The Letters of Robert Frost by Robert Frost

First published:The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer with a commentary by Louis Untermeyer, 1963; Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship, edited by Margaret Bartlett Anderson, 1963; Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrance Thompson, 1964

Critical Evaluation:

In 1912, when Frost left teaching at the New Hampshire State Normal School in Plymouth to take his family to England in search of seclusion and more time to write, he was thirty-eight years old and all but convinced that, as a poet, he would never be a success. His first two volumes, A BOY’S WILL and NORTH OF BOSTON, had been published in London before he returned to America in 1915. The American edition of NORTH OF BOSTON, published with sheets imported from England, had been favorably reviewed in the New Republic by Amy Lowell and by Louis Untermeyer in the Chicago Evening Post. Soon after his return Frost undertook the public appearances which, continuing throughout his life, contributed so much to the legend that grew up about him as the cracker-barrel philosopher beloved for his homely wit and benevolent charm, the same man who was excused from leading chapel exercises when he was teaching at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, New Hampshire, because the prospect of such an ordeal so obviously terrified him. But he needed the twenty-five or fifty dollars he got for each reading; and he realized that letting the public see him would establish more firmly the literary reputation he had worked and waited so long to achieve.

MOUNTAIN INTERVAL, a third volume of poems, was published in 1916; and the following year Frost, who, as he put it, had run away from two colleges, accepted a teaching appointment at Amherst College where he continued until 1920, the year he sold his Franconia, New Hampshire farm and moved his family to another in South Shaftsbury, Vermont. Prizes, honors, other teaching appointments followed fast. Yet, in a sense, his difficulties were just beginning. The world intruded on his time; teaching, while it enhanced his financial independence, curbed his freedom to work; the lecture platform drained nervous energies he would have preferred to use for writing. To keep his equilibrium as he continued the search for his own poetic idiom was not easy. He was providing, moreover, for a sizable family two children had died; four remained as well as coping with the vicissitudes of domestic life. It is against this background of long neglect followed by sudden acceptance, of complicated and increasingly burdensome personal responsibilities, that his letters must be read.

Until the pressures of growing fame nudged him too sharply and too often, Robert Frost wrote letters chiefly because doing so gave him pleasure. Later, resolving to write no more letters of obligation, he threatened to wait until he wanted to say a particular thing in a particular letter to a particular person if he had to wait till the Second Coming. What, he wanted to know, did he get into writing for if it wasn’t for fun? That is not to say that when roused by resentment, or the need for a forceful rebuttal, he could not construct a letter as carefully as he felled a tree on his farm or built a stone path across the bog in his meadow. The construction itself was part of his fun. Since working with words so obviously delighted him, his letters, like his poems, are the reader’s delight as well, even when it must be that happy-sad blend Frost once spoke of as belonging, in the nature of things, to the final phrase of a poem.

In his intimate letters Frost liked to play with words as a retriever plays with a ball, used hyperbole almost as often as metaphor, and could give his lyric-dramatic imagination free rein with brilliant effect. Such letters may not be taken literally. Like poems, they simply are, and they make their own truth. Over a period of years, as he later confessed, he deliberately wrote letters to a certain correspondent in such a way as to keep the over-curious out of the secret places of his mind. It is not surprising that the poet who was of two minds about the statement that good fences make good neighbors should have hinted, in another poem, at the propriety of not exploring too deep in others’ business. Yet these letters of Frost’s are now being deeply explored by those who wish to distinguish between the Frost the American people loved and thought they knew, and the Frost who, much of the time, was acting a part he had consciously chosen to play. But if, for the purpose of protecting his privacy, Frost often threw dust in people’s eyes, he did not fool himself. He knew very well that petty resentments influenced him inordinately; that he sometimes resorted to deceit for more selfish purposes than to shield himself from those who would pry. Other reasons, too, make it difficult to read the man through his letters, for in Frost extreme opposites mingled. Arrogance was balanced by self-doubt; violent rages, by serene acceptance. Bad feeling he himself had advertised could end in the truly humble wish to make amends and be forgiven.

John T. Bartlett and his wife, Margaret, were both students of Frost at Pinkerton Academy—as he told them later, the best and next best pupils he ever had. From England he wrote frequent, warm-hearted letters to Bartlett, and it was to him that Frost explained in 1913, after the publication of A BOY’S WILL, his theory of versification—what he called “the sound of sense.” The sound of their talk, Frost said on another occasion was what first roused in him a conscious interest in people. More than once to Bartlett, and to various others among his correspondents, Frost described, with illustrations, what he meant by the poet’s need to learn how to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense, with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the meter. Although generous with advice to the young Bartlett, of whom he was very fond, Frost treated him much of the time as an equal, an easy, relaxed fellowship which gives the Bartlett letters particular significance. Only Bartlett’s death in 1947 terminated their friendship.

The correspondence with Louis Untermeyer, beginning shortly after Frost’s return from England and covering a period of forty-seven years, is even more revealing. No other friend, Frost told him, had released him to such letter writing. Mutual trust, affection, and respect, added to their common concern for poetry, made it possible for Frost to speak more freely to Untermeyer than to anyone else of other writers then being published, and of his own artistic and personal life. From the first Frost wanted to be on emotional, rather than intellectual terms with Untermeyer, so that nothing would matter to them more than the fact that they were friends. The selfportrait of Frost emerging from such a relationship, taken with Untermeyer’s comments, provides an invaluable basis for understanding him both as poet and man.

With Lawrance Thompson’s selection, which includes some of the best letters to both Bartlett and Untermeyer, the process of discovering the real Frost, which began with the publication of the earlier volumes, is continued and extended. Thompson, who in 1939 accepted Frost’s invitation to be his official biographer, chose, from more than fifteen hundred letters examined, five by the poet’s parents; 466 from Frost to 123 individuals; forty addressed to Frost by thirty-four correspondents; and fifty-five about Frost written by thirteen persons, most particularly those by his wife, Elinor M. Frost. Thompson also prepared a chronology of Frost’s life, a genealogy, and a selective index. Presented in strictly chronological order, and arranged so as to divide Frost’s life story into ten chapters, the letters present as complete a portrait as possible of the man, his work, and his life: facts, events, friendships, enmities, circumstances, obsessions, commitments, family crises, habits, ideas, prejudices, theories, and practices. The whole may be read as an autobiographical narrative, one which provides the raw material for evaluations by any who wish to create their own biographies before the formal life studies appear.

Like any impressive body of writing, these letters are bound to be studied, and what they demonstrate, as much as anything, is that Robert Frost, in the sense of his own definition of it, had style. Coming unmistakably from the same piece of cloth as the poems, they are the product of an orderly, quick mind with an unfailing talent for seizing the right detail: and of the same cultivated ear. Imaginative hearing, Frost declared, rather than imaginative seeing, ought to be the basis for poetry. And the style, he felt, was considerably more than the man: it was out of man’s superfluity. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer he defined it as the way a man carries himself toward his ideas and deeds. In all of his letters, whether he sulked, grieved, or exulted, whether he was writing to his friend, his publisher, his grandfather’s lawyer, or his son, Frost carried himself in a way he made entirely his own. After reading the letters one does not wonder that he was not amused that Amy Lowell thought he had no sense of humor.

If Frost’s struggle to succeed as an artist made his conduct as a man appear wayward, it is clear from the full range of his letters that he was always devotedly and warm-heartedly close to his family. When his children were grown and away, his loving thoughts and letters reached after them. He visited and sent presents to his sister Jeanie after she was confined in an institution for the insane. He watched his daughter Marjorie dying of puerperal fever. Another married daughter, Irma, had to be hospitalized because of insanity. In all his traveling he was never separated for long from his wife, whom he described as the unwritten half of nearly everything he wrote. Not long after she died suddenly of a heart attack, the suicide of his only son made Frost feel that he had failed as a father. Forty-four honorary degrees here and abroad, four Pulitzer prizes, and a galaxy of other honors could be no compensation for such losses. A letter he wrote to THE AMHERST STUDENT in 1935 provides the best explanation of how he managed to survive. Anyone who has achieved form, he said, whether it be letter, basket, garden, room, picture, or poem, is comforted. Certainly Frost needed, if anyone ever did, this protection—a stay, he called it, against confusion.

It may not be possible to know Frost completely from his letters. He pretended sometimes, but he always kept under cover the details of his wretchedness. From the twelve-year-old schoolboy’s loving notes to Sabra Peabody, a girl in his class at school, to the dying man’s letter, dictated nearly seventy-seven years later, to G. R. and Alma Elliott, his letters are impressive, not only for their intrinsic interest, but also because of the stature of the man who wrote them. A biography may extend understanding, but it will always be possible, through the body of the letters, to become well acquainted with a man thoroughly alive with the sensibility of an artist, the activity of an excellent mind, the trials of a truly remarkable human being, not to mention the mischievous wit, the mulish independence, and the sheer cussedness of a Yankee.