, he was among five poets singled out for special recognition (Wallace Stevens was another—one of his first appearances on the national scene). There seemed no stopping him.

But illness began to intrude as the fall deepened. At the end of October, Frost was feeling physically fragile, as one sees in a letter to George Browne of October 27: “It’s not so much busy as sick with a cold I’ve been—though I’ve been a little busy helping Carol build the henhouse when I’ve felt able to be out of the wind. We got the house up and the roof onto it (and the hens into it) just before the rain came yesterday afternoon. This is something to have got off my mind. It leaves really very little to think of before winter but banking up and putting on a window or two.”15

This was in part a form of sympathetic illness, as Elinor was herself extremely unwell. She had become pregnant again, accidentally—her seventh pregnancy. An old worry about her heart not being strong enough resurfaced, and she was forced to take to her bed. Frost wrote to Abercrombie in England: “You will be sorry to hear that Elinor is altogether out of health and we are in for our share of trouble.”16 The crisis ended when, in late November, she had a miscarriage.

Frost’s life now took on a familiar pattern, combining farming, family life, writing, and lecturing. While he was not exactly beset with invitations to speak, these did come regularly, giving him that extra layer of income, making possible a fairly relaxed form of farming. “I like farming,” he told a Boston reporter, “but I’m not much of a farmer.” He elaborated: “I always go to farming when I can. I always make a failure of it, and then I have to go to teaching. I’m a good teacher, but it doesn’t allow me time to write. I must either teach or write: can’t do both together. But I have to live.… I’ve had a lazy, scrape-along life, and enjoyed it. I used to hate to write themes in school. I hate academic ways. I fight everything academic. The time we waste in trying to learn academically—the talent we starve with academic teaching!”17

In this interview, which appeared in the Boston Post, Frost was busily at work creating a self-myth that would accommodate and facilitate his writing life. He never mentioned that he had money from his grandfather, and he went out of his way to portray himself as lazy when, indeed, he worked hard enough to keep body and soul together, to keep the farm running and the poetry flowing. He was intensely ambitious, artistically; he wanted to make a name for himself, of course, but he also wanted to get his vision onto paper, to find a language adequate to experience. Having been neglected by the public for two decades, he also wanted an audience to confirm his vision.

In the winter and spring, Frost lectured widely. His various travels took him back to Dartmouth for the first time since he had left there years before. The high point of the spring was a lecture in Boston before the New England Association of Teachers of English, which took place on March 18, 1916. Frost reminisced about his own years as a teacher at Pinkerton, saying that he always encouraged students to write directly from experience. He worked by encouraging students, never discouraging them. Students should be shown to use their ears to gather information for essays, he suggested. His clear antipathy to the conventional forms of academic training rankled some members of the audience, and their hostility was evident in some of the questions—a development that took Frost by surprise. The whole experience of lecturing on the hoof was somewhat disorienting for him. “I wish I could remember where-all I’ve been in the past week or so and who-all I’ve baptized into my heresies,” he wrote to Untermeyer upon his return.18 The animosity in Boston had obviously not rattled his nerves, as it might have a few years earlier. He was rapidly building a stage presence and perfecting a mode of public address that satisfied him and much of his audience.

He was quite exhausted by the tour, however, and (according to Elinor) should have stayed put for a while, but an invitation to lecture in Philadelphia came from Cornelius Weygandt, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania whom he had met the previous summer. Frost read before nearly five hundred students at the College Hall Chapel at Pennsylvania on April 1, his biggest reading to date. He was interviewed the next day by the Public Ledger, a Philadelphia paper, and used this opportunity to expand on ideas developed in previous interviews. “You know, the Canadian woodchoppers [make their own] axe-handles, following the curve of the grain, and they’re strong and beautiful. Art should follow lines in nature, like the grain of an axe-handle,” he maintained.19

On his way home, he stopped to read his poems at Amherst College, thus making the most crucial academic contact of his life. A group of students had invited Frost, supported by their professor, Stark Young—a brilliant young author himself. Young had been brought to Amherst by Alexander Meiklejohn, Amherst’s energetic and original new president. Having spent two days at Amherst, Frost was impressed by the physical surroundings and intellectual atmosphere. It occurred to him that here was the kind of small college where he might like to teach one day.

As word spread of Frost’s memorable public appearances, the demand for his presence only increased; indeed, Harvard asked him to attend its commencement in June and to read a poem as the Phi Beta Kappa poet—a great honor for anyone but especially for a man who had himself dropped out of Harvard. Frost accepted this invitation happily. He and Elinor left the children with their neighbors, Reverend Joseph Warner Fobes and his wife, Edith, who spent their summers at a nearby farm. Mrs. Fobes, in particular, became a very close friend of Elinor’s.

Alfred Harcourt had been wondering when he might expect the next book of poems, and Frost had reassured him that he was almost ready. That summer, he set to work on assembling Mountain Interval. It was not difficult work, since he had come back from England with a fairly complete manuscript. The poems he had written since moving to Franconia filled out the book nicely. It was merely a question of arranging the poems in a satisfying sequence.

In the middle of the summer, two visitors arrived unexpectedly: Stark Young and Alexander Meiklejohn. They came with an offer that Frost, though he briefly hesitated, could not refuse. He was invited to join the faculty at Amherst for the spring semester of 1917 for $2,000. He would be expected to teach only two courses. Meiklejohn, a maverick in American education, assured Frost that his brand of anti-academicism would be welcome at Amherst, where he was trying to do something different.

Among the factors that played into Frost’s decision to accept this offer was the climate of Franconia. In winter, the cold was so bracing that the Frost family often found themselves bedridden with colds and lung ailments. Carol, in particular, seemed always on the edge of something serious, such as tuberculosis. The idea of finding a farm in some more hospitable part of New England dawned on Frost, and he told John Bartlett that he hoped one day to use Franconia merely as a summer home when he was “rich enough to let it lie idle all but two or three months in the year.”20

Frost accepted the offer formally after making another trip to Amherst to confirm his original impression and discuss the terms of the appointment in greater detail. President Meiklejohn was pleased by Frost’s response and wrote to tell him that he had read “The Road Not Taken” in college chapel to the delight of the students, who applauded vigorously. “I can assure you of an eager and hearty welcome by the community,” he said.21 Little did Frost know, of course, that this association with Amherst would become a more-or-less permanent aspect of his life until his death in 1963.