Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Abstract

Robert Francis's reminiscence of Robert Frost, A Time to Talk, entry dated April 4, 1932, contains poem published day before in Springfield Republican and Union. Francis wrote poem to commemorate Frost's arrival at Amherst. Here are its final stanzas: Best of all--you've heard?--he comes to stay. This is his home now. He is here for good. To leave us now would be running away. (I too would stay forever if I could.) While stays, life that breathless fugitive, Will stay. While lives, things here won't die. And we, breathing his air, may learn to live Close to earth, like him, and near sky. An example of Francis's exuberant juvenilia (neither published in book form nor included in Collected Poems), lyric was, in his words, the pop gun fired in my private campaign to establish significant relation with this most significant man in town (48-49). following January, befriended Frost in his home on Sunset Avenue in Amherst; thereafter blossomed relationship in which younger found in Frost mentor. fact, recalled, when Frost's acquaintance, still unpublished in book form, young looking for guidance. So Frost took role of mentor, and much that said had to do with my own poems and my problems as poet (45). [1] After his second book, Valhalla and Other Poems, was published in 1938, volume made no stir anywhere (21), Francis wrote in his autobiography, Trouble with Francis. But if book failed to excite critical notice, it brought some quiet rewards (21), one of which was letter from Robert Frost: I am swept off my feet by goodness of your poems this time. Ten or dozen of them are my idea of perfection. A new swims into my ken. I can refrain from strong praise no longer. You are achieving what you live for.... You have not only feeling of true lyric poet, but variety of man with mind. (19) Francis's mention of Frost's letter is important because Frost's praise was formal recognition of his poetry. letter also provided evidence of Frost's influence on Francis: note that his praise of Francis's poems is reserved for those that are [his] idea of perfection (19). Not surprisingly, then, there is sort of Frost static everywhere in this volume. Compare passage from Francis's Valhalla- valley sees pasture on hill. Below pasture and above are woods Up to wooded peak up to sky. valley sees darkness of evergreens Waiting above pasture to come down As other evergreens have come or wait To come to darken pastures on other hills. --to an excerpt from Frost's poem, The Mountain: mountain stood there to be pointed at. Pasture ran up side little way, And then there was wall of trees with trunks; After that only tops of trees, and cliffs Imperfectly concealed among leaves. [2] As David Graham observes, echoes of Frost in Francis's early poems helped shape critical view that Francis was a minor lyricist perpetually standing in Frost's broad shadow (83). Reviews of Francis's early volumes focused on thematic resemblance of his writing to Frost's. Consider, for instance, Louis Untermeyer's critique of Francis's third book, Sound I Listened For (1944), whose poems accentuate what asserts is Francis's gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial. In this, Untermeyer animadverts, he reminds reader of his more illustrious forerunners, especially of one whose background is contiguous. It is nothing against Robert Francis that often resembles Robert Frost. And though Untermeyer admires Francis's lyrics for way in which they blend observation with imagination, adds, finally, [b]ut we know who wrote them first (345). …