When Robert Frost died in January 1963, he had been America’s Poet for half a century. Such was his fame that his correspondence with two of his old friends, John T. Bartlett and Louis Untermeyer, was published within the year. The following year his “official” biographer, Lawrance Thompson, edited The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, which, until now, has been the standard edition. These and later volumes of Frost’s letters introduced readers to the man behind the poetry.
Not everyone liked what they saw. Thompson’s own animus was revealed in his introduction to the Selected Letters, where he charged that Frost “was never as natural as he seemed,” a man who hid behind “dramatic masks” in order to “protect his excruciating sensitivities.” The publication of Frost’s letters, Thompson hoped, would help to unmask him, revealing his “gloom, jealousies, obsessive resentments, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages, and vindictive retaliations.”
The index to the Selected Letters, where we find such keywords as “Ambition,” “Cowardice,” “Fears,” “Masks and Masking,” and “Self-Indulgence,” only confirmed Thompson’s dislike of his subject. The question is whether Thompson’s bias influenced his selection of Frost’s letters. Did he pounce on the most damning letters while ignoring others that might have created a more balanced impression of the poet? Possibly not, although he chose to publish fewer than a third of the 1,500 letters he examined.
The letters Thompson omitted—along with those that were not collected until after 1964—will soon be available in one place, thanks to Harvard’s decision to publish all of Frost’s letters in a three-volume scholarly edition. The publication of these volumes promises to be an event in American literary scholarship, like the publication of Emily Dickinson’s letters in 1997 (also by Harvard). Whether they will serve to correct Thompson’s distorted portrait of Frost will depend on their use by future biographers.
Prior to 1912—the year he moved to England—Frost struggled to put bread on the table and get his verse into print. Many of the letters from this early period are addressed to Susan Hayes Ward, the poetry editor of The Independent, who in 1894 published “My Butterfly”—the first poem to earn Frost a little pocket money. The Harvard editors have added only a letter or two to Thompson’s selection from this period, which suggests that Frost’s other early letters have been lost or remain in private hands.
From September 1912 to February 1915, Frost lived in England, where he published his first two books (A Boy’s Will and North of Boston) and established his reputation as a poet. Thompson’s volume contains only a few of the letters Frost wrote during this period to his new British acquaintances. The Harvard edition contains more letters from British sources, including one Frost wrote to the British poet Lawrence Binyon, who had criticized certain lines in one of Frost’s poems (probably “Mending Wall”). “I experience a curious satisfaction,” Frost replied, in having hit on “Oh just another kind of outdoor game” and on “But it’s not elves exactly.” Such “accents of the practical,” he wrote, “are part of my venture.”
In 1915, Frost returned to America to reap the fruit of his labor. Among the gems not found in Thompson’s volume is a letter Frost sent to the novelist Willa Cather on January 15, 1916. In December, Cather had written to congratulate Frost on A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. In her letter—which the Harvard editors helpfully quote in a footnote—Cather confided that Frost’s books “contain the only American verse printed since I began to read verse, in which I have been able to feel much interest—the only verse of highly individual quality.” She went on to confess her lack of enthusiasm for the “new poets,” declaring that “if Ezra Pound and [Edgar Lee] Masters are poets, clearly you are none.”
Before he answered Cather’s letter, Frost wrote a brief note to Louis Untermeyer (omitted by Thompson). “Will you tell me who Willa Sibert Cather is?” he asked Untermeyer. “Is the name a man’s? That’s what I want particularly to know. Is he (or she) some poet I ought to have read?” Frost can be forgiven for not knowing Cather’s early (and only) collection of poems, April Twilights. As for the Prairie Trilogy that made her reputation as a novelist, O Pioneers! had been published while Frost was living in England.
Evidently Frost got the information he wanted, for his letter to Cather begins, “My dear Miss Cather.” He approved of Cather’s sharp distinction between his verse and that of Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology had made a splash the previous year. “You for one see that I am not only not a free-verse writer,” he agreed, “but not a free-thinker nor a free anything.” Indeed, Frost and Cather were alike in this regard, finding their freedom as writers and thinkers within the traditional constraints of form and creed.
In 1917, Frost took a teaching post at Amherst College, where his silhouette now communes with Emily Dickinson’s in front of the Frost Library. That April, President Wilson asked Congress to approve his declaration of war against Germany. In May, Frost was invited by Hermann Hagedorn, the leader of “The Vigilantes,” a group of prowar poets, to contribute to an anthology of war poetry. As his letters reveal, Frost was no pacifist: he had been an ardent supporter of England’s war effort from the beginning. But he declined Hagedorn’s invitation in a letter (not found in Thompson) that is vintage Frost.
“I’m of no earthly use,” he informed Hagedorn, “except to write about a stray cow or collar now and then when I’m least expecting to. If you let me alone,” he continued, ” … theres [sic] a bare possibility that I might happen to write a poem about the war … . But I sha’n’t [sic] write it if I’m billed to write it. So don’t bill me, will you?” In Frost’s rigorous aesthetic, poetry and ideology did not mix. More broadly, poetry and intention did not mix. A poem must come as a surprise to the poet, or it is not a true poem.
The first volume of the Harvard edition of the letters ends with Frost’s resignation from Amherst in early 1920. Granted, only a handful of Frost scholars will read it cover to cover. Many of the letters concern the mundane details of a poet’s life—publication, speaking engagements, and the like. Others—especially those to Untermeyer—are written in a sort of code language that most readers will not bother to decipher. But for every two unimportant letters, there is a third that sheds light on Frost the man or Frost the poet.
The Frost who emerges from his letters can come across as vain, defensive, ingratiating, stubborn. Thompson was not entirely wrong about that. But what redeems Frost is his acute awareness of his own deficiencies of character—along with his lively sense of humor. Like his poems, his letters can be playful and teasing. Others read like drafts of lectures, in which he tries out his ideas about poetry. They take us back to an era when letter-writing was the next best thing to a conversation beside the fireplace.
Frost meant his letters to do what Horace said poetry should do—please and instruct their readers. Thanks to the labors of Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, they can now please and instruct us as well, even though we don’t write letters anymore.
Mark Walhout teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.
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