V. “NEW HAMPSHIRE”

Grandfather Frost reached a decision that to American poetry at any rate was fortunate. With $1800 he purchased a farm at Derry, New Hampshire, for his grandson and thither Robert Frost transported his family in 1900. The family now numbered four: a son, Eliot, had been born in 1896, and a daughter, Lesley, in 1899. Eliot, however, died in the middle of 1900.

Derry, which is in the southeastern corner of New Hampshire almost on a line northward from Lawrence to Kingston, New Hampshire, an old birthplace of Frost’s ancestors, was apparently the right locality for the nurturing of Robert Frost’s bents. Like a true New England village it had its academy, Pinkerton Academy, standing on a hill with Derry Village spread out below it. A mile away from that was the comparatively recent “Depot” where most of the five thousand inhabitants lived. But there was a breakage of character between the village proper and the “Depot.” The latter was developing, rapidly of course, along the lines of present-day industrial New England: it had several shoe factories and foretold in its little way a new and confused order of society. But Derry Village was then very much as it had been in 1880. Its families were conservative and regarded their religion and inherited culture very stolidly, entrenched in the feeling that twenty or thirty years ago the satisfactory elevation in religious thought and education had been achieved and now required only maintenance. It had its local small scale industries, founded upon Yankee inventiveness, particularly the Chase mill, a woodworking plant which among other specialties turned out in large quantities the wooden tags that nurserymen employ to identify their stock.

All this was right for Robert Frost: a settled rooted community, its life persisting in the presence of an enveloping alien and noisy industrialism which has not yet succeeded in totally smothering its vitality, and the academy on the hill as a sign, however inadequate, that culture should keep conservatism a little worried about the large questions of life lest conservatism fall into complacency. “I believe in tradition and accident and a bit of an idea bothering tradition,” Frost once remarked years after the Derry period, and Derry itself appears to have been a living pattern of this traditionalism affected by accident and ideas.

Frost’s small farm was a couple of miles “down the turnpike.” Like scores of other farms in Rockingham county it was a farm out of which even a very experienced farmer would have had difficulty in extracting a living. For Frost it was a downhill dogged battle. The unprolific character of the soil was unfairly aided in its resistance to success on the tiller’s part by the hay-fever which attacked Frost in the middle of August each year and made him wretched for two months. In addition, it was the child-bearing and rearing phase of his married life. A son, Carol, born in 1902, a daughter, Irma, in 1903, and another daughter, Marjorie, in 1905 naturally increased the strain of his struggle.⁠[3] In spite of all that, there was a good deal of play, too: botanizing, making wood paths, inducting the children into outdoor life. His farming neighbors, probably correctly, did not approve of Frost’s methods (he could be caught milking the cows at ten at night in order to sleep later in the morning) and the end of this venture came in 1905 when he drove up to the butcher’s to make further purchases on credit. The fattish butcher came brusquely out on the porch of his store, cocked an appraising eye at Frost’s horse and inquired, none too delicately, if anyone had a lien on it. Then Frost, with four children, a rundown farm, and a bundle of unpublished poems (including Black Cottage which he had just written) on his hands, decided to apply for a position at Pinkerton Academy.

If the farm had not grudgingly yielded him a living, it had done something else; it had toughened his respect for nature, it had disciplined him by its immalleability to aught but extremely hard labor. It put, in short, a fibrous quality in his living which has been expressed in the poetry.

It was almost literally with a poem that Robert Frost secured his position at Pinkerton. The incident was this: he had been invited to read a poem before the Men’s Club of the Central Congregational Church at Derry. The reading aroused the interest of the Pinkerton trustees, among them, John C. Chase, the head of the mill; and the pastor of the church, Reverend Charles Merriam, used his influence in crystallizing this interest into an offer. And so Robert Frost came to worry and modify the traditional state of affairs at Pinkerton Academy during the years 1906 to 1911.

The reports of eye-witnesses have a superior validity in biography as well as in courts of law, and the author of this study is grateful to Mr. John Bartlett of Boulder, Colorado, for the privilege of utilizing portions of his letter on this period in Robert Frost’s life. Mr. Bartlett wrote:

“I joined the class of 1910 in the fall of 1907, being rated then as a member of the Junior Middle Class. Pinkerton had a student body of one hundred and twenty or thereabouts, and its equipment consisted of a modern brick building on a hill-top and facing to the east, and a little lower on the hill the ‘old academy’ of wood, well preserved and painted white.

