IS ROBERT FROST A NEW ENGLAND POET?

Abstract

4 2 Y I S R O B E R T F R O S T A N E W E N G L A N D P O E T ? H E N R Y H A R T With the appearance of each new biography of Robert Frost, we learn more about the extent to which the iconic American poet fashionedamaskforhimselfasasturdy,a√able,even-temperedNew England farmer who just happened to have a gift for poetry. When the first installment of Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography arrived in 1966, some reviewers were surprised to discover that Frost had followed Yeats’s example by constructing a persona that was, in many aspects, antithetical to his actual personality. In one of the most perceptive reviews of Robert Frost: The Early Years, James Dickey, another inveterate mask wearer and role player, pointed out that the ‘‘Frost Story’’ was a ‘‘secular myth of surprising power and tenacity.’’ Unlike Thompson’s detractors, who accused Thompson of giving a maliciously one-sided account of Frost’s career, Dickey felt the biographer was slightly too enthralled by the ‘‘beloved’’ poet of New England. Nevertheless, he complimented Thompson for moderating his ‘‘bias in favor of his subject’’ and providing a ‘‘fully documentedrecordofwhatFrostwaslikewhenhewasnotbeloved :when he was, in fact, a fanatically selfish, egocentric, and at times dangerous man; was, from the evidence, one of the least lovable figures in American literature. What we get from Dr. Thompson is . . . the 4 3 R narrative . . . of the construction of a complex mask, a persona, an invented personality that the world, following the man, was pleased, wasoverjoyed,finally,totakeasanauthenticidentity.’’Othersshared Dickey’s sentiments. The poet Stanley Kunitz remarked that Frost’s ‘‘most successful work of the imagination was the legend he created about himself.’’ The biographies of Frost that began to appear in the late 1920s (Edward Davison’s Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense was the first) did little to alter Frost’s persona as a goodnatured New Englander. Before long, as Dickey observed, fans had chiseled an idealized image of Frost ‘‘in a kind of Mount Rushmore of the nation’s consciousness.’’ Thompson’s biography hammered away some of Frost’s granite mask, portraying the man as a reluctant New Englander who repudiated many of the virtues associated with the region. Thompson pointed out that Frost’s family had moved to New England not by choice but by chance and out of necessity. His mother would have preferred to stay in San Francisco, where Robert had grown up. Unfortunately, his father, William, died at the age of thirty-four, and the family was forced to uproot. Realizing that Robert, who was eleven, along with his sister, who was eight, and their mother could not survive on the eight dollars that William left them, William’s parents invited the family to stay in their home in New England. So in 1885 the Frosts traveled by train – with William’s corpse in a co≈n – to Lawrence, Massachusetts. The young Frost took an immediate dislike to his dour, puritanical grandparents and to New Englanders in general. He pined for the warmer climate and friendlier people out west. He later said: ‘‘At first I disliked the Yankees. They were cold. They seemed narrow to me. I couldn’t get used to them.’’ Although William had been an abusive alcoholic – sometimes beating his son with a dog chain – painful memories of the Frost household in San Francisco failed to quell his son’s nostalgia for the sunny West. In the sonnet ‘‘Once by the Pacific,’’ Frost expressed a sense of approaching doom that may have been accentuated by all the di≈culties he experienced after leaving California and settling in New England. The poem, Frost revealed, arose from a boyhood vision on a beach in San Francisco: ‘‘I got scared, imagining that my mother and father . . . had gone away and left me by myself in danger of my 4 4 H A R T Y life. I was all alone with the ocean water rising higher and higher. I was fascinated and terrorized watching the sea; for it came to me that we were all doomed to...