![]() Even as he and his wife, Elinor, and their four children walked uptown from the ship, Eliot, and Dos Passos were preparing to turn to Europe, Frost characteristically turned home, where his planted notices and reviews had worked well. So, at about the time when a "lost generation" of American writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, īy 1915, when his second book, "North of Boston" had been published (again, in England), he was ready to take his homesick family back to America. In demonstrating that you could thrust anything upon the world. You were not concerned so much with my desert " And Frost's touchiness, combined with his ambition, led him to cultivate Pound's help further, even as he was parodying Pound and attacking his motives in such lines as these sent should go to people who care especially for you or for me or for poetry." At the same time, he was writing to Robert Bird Mosher,Īn editor who had published some of his earlier worked in America: "you will be amused to hear that Pound has taken to bullying me on the strength of what he did for me by his review in Poetry. "I should take it kindly if you would pass these along," he wrote to his young admirer Sidney Cox,Īnd in repeated notes urging action he pointed out that the material "to be most effective. ĺs Frost began to plan his return to America, he sent ahead favorable reviews from England, with instructions about distribution. When Pound championed other new talents, Frost referred to his "perfidy" and sarcastically called him "that great intellect abloom in hair." But Frost quickly showed his independence and his touchiness. Ezra Pound, then living in England, has presumed to become Frost's champion, and with a review in Harriet Monroe's new magazine, Poetry, launched the ![]() Anyone reading the recollections and letters of the time will see that Frost was currying favor with some critics even while preparing to turn from them toward others farther along his chosen line of progress īut the record is hard to follow, tangled among conversations and letters. Yet he had helped his career grow up fast. The collection "A Boy's Will," was published in England, after he had given up teaching, given up farming, sold the farm for $1,900Īnd taken the money to sustain him and his family in England, "under thatch." With the appearance of "A Boy's Will," Frost's literary fortune began to turn. Thirty-nine years old when his first collection of poems appeared, Robert Lee Frost was a late achiever. And wait to watch the water clear, I may. And his picture seems like that too - a sturdy, gray school poet, patriotic, kindly. These lines are fit for public occasions and for anthologies. (And wait to watch the water clear, I may) I'm going out to clean the pasture spring. "What the hell am I doing here anyway, if I don't get to see Khrushchev?" he complained when briefly restrained at that encounter. But he caught the world's attentionĪnd he went on - citations in Congress, a spectacular talk with Khrushchev in Russia. He has spent hours memorizing another poem written for the inaugural, but he could not complete the job in time. He was already and emblem, the old man in the wind reciting those lines. Such as she was, such as she would become. Such as we were we gave ourselves outrightīut still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, We were withholding from our land of livingĪnd forthwith found salvation in surrender. Something we were withholding made us weak Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, She was our land more than a hundred years The land was ours before we were the land's. At the age of 86, he came alive before the nation when he recited "The Gift Outright" for the inaugural of President Kennedy in 1961. ľven before his death in 1963 the land was his. But he still holds his secrets, and presumably we still cannot His picture is on a stamp his residences are marked ("Seven colleges claimed me," he once said) his books and books about him are everywhere. Now, in the centennial year of his birth, it looks as if he has become America's foremost ![]() The Terror in Robert Frost By WILLIAM STAFFORD obert frost liked secrets. ![]()
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