Robert Frost and the Lockless Door

Abstract

IN his 1929 preface to A Way Out, Robert Frost closed by declaring, Here for once I have written a play without (as I should like to believe) having gone very far from where I have spent my life.'1 He was telling a truth in a number of ways. Frost had indeed not strayed far from the psychological probing and dialogue form of many of the North of Boston poems, and he had retained his New England setting and characters. Most intriguingly, however, Frost was also hinting that for inspiration he had not gone very far from a traumatic event of his own youth. That event inspired not only this one-act play but another, full-length one, Guardeen, which was to follow many years later. A key event of the summer of 1895 echoes in poems and plays whose composition spans a period of twenty-five years. So sustained an effect reveals not just how personally critical the experience itself was but also how much Frost needed to revalue and revise in art the events of his life. A Way Out, The Lockless Door, and Guardeen, the first written in 1916 and the last completed in 1941-42, also demonstrate the crucial tension in Frost between solitude and community as well as his shifting perspective on the role of the artist in society. In Robert Frost: Early Years, Lawrance Thompson offers a detailed account of the summer of 1895. When Elinor White, home from college, decided to accompany her sister Leona to Ossipee Mountain, near Lake Winnepesaukee in New Hampshire, Frost, still at that time the importunate suitor, saw no recourse but to follow, even though he would