One thing I learned immediately upon researching Frost is that he had a complex relationship with biographers (and just about everyone else, apparently), saying, “either the ideas for the ideas’ sake and without the dirt and dross of me or no book at all ever while I live or after I die” (Sheehy 394). Frost had a number of biographers, but Lawrance Thompson earned the title of his “official biographer” in 1939 (Sheehy 395). Thompson later wrote that the difficulty behind being a Frost biographer is in getting “far enough back into the formative years of Robert Frost to try to understand and explain what forces were operative, back there, to create the curious forms of neurosis which Robert Frost had to struggle with throughout most of his life” (Sheehy 393). It may also be worth mentioning that Frost was known to bend the truth when speaking with biographers, so there are discrepancies in different representations of his life.*
Young and Handsome Frost, possibly from when he was Dartmouth (???)
Although Frost is known for his association with New England, he was actually born in San Francisco, CA on March 26, 1874 to William Prescott Frost Jr and Isabelle Moodie (Parini 4). Frost’s father (if you’re interested in hypermasculinity, you might want to look him up too), was a writer of a daily newspaper, and “warned the doctor who delivered his son that he would shoot him if anything went wrong” (Parini 4). Frost was named after Robert E. Lee, who was his father’s hero. From what I can tell, Frost’s parents were often at odds with one another, with his father being a heavy drinker and emotionally abusive towards Frost’s mother** (and apparently physically abusive towards Frost later on in life) (Parini 9, 12). When Frost’s father became exceedingly ill, the family was forced to live in impoverished conditions, often moving from hotel to hotel (Parini 10). After Frost’s father died of tuberculosis, his family moved to New England, the setting of many of Frost’s poems (Sheehy 401).
Frost attended Dartmouth, but dropped out after about two months of school (Gerber). Frost and Elinor White, whom he met in high school, married in 1895, but Frost found trouble supporting them through teaching and farming, neither of which were very successful (Gerber). Frost’s first poem “My Butterfly” was published by the New York Independent in 1894, for which he received $15 (which according to google would be about $400 today) (Gerber). Together they had four surviving children (and two others who died young), and raised poultry in New Hampshire (Gerber). Frost had a relatively late start in publishing poetry, and after having little success publishing in America, he decided to sell his farm and move to London (Gerber).
Frost and his family.
Similarly to our other poets, Frost had a pretty strange relationship with Ezra Pound, which ultimately ending in a falling out between the two. A notable sentence from this article: “The point – and Frost always had a point in his yarn spinning – is that Frost was much impressed with Pound’s energetic youth, his physicality, and his exoticness” (Sokol 521). With the help of Pound, Frost published his first book of poetry A Boy’s Will in 1913 (Gerber). Frost eventually cut off his ties to Pound after a review of his book which attributed Frost’s inability to get published to “the American cultural desert”, and asserted that Frost was “to be praised mainly for simplicity and directness” (Sokol 528). Frost felt as though Pound used his reviews as an avenue to take a political stance against America.*** Here is a short video that talks a tiny bit about Frost’s relationship with Pound, but also of importance: Frost liked trout heads (??).
Most critics seem to place Frost at “the crossroads of 19th century American poetry and modernism (“Robert Frost”). Some align him with poets like Eliot and Stevens in his use of imagism, while others find that his poems “[show] no marked departure from the poetic practices of the 19th century” (“Robert Frost”). A lot of the articles I found were heavily focused on the neurosis (to use Thompson’s language) of Frost, and how this was an effect of his childhood, which I think is largely a result of the route that Thompson took in his own biography of Frost. Thompson wrote that Frost’s own letters revealed “periods of gloom, jealousies, obsessive resentments, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages, and vindictive retaliations” (Sheehy 399). Almost all of the biographies I read mentioned that Frost suffered from some variation of depression or anxiety.
Because Frost is one of my all-time favorite poets, I have a number of audio files of him reading his poetry aloud. Here is one of him reading my very favorite poem, “Birches,” which has an obscene number of plays in my iTunes library. Also, since we’re reading “After Apple Picking” for next class, I included that one as well. His readings remind me a little of Yeats’s chanting.
Frost died of complications from prostate surgery when he was 88 years old, on January 29, 1963.
*See the following: “Frost once admitted to such an intention in his correspondence with Sidney Cox, a would-be biographer: ‘About five years ago I resolved to spoil my correspondence with you by throwing it into con- fusion the way God threw the speech of the builders of the tower of Babel into confusion’” (Sokol 522).
**Frost’s mother also apparently thought she could see the future, so that…is interesting?
*** Their disagreements were actually many-layered and bizarre, but for the sake of word count I couldn’t include everything. I would definitely recommend reading the article if you’re interested.
Word Count: 921
Works Cited:
Gerber, Philip L. “Robert Frost.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014. Web. 13 April 2014.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York, New York: Owl Books Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1999. Print.
“Robert Frost.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. Web. 13 April 2014.
Sheehy, Donald G. “The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost.” American Literature 58.3 (1986): 393-410. Print.
Sokol, B.J. “What Went Wrong between Robert Frost and Ezra Pound.” The New England Quarterly 49.4 (1976): 521-541. Print.