Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,831

This is the grave of Robert Frost.

Born in 1874 in San Francisco, Frost grew up pretty well off. His father was a newspaperman who edited the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. But he died of tuberculosis when his young son was 11 and left the family with almost nothing due to present financial circumstances. After that, his mother moved with the children to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his grandfather, a mill owner lived. He briefly attended Dartmouth but didn’t really stick there. He came home, taught a bit, worked various odd jobs, and wrote poetry, which was really the only thing he cared about. He started selling a few poems, got married, and went back to college at Harvard for a couple of years, though he never graduated. As his grandfather was aging, he bought his beloved grandson a farm up in Derry, New Hampshire. That was the life Frost wanted–write in the morning, work outside in the afternoon.

The farm wasn’t particularly successful, though Frost enjoyed it. He started publishing his poetry more too. He had to support himself by something else than farming, so in 1906 he started teaching at a private academy and then at the New Hampshire Normal School, which is today Plymouth State University. In 1912, he was ready for a change. He and his family decided to move to England. They lived in a small town outside of London and Frost moved toward more consistent publication. He published his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will, in 1913 and it came out in an American edition in 1915.

Shortly after that American edition was published, with World War I making things in England pretty not great, Frost and his family returned to the United States. He bought himself another farm, near Franconia, New Hampshire. He lived there in the summer until 1938. During the winters, he frequently taught literature at Amherst College and you can see his home in that town today, as you can the homes of the other rather large number of writers who have lived in that town. The main thing he tried to teach–and you can easily see this in his own writing–was to pay attention to how people actually spoke and to use plain language to get your point across.

Frost wasn’t just a poet. He was probably the most honored poet in twentieth century American history who did the rarest thing possible–he became popular. Only Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath can really come close to Frost’s impact on the general public and of course most of Plath’s impact was after her death. T.S. Eliot too I suppose. Frost kept publishing his poetry at a pretty prodigious pace and he won his first Pulitzer Prize for 1923’s New Hampshire. That included such poems as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and “Fire and Ice.” Let’s reprint “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a good example of his best work:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

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.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

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

1930’s Collected Poems won Frost another Pulitzer, though it was a bigger collection of his first five poetry books, including New Hampshire. He won his third Pulitzer for 1936’s A Further Range and his fourth and final for A Witness Tree, published in 1942.

By the 40s, Frost was spending his winters in Miami, not Amherst, which made sense for an aging man. But he was committed to teaching still and from 1921 to 1962, he spent part of every summer teaching at the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, where it had a small campus on top of a mountain in Ripton, Vermont. For a man deeply committed to New England and its ways of life, this was a good gig. He aslo taught at the University of Michigan for awhile in the 1920s; of course, the weird Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn bought his house and moved it there to fit with its larger theme of oddball nostalgia for rural America by the man who did more than any other single American to create the 20th century. He also had a house in Shaftsbury, Vermont, which is today owned by Bennington College.

Still, things sure weren’t easy for Frost. Severe mental illness was a very real thing in his family. His mother was severely depressive and so was Frost. He had a sister who died in a mental institution and his daughter also spent many years in an institution. In fact, only two of his six children would outlive him, though one of the deaths was as an infant.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy asked Frost to read a poem for his inauguration. He wrote a new poem for it. But the sun was so bright that he couldn’t see the text (to be fair, he was 86 years old on top of it being a sunny day) so he just started citing his 1941 poem “The Gift Outright” instead. Although he was very old, he was actually really involved in the Kennedy administration in some interesting ways. For example, in 1962, Stewart Udall, who was Secretary of the Interior at the time, went to Moscow to meet with Khrushchev to further relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Udall invited Frost along. Sure!

Frost was obviously thus active until the very end, which came in early 1963. He got sick and died quickly, in a Boston hospital, at the age of 88.

Robert Frost is buried in Old Bennington Cemetery, Bennington, Vermont.

Let’s read another Frost poem: This is “Birches”

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

In the Library of America, Frost’s volume comes in at 81. If you would like this series to visit other LOA authors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John Dos Passos, whose USA trilogy is Volume 85, is in Kinsale, Virginia, and John Steinbeck, who has many volumes including The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings, 1936-41 as Volume 86, is in Salinas, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.