Hugh Blanton

In August of 1912 at the age of thirty-eight, frustrated with his lack of success, Robert Frost sold his New Hampshire farm and set sail for the land of Shakespeare to stake his claim as a poet. Although his poems had appeared in various magazines by then, he had yet to publish a full book of poetry. Within two months of arriving in Old Blighty he hit pay dirt—the publisher M.L. Nutt agreed to publish A Boy’s Will and they signed the contract on October 26. Frost’s quick success got him introduced to such luminaries as Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats; he and his family hobnobbed around London’s cultural centers and rented a cottage near the house of G.K. Chesterton and only a few miles from where Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Frost had given an advance copy of the book to Ezra Pound who immediately fired off a review to Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, excoriating American publishers for overlooking such promising talent as Frost. However, Frost thought the review condescending—Pound calling the book “a little raw” and “folk poetry.” Pound called the surroundings in the book a “middan,” Irish for trash heap. After Frost’s wife Elinor read the review, she cried. “Ezra Pound manifestly made a mistake when he thought he knew how to praise my poetry for the right thing,” Frost wrote in a letter to the poet F.S. Flint. “What he saw in them isn’t there and what is there he couldn’t have seen or he wouldn’t have liked them.” Frost’s admiration of Pound had turned to condemnation.