Frost – The Poet of Terror

On 26 March 1959 a dinner was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to honour, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Robert Frost. This literary icon, who many believed wrote of old pieties, old virtues, was the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes – a record which still stands. Lionel Trilling the eminent critic rose to speak: ‘I have to say that my Frost . . . is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, old simplicities and ways of feeling; he is anything but. Frost’s best poems represent the terrible actualities of life. In sum, he is a terrifying poet.’ Frost was disconcerted. The audience was disconcerted. Trilling left almost immediately – but Trilling was right. For beneath the guise of the avuncular, Robert Frost was indeed the poet of terror. He was also the poet of courage; he needed it – ‘I’d rather be taken for brave than anything else.’ His was a life that had not only a tough beginning but one in which he later suffered a Joblike series of tragedies that would have felled all but the bravest. A poem, he wrote, ‘begins in delight and ends in wisdom’ and in his case the wisdom was dearly bought. He was indeed ‘acquainted with the night’.

He was born in San Francisco in 1874 to William Frost, a Harvard educated journalist and aspiring politician from the East Coast who’d gone West to pursue his ambitions. These, alas, came to nothing.
He died aged thirty-four, a gambler and an alcoholic. After funeral expenses his wife, Belle, a teacher and a published poet of Scottish descent (whose family history was overshadowed by the mental illness
of which Frost had a deep fear) was left with only eight dollars in the bank. She had no alternative but to take her two children, Robbie and Jeanie, back to her parents-in-law in Boston, where she would resume her schoolteaching career. Frost often helped her in class and, when he could, financially, with work on farms and in factories. He wanted more: ‘Inflexible ambition trains us best.’ It was, in Frost’s case, combined with academic brilliance and a passion for poetry inherited from his mother, as well as for the classics. According to John Updike, Frost, who won a scholarship to Dartmouth and eventually went to Harvard, knew more Greek and Latin than either Eliot or Pound. Yet Frost’s poetry is almost devoid of overt classical references. However, in his monologues (and he is as great a monologist as Browning, with a similar genius for creating character) it is possible to trace a form of Greek tragedy in his tales of lives broken by arbitrary fate. His disturbing desire and capacity to ‘trip the reader head foremost into the boundless . . . Forward, you understand, and in the dark’ is clear also in the shorter poems, as in ‘Bereft’ and ‘Fire and Ice’. Joseph Brodsky said ‘Frost’s is a signal from a far-distant station. . . the fuel – grief and reason.’ The initial signal came in 1894 with the innocently titled ‘My Butterfly’, the writing of which he said was like ‘cutting along a nerve’. It was his first published poem,
appearing in the prestigious Independent newspaper. The editor noted that ‘there is a secret genius between the lines’. Frost now determined on poetry for life. His previously parsimonious grandfather offered to support him for one year. No, said Frost, it will take me twenty. It did. He supported himself by farming, eventually selling his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and, after moving to Britain, buying one in Buckinghamshire. It was in England that his first collection A Boy’s Will was published in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston, to great acclaim. Frost returned to America in his forties and from then on there was no stopping him. He would, even in late life, attract audiences numbering in their thousands. The cool Miss Marianne Moore, not given to hyperbole, said he was the best speaker she had ever heard; Alan Ginsberg said Robert Frost literally created the audience for poetry readings. ‘I teach myself,’ Frost said, ‘my own take on the world’; and ‘I sit there radiating poetry.’ It was not to be his only stage. Though he was orthodox in politics – a Liberal, he believed, was someone who wouldn’t take his own side in an argument – President Kennedy invited him to read at his inauguration. Frost recited from memory a poem he had written twenty years earlier, ‘The Gift Outright’. The glare of the sun had made it impossible for him to read his new poem. In 1962, Kennedy, astonishingly, asked Frost to visit Khrushchev in Moscow to plead against the construction of the Berlin Wall. It didn’t work. That his
intervention had been sought at all is testimony to how far he’d come.

On his deathbed Frost said, ‘Love is all. Romantic love – as in stories and poems. I tremble with it.’ ‘The Figure a Poem Makes’ is, according to his famous essay, ‘the same as for love’. Love brought him Elinor White, whom he’d pursued with almost overwhelming passion, once becoming so distraught when he sensed rejection that he went missing for days in the dangerous Virginia swamps. Finally, reader, he married her. She was twenty-three and he was twentyone. Family life brought neither of them any luck. Their son Eliott died when he was four, a daughter in infancy and another, Marjorie, having successfully fought off serious mental illness (a maternal genetic inheritance), succumbed to puerperal fever with her first child. In 1938 his beloved Elinor died. He was literally mad with grief. This is his Lear-like description: ‘I can’t touch my mind with a memory of any kind. I can’t touch my skin.’ He was consumed with guilt: ‘She was too frail’ for the life he’d given her due to his ruthless ambition, too many children. In a shocking line he wrote, ‘God damn me when he gets around to it.’ His suffering was not over, for two years later his son Carl shot himself. ‘I feel,’ he said, ‘as though I am laid out upon a cross.’ He died on 28 January 1963, aged eighty-eight: ‘I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.’ Only a man who’d carved grace out of tragedy could have written a line of such irony and sweetness.

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