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In 1911, Frost sold his farm; he took his family to Scotland and London in the fall of 1912, a trip that proved invaluable to his writing career. Despite trouble getting his work published in America, Frost found a willing publisher in London, and A Boy’s Will appeared in 1913. North of Boston followed in 1914. It was in London that Frost first met many of the leading young American poets, including Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, who subsequently introduced Frost to Yeats, a poet he had long admired. The outbreak of World War I cut short Frost’s time abroad and he returned to America in 1915. He had little trouble publishing his verse thereafter, and his growing reputation as a poet brought attractive offers at prestigious universities. He began teaching at Amherst in 1917. While he remained loyal to Amherst, Frost spent short periods at other institutions as poet in residence, and he lectured all over the United States. He eventually became an emissary to South America and later, during John F. Kennedy’s presidency, to the Soviet Union. As the most famous poet of his time, Frost read at President Kennedy’s inauguration.
Frost’s poetry is widely recognized for its intense evocation of rural New England settings, its aphoristic lines, and its enigmatic voice-wise, clipped, and thematically evasive. Like other American modernists, Frost wrote in the American idiom, striving for colloquial language that evoked everyday speech. His poems usually have a narrative feel, and the characters are often engaged in manual labor, whether they are building a fence, picking apples, or chopping wood. Despite this penchant for the common and colloquial, Frost still believed very much in poetic form; he was famous for saying, in the face of so much free verse, that writing without rhyme and meter was like playing tennis with the net down. For Frost much of the challenge and beauty in poetry comes from a tension between a dynamic, dangerous subject matter and the poise and restraint of literary form. Although Frost’s poems often seem as simple and accessible as Sandburg’s, his work reveals a darker underside, suggesting the complexity he sensed beneath the tranquil surfaces of New England country life. Frost’s sagacious voice and gift for narrative lend his poems a popular appeal not shared by other modernists.
[5873] Dorothea Lange, Napa Valley, CA. More Than Twenty-Five Years a Bindle-Stiff. Walks from the Mines to the Lumber Camps to the Farms (1938),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-018799-E].
Transients, referred to as “hobos” or “bindle-stiffs,” often traveled around the country by rail and on foot, working odd seasonal jobs such as harvesting crops or lumber. During the depression, the hobo became a character in American literature, particularly in works by Jack London, John Dos Passos, and Robert Frost. Poems and autobiographies by hobos themselves also flourished.
[7111] Samuel H. Gottscho, Gate Bordered by Stone Walls (c. 1918),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC2-4334].
This photograph shows a fence constructed in typical New England style: stone laid upon stone. In poems such as “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost emphasized rural New England settings and used images like this to represent larger concepts.
[8002] Anonymous, Robert Frost, Head-and-Shoulders Portrait, Facing Front (between 1910 and 1920),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-115064].
Robert Frost is often thought of as a pastoral New England poet, but even his simplest-seeming poems engage complicated questions about life and death, good and evil.
[9066] Joseph John Kirkbride, Panorama of Mooseriver Village (c. 1884-91),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-61485].
“Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost tells us in “Mending Wall.” Nineteenth-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett, the daughter of a country doctor, also drew much of her inspiration from the small-town New England life with which she was familiar.
[9142] William Shakespeare, from Macbeth (c. 1608),
courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
Macbeth’s famous soliloquy from Act 5, scene 5 of Macbeth. Numerous works of American literature have drawn on this soliloquy, including William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Robert Frost’s “Out, Out-.”