MILES TO GO

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.

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Robert Frost is one of the more written about American poets, probably only Walt Whitman has been discussed more. Do we really need another Robert Frost biography? Obviously Adam Plunkett thinks so. Early on in Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), he tells us his book is something of a reputation rehabilitation, saying that it’s needed after Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography completed way back in 1976. Indeed, in a review of the second volume of Thompson’s biography in The New York Times Book Review, Helen Vendler summed up that Robert Frost was a “monster.” However, in 1984, William Pritchard had had much the same idea as Plunkett today, writing Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered that so successfully changed the public’s mind about Frost that Vendler retracted her previous “monster” statement. Adam Plunkett’s new book is actually more critical analysis than biography anyway, as you can probably guess from the subtitle. He spends more time on Frost’s poetry than Frost himself; in fact the book’s call number in my local library is 811.52, American Poetry, instead of B for biography.

Biographers of poets have to decide how to blend criticism and biography—how much of each to write about. Plunkett weighed more heavily to the criticism side, but bewilderingly left out some of Frost’s most well known poems. Critic Randall Jarrell considered “The Witch of Coös” “Home Burial” and “A Servant to Servants” the crowning achievements of Frost’s poetry, even calling them the summit of poetry itself. Plunkett gives a brief passing mention to “Servant,” but there is no mention at all of the other two poems. (Louis Untermeyer included all three in his pocket anthology of Frost poems.) Plunkett’s analysis does run deep though—he gives side by side comparisons of Frost’s poems to other poems he believes may have inspired Frost. His comparison of Frost’s “Flower Gathering” to Shakespeare’s “Carpe Diem” is convincing. And Plunkett does not shy away at giving his own judgment on Frost’s poems—he proclaimed “The Silken Tent”, a poem written after Frost’s wife died, to be the last great romantic poem that Frost ever wrote.

Upon Frost’s triumphant return to America with his two published books (North of Boston was published a year after A Boy’s Will in England) he found he’d achieved a bit of renown in his home country. A brand new magazine, The New Republic, had favorably reviewed North of Boston which had been published in America by Henry Holt without Frost’s knowledge. Frost called on his newfound American publisher who immediately cut him a check as an advance against royalties. He then headed to Franconia, New Hampshire, bought himself a farmhouse (mostly for the seclusion, Frost was a terrible farmer) where he settled in to write, only leaving to give the lectures he was now in demand for. He only stayed four years there, leaving for South Shaftsbury, Vermont after Franconia became a little too touristy. Plunkett also cryptically mentions another reason for Frost’s exit from Franconia: “…avoidance of a possible scandal involving sexual advances toward Irma later cast into a very different light.” He makes no further mention of it in the book, and it seems an odd bit of information to include in a book intended to be a reputation enhancement.

Prior to his hejira across the Atlantic it wasn’t just his poetry Frost was struggling with. He was in debt to various people, including a landlady trying to evict him. Frost’s grandfather, William Prescott Frost, paid the back rent for him and bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire called the Magoon Place where Frost and his family could live. Grandfather Frost put some restrictions on his rascally grandson, though—he could not sell the farm for ten years after inheriting it upon William Frost’s death, and he had to take on a boarder, Carl Burrell, to help work the farm (Frost’s grandfather knew Frost wouldn’t be able to run the farm himself). Frost’s grandfather died in 1901, Burrell left the farm in 1902, and indeed the Magoon Place fell into a bit of a decline. One of Frost’s neighbors recalled that Frost was unable “to cope with any form of farming,” there was machinery left laying about and weeds and brush growing everywhere. His impoverished neighbors also resented the annuity Frost regularly received after his grandfather died. (When Frost was nineteen his grandfather told him “No one can make a living at poetry. But I tell you what, we’ll give you a year to make a go of it. And you’ll have to promise to quit writing if you can’t make a success of it in one year. What do you say?”)

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Although Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was written in 1922, seven years after Frost left Magoon Place, I’ve always believed it to be about his time in Derry.

 My little horse must think it queer  
 To stop without a farmhouse near  
 Between the woods and frozen lake  
 The darkest evening of the year.

The darkest evening of the year would have been referring to December 22, the solstice in Derry, three days before Christmas. Then we get the poem’s final stanza:

 The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  
 But I have promises to keep,  
 And miles to go before I sleep,  
 And miles to go before I sleep.