“There were several fine old teachers, excellent representatives of the school that believed that thoroughness and hard work were the beginning and the conclusion of the educational process. Great store was set by Latin which was taught by George W. Bingham, the stern and aged principal, and by Greek in which Mary Parsons, maiden member of a distinguished Derry Village (and New Hampshire, too) family, gave instruction.

“The faculty was true to the good old Pinkerton tradition. The Academy had been founded in the first years of the nineteenth century and dedicated to the development of cultured Christian character. Old rules governing the student body were still in effect. Card playing, for example, was forbidden, and for a boy to escort a girl to and from an entertainment was still a technical violation of ‘requirements.’ There were compulsory study hours and compulsory attendance at church. Students must be in their homes at seven p.m. and not leave thereafter except on Friday evening when grace was extended to ten p.m. and Sunday evening when the students were expected to attend church services. Once a week the principal called the roll of the assembled student body and each student reported his record of the week, thus: ‘All the requirements,’ ‘One exception, excused,’ ‘Two exceptions.’

“Most of the students came from homes within a radius of fifteen miles. A great many were from farm families, while Derry ‘Depot’ sent the children of factory workers. An Academy-owned dormitory housed the majority of the few boarding students.

“I am sure that when I entered the Academy there was much faculty hostility to Frost, and even among the older students there was some also. I recall that the submission to Frost as the English teacher of all prepared papers in an inter-class debate between Junior Middlers and Seniors was objected to by the Senior team, a grossly offensive act meriting disciplinary rebuke, but such did not follow. And I believe that there were certain members of the faculty who had toward the new English teacher almost a personal animosity.

“Frost came as the representative of new things, and there was collision. He did not arrive at the Academy in time to participate in the morning chapel exercises; he had no classroom; he defied the Pinkerton tradition in the informality of his presence and the free-and-easy way he handled his classes. The fact that he had no college degree would, for a portion of the faculty, keep him forever outside the circle. He was younger than nearly all the others. A dozen things made him an ‘outsider.’ He looked it and acted it.

“The old order of things at Pinkerton went quickly. A new principal, Ernest L. Silver (later principal of the New Hampshire State Normal School), came in 1909. There were new teachers and new subjects—agriculture, domestic science, and this and that. Pinkerton in brief time was doing a lot of catching up. I believe that Frost’s success with his English classes had a great deal to do with the rapidity and completeness of this change.

“No greater departure from traditional Pinkerton teaching methods could be conceived than those of Robert Frost. A boy of sixteen or seventeen isn’t aware in respect to much of a teacher’s pedagogy beyond knowing whether it pleases him or not. But, looking back, I believe I know the first great difference between Frost and the other teachers. He had far greater interest in the individual student. He had a way of manifesting this, of asking questions and of making observations in a few words, all the while getting closer to the boy in question. It was not a professional self-conscious thing, but a desire from Frost’s heart to get closer and learn more.

“A new member of one of his classes, I had handed in a single short theme. Late one afternoon as a group of boys were passing a football about on the athletic field, Frost came up. He was a frequent figure on the athletic field and sometimes he would take off his coat and ‘make a bluff,’ as the boys put it, at playing. This afternoon he happened to come near me. He asked several questions concerning the Pawtuckaway Mountains where the ‘Devil’s Den’ about which I had written was located. I answered them awkwardly: I was a shy boy. In a matter-of-fact way he observed that I was a fellow who had ideas.

“That was all there was to the conversation, for a spinning ball came my way, but I can still see Frost and the fall mud and the football bucking machine and the boys on that afternoon. He seemed to show in this conversation several hundred times the interest in me that other teachers had.

“He really had this interest, I am sure, and it was not directed toward me alone, but toward all his students. He asked them personal questions, drew them out.

“In those days Frost was always asking questions of people. Not the mechanical questions of politeness, but questions that would get at things Frost was interested in ... and he was interested in a great deal. If we took a winter walk toward Londonderry and met a logging team, which stopped as we came abreast, there would be a conversation right there. Frost would have the teamster talking about logging things and horses and wood roads and such matters. He talked with his students in somewhat the same way. There was always something to be learned from these New Englanders, and Frost learned it.

“And he was interested in the boy’s problems of individuality. Seemingly, he could like any sort of boy. He might not win a boy in the first few months of his contact with him, but nearly always he won him in the end.

“The most excited boy over an English paper I ever saw was Dave Griffith, the athlete of ’10, a magnificent halfback and sprinter. He had written on a sport subject and had earned commendation from Frost. Breaking the study hour rule of the dormitory, Dave stealthily went from room to room to announce grandly his accomplishment. Dave had a haughty disregard for scholastic honors in general (few of which he ever received), but he knew when he had something to be proud of.

“We had a boarding student in the Junior class, Arthur Eastman, who was neither among the scholars on one hand nor the athletes on the other. Arthur suddenly was famous for a four-line stanza which Frost was commending to his classes. I believe the boy never again wrote a verse which was praised. On the other hand, one of the older students who turned out verse with great abundance and prided himself on his ability received no approval whatever. The school knew that Frost considered this student’s verse of no merit.

“Frost’s English classes were always ‘easy’ classes. Frost had none of the taskmaster’s attitude, yet his classes did a great deal of work and covered fully as much ground as any ordinary class. Any feeling for literature displayed by a student was cultivated: any talent for writing was nursed along. A few in each class were gradually developed who could always be counted on for lively discussion. Very frequently departures from the regular routine were made. Often, for example, Frost, slumped down in his chair, would read to the class. And every time a new Critic was out, Frost would discuss it with his classes.

“The Critic was the student publication, and it was better than it had been for many years before Frost’s engagement. He let the boys and girls run it largely themselves: faculty supervision of it was much less than formerly. There was a good deal of comradeship between Frost and the Critic staff. Unconventional things occurred ... the Critic files may contain at least one poem the distinguished authorship of which is not generally known. I believe the Critic sometimes contained, because of his ‘hands off’ policy, things that he would not have passed for publication. But he knew that his policy was right and held to it.

“He was philosophical, too, when one of the honor members of the Senior class, given liberty in connection with his Commencement essay not in keeping with Pinkerton practice, read a paper at Graduation which was a wretched failure. This boy had not been required to submit his essay for faculty approval. And he messed the job, actually writing the final paragraphs two hours before he was due on the platform. Frost remarked later, ‘It sounded as though you had read one book or article and then written your essay.’ That was all that was ever said between us, and it was enough! Frost had divined the fact.

“Out of the English classes came during those years several plays coached by Frost. In one year I remember we had Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Milton’s Comus and Yeats’ The Land of Heart’s Desire. The plays were a success on both sides of the footlights. Frost liked to have his fun as much as any of the students, and the rehearsals brought us all together in a fine way. These plays were a new thing at Pinkerton. The Academy had presented several of Shakespeare’s plays since the century came in but no cognizance of other drama had been taken.

“In 1909 the state began to be interested in Frost’s classes. He talked at conventions, booked by Henry Morrison, the New Hampshire State Superintendent. And from time to time educators visited our classes. These convention talks were ordeals, and Frost always came back from them in a condition of exhaustion. Once he made an experiment before a talk given at Exeter, I believe. He put sharp pebbles in his shoes and walked about for hours, painfully, hoping that physical pain would alleviate the mental torture he was in. But it didn’t!

“The student body was with him one hundred per cent as the fall term of 1909 opened. There was a new order of things in the school and Frost was recognized as a big figure.

“I do not recall just when it was that Frost first wrote a formula, famous with his classes, upon a Pinkerton blackboard. He put forward the following kinds of matter used for literary purposes:

Uncommon in experience—uncommon in writing.

Common in experience—common in writing.

Uncommon in experience—common in writing.

Common in experience—uncommon in writing.

The last was the kind of material to search for, he told us.

“We celebrated a football victory over our rival school, Sanborn Seminary, in November, 1909, with a supper provided by the new domestic science department. Frost was the hit of the evening with a string of verses he put on the blackboard. This was one:

“A few of the boys spent considerable time with Frost out of school hours. I remember a walk over the turnpike to Manchester twelve miles away in the late afternoon, an hour spent in a bookstore, an oyster stew, and then a ride home on the electric railway. Our conversation on walks touched books only now and then. They might include reminiscences of Frost’s early life, discussion of school affairs, aspects of farm life in New Hampshire, some current news happening of importance, and nearly anything else. If in passing a farmhouse the aroma of fried doughnuts came out to us, Frost might propose that we buy some. Down around the corner we might encounter a fern he hadn’t seen since he was last in the Lake Willoughby region. And if darkness overtook us and it was a favorable night for observation, Frost would be sure to take at least five minutes to study the heavens and attempt to start our astronomical education.

“There was always an abundance of conversation, but almost never any argument. Frost never argued. He knew what he knew, and never had any interest in arguing about it. In the same way he was always willing to let others