11/02/2022
Dr. Stigma is back with another historical essay!
Robert Frost (1874-1963) was the best-known, most beloved, and most decorated poet in America of the 20th century. In a 20-year period this chronicler of New England ways won a record 4 Pulitzer Prizes for poetry (1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943) while changing how Americans viewed themselves and their culture. He wrote 4 plays and over 100 published poems. He won a Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for the body of his work.
His style was deceptively simple, and deeply observational. His first published poem “My Butterfly: An Elegy” emerged from the New York Independent while he was 20, for $15.00 ($470.00 today). Frost had already overcome hardships that would cripple a lesser young man. His father died when Frost was 11, leaving $8.00 for the family he left behind. His mother died of cancer when Robert was 26. He and his mother both suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental institution in 1947. His wife Elinor had bouts of depression as well.
Though his later poetry would reveal a deep understanding of Classical Greek and Roman literature, San Franciscan Frost left New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College, Class of 1896 after an unseasonably cold first-year September and October; later he lasted two years at Harvard before trying to figure out how to make a living as a poet. Decades later Dartmouth would bestow two honorary degrees on Frost, the only person it would so honor; Harvard and Oxford among 40 other institutions followed suit with single degrees, leading double Ivy League drop-out Frost to quip, “I got my education by degrees.”
Like guitar legend Jimi Hendrix decades later, Frost had to go to England to achieve notoriety back in America. His books of poetry, “A Boy’s Will” (1913) and “North of Boston” (1914) not only sold well, with the encouragement of the best British poets; Frost returned to America an “overnight” literary celebrity at age 40.
In 1915 the prestigious Atlantic Monthly published “The Road Not Taken”, which famously ends,
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.”
Frost was perfecting the art of writing fine poems with memorable endings.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (written in 1922, published in 1923), ends with a unique and famous quatrain:
“These 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”
The decision by Frost to repeat verse 3 with verse 4 was a daring one.
Frost kept writing diligently and produced another gem in 1923, “Dust of Snow”:
“The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued”
Frost is observational and appreciative of Nature which functions as a character of its own in much of his poetry, not just as a backdrop. And his understanding of the way ordinary men talked and acted is unparalleled.
Interestingly, Robert Frost as an observer of human nature produced many memorable non-poetic sayings.
A sampling:
“A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday, but not her age.”
“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.”
“A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”
“Education is hanging around till you catch on.”
And finally, “How many things would you attempt if you knew you could not fail?”
For 68 years Frost faced the blank page and consistently produced. He was already filling auditoriums when the newly elected John F. Kennedy tapped him to recite an original poem for the symbolic moment of the beginning of The New Frontier, his Presidential Inauguration.
It was a bitterly cold January 20, 1961, and as the former Poet Laureate of the United States grasped the lectern, he was blinded by brilliant rays of sunlight reflecting off snow. He could not read his prepared poem, “Dedication”. Kennedy, hatless, on his right, clearly suppressed worry. As befitted his name, Frost cooly recited his poem, “The Gift Outright” (1942) perfectly, from memory. The great man was up to the task at hand at age 86.
Robert Frost’s legacy is you make your own legacy. Overcoming poverty as a youth, and depression that ran in his family, Frost succeeded by sticking to his own style in the face of some critics who complained it was not complex enough. Much of his best work was accomplished before the advent of radio. Frost mostly rejected celebrity, preferring to be a mediocre farmer but an excellent teacher for decades at the Breadloaf School of English of Middlebury College in Vermont. His phrasing lives on through best-selling book titles like “The Road Less Traveled” by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck. Maybe that one should have been titled “The Poem Less Attributed”.
The pantheon of 20th century poets, most critics agree, starts with Frost and then further down dwell Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, both immensely talented in their own right.
Just not as good as Robert Frost.