What “promises to keep” would Frost have been referring to in the poem’s final stanza? Some interpretations say a promise to live after briefly thinking of death. However, Frost himself said the tone of the ending was not that of someone contemplating death, but more like someone, say after visiting a friend for dinner, saying “Well I must be getting on.” I think the promises would have been something more prosaic, like a good Christmas for his family which would have been a little difficult for someone as poor at farming as Frost was. More than a few critics have also said the narrator in the poem is stopping to enjoy the lovely scenery; in fact the woods are described as “lovely.” Again, I don’t think so. I think it was the wistful envy of an unsuccessful farmer. Frost often gainsaid the overwrought interpretations of mortal stakes and sublimity. “These people can’t seem to get it through their heads that the obvious meaning of a poem is the right one,” Frost said more than once. Frost did not keep secret his dislike of the critics, saying “they scratch each other’s backs, then scratch each other’s eyes.” However, he did agree with them when they classified him as a Realist: “There are two types of realist. There is the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real potato. And then there is the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I am inclined to be the second kind. To me, the thing that art does for life it to clean it, to strip it to form.”

“I fear I am not a poet, or but a very incomprehensible one.” Frost wrote that in a letter to Susan Hayes Ward when he was twenty-two years old in 1896. Of course he had no idea that there were four Pulitzer prizes in his future; the most of any poet. Even after he’d achieved critical acclaim the modernists dismissed him as a rural rhymster and crackerbox philosopher. (He called them the Eliot Gang in his clapbacks.) Frost’s most anthologized poem, “The Road Not Taken”, was first published in the August 1915 edition of Atlantic Monthly. Probably the most analyzed poem in American history, David Orr wrote a 192 page book about it published in 2015. Orr assures us we’re all getting it wrong: “The poem’s speaker tells us he ‘shall be telling’, at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled…yet he has already admitted that the two paths ’equally lay/ in leaves’ and ’the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same.’” Orr sums up: “So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.” Frost actually wrote the poem as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas who was always whiffling over which road to take when they were out on walks together in England and how Thomas always regretted the one that they did take. Frost later wrote a poem for his friend Thomas after Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras in 1917. Titled “To E.T.”, it is the only poem Frost wrote to a named contemporary.

Frost disliked being asked which of his own poems was his favorite, probably because the questioners always assumed it would the “The Road Not Taken.” When Frost was lecturing in Bowdoin in 1947 he was again asked by an attendee what his favorite poem was. The questioner was University of Maine student N. Arthur Bleau, and as Bleau recalls Frost angrily dismissed the question at first, but later waved Bleau up to the podium after Frost finished the lecture. Bleau later wrote of the encounter that Frost said, “I’d have to say ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is that poem.” That seems to be somewhat foretold in a letter to Louis Untermeyer in May of 1923 when Frost wrote that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was “my best bid for remembrance.”

If the readers of Plunkett’s new book are looking for clarity on the Robert Frost/Kay Morrison relationship, they aren’t going to get it. If anything, they’ll come away more befuddled than ever. After Frost’s wife Elinor died, Kay became Frost’s amanuensis, secretary, caretaker. While Frost was in a state of nihilistic grief in the months after his wife’s death, Plunkett writes, “It was in this state, in which Frost felt as if nothing mattered to him anymore, that Kay had visited him over the summer and the two had a tryst.” This seemingly gives a definitive answer to the question of whether or not the two had an affair, which for some Frost devotees has always remained an open question despite all the indications that the two were indeed romantically involved. However, Plunkett also writes of the conversations between Kay Morrison and Frost’s biographer Lawrance Thompson where, “She said Frost had misled people about their relationship, giving people a sense of intimacies that were not there and a rupture in her and Ted’s marriage that was not there either.” Plunkett muddies his own waters, seemingly deliberately so.

Frost was an imperfect father and husband, as Thompson pointed out in his biography and also Plunkett in his. The cruel treatment and unreasonable pressures he put on his wife, and then later on Kay, are part of what led some to call him a monster. Then there were the other more trivial things—bashing up his furniture in a Bukowskian drunken rage, lighting a newspaper on fire during a poetry reading at Bread Loaf (the fire started to get out of control forcing other attendees to put it out). Lawrance Thompson included in his copious notes: “Nobody could have been more completely selfish than Frost. He is more thoroughly self-centered than any person I’ve known. And it has been his vice more than it has been his virtue, I’m sure.” Plunkett does not shy away from these negative aspects, and it makes me wonder if his impetus for Love and Need was really to refute Thompson’s negative portrayal or if he just wanted to just show off his critical chops with his in-depth analysis of Frost’s poetry.

After Frost dropped out of Dartmouth he took a job at the Arlington Woolen Mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts in September of 1893. He may or may not have been aware that some of his former students (Frost was a teacher for a short while at an elementary school), now young adults, were working there. To say Frost had been a strict disciplinarian during his teaching days would be a gross understatement—he regularly beat misbehaving students with a rattan cane that he brought to school just for that purpose. (One particularly aggressive student even pulled a knife on Frost, Frost disarmed and beat him.) One morning after work as Frost was heading home (he worked the night shift) a group of his former students on their way in to work decided to get their revenge. The beating was so severe Frost was sure they were trying to kill him. A passerby stopped the beating. Frost quit working at the mill after just five months. This incident is omitted from the Plunkett biography, but Plunkett does include reminiscences of a few of Frost’s former students who remembered him in a more pleasant light—his rumpled clothes, messy hair, and meandering lessons (one student said Frost’s clothes looked like he slept in them).

Near the end of Love and Need Plunkett tells of Frost’s efforts to get Ezra Pound released from the bughouse and with so few pages left I was starting to wonder if Plunkett was going to omit Frost’s recital at the Kennedy inauguration. He did not. He was saving it for last. Frost was unable to see the manuscript he’d brought with him in the bright glare of the sun, “his eyes failing him for two minutes in the most public moment of his life…” Frost instead recited his poem “The Gift Outright” (in Randall Jarrell’s 1952 essay “To the Laodicieans” Jarrell said that “The Gift Outright” is the “best patriotic poem ever written about our own country.”) Other critics have said the poem reeks of nationalistic jingoism; it’s opening lines are: “The land was ours before we were the lands./ She was our land more than a hundred years/ Before we were her people.” In a January 1961 letter to William Corrington, Charles Bukowski said of Frost’s recital, “I am thinking now of Frost slavering over his poems, blind, the old rabbit hair in his eyes, everybody smiling kindly, and Frost grateful, saying some lie, part of it ‘…the deed of gift was the deed of many wars…’ An abstract way of saying something kind about something that was not kind at all.” Not long after Kennedy took office, he sent Frost on a state-sponsored visit to the Soviet Union. Kennedy was unhappy with statements that Frost made to the press about the visit afterward and the two never spoke again.

Frost’s fourth and final Pulitzer came in 1943 for A Witness Tree. Plunkett writes, “The committee had decided to give it to a book by a less decorated author that they deemed less deserving on the merits; their decision was reversed on Louis Untermeyer’s appeal.” Plunkett doesn’t mention it, but that other book was Have Come, Am Here by José Garcia Villa. Garcia Villa had only been writing poetry for about ten years by that time, having been a prolific short story writer beforehand. One of the poems in the collection was “The Emperor’s New Sonnet”, which was just a blank page. (Other gimmicks Garcia Villa used from time to time in his poetry was commas after every word—he was known as The Comma Poet.) Pulitzer chairman Wilbur L. Cross resisted Untermeyer at first, saying that the jury would be accused of failing “to find any evidence of new talent” if the award went to Frost. He of course relented and that was the final year of his tenure as Pulitzer jury chairman.

I had only a few minor quibbles with Love and Need, one being that Plunkett mentions how Frost demanded that Stark Young, a professor at Amherst during the same time Frost briefly taught there, be fired for trying to seduce male students. What Plunkett doesn’t mention was that Young was a very popular professor and that Frost’s demand for his dismissal could have been motivated by envy. Young was regarded as the wittiest and most skillful professor in the English department at the time. Gardner Jackson, a student of both Frost and Young, recalls that Frost gossiped often about fellow professors and that Frost asked Jackson about Young’s ways of dealing with students, trying to get at the source of Young’s popularity—there’s little doubt that Frost was jealous of Young. Another small quibble I had was that Plunkett writes the North American chestnut was decimated by a European disease; it was actually an Asian fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica. (Petty, I know.) This new biography isn’t a triumph, not if Plunkett really set out to rehabilitate Frost like he said he intended. And with the omission of many of Frost’s most well known poems, I can’t really say it’s a triumph of criticism, either (although the criticism of what is included is very incisive indeed). Frost had a lover’s quarrel with the world, but for all his faults, American poetry—indeed the English language itself—owes a profound debt to Robert Frost.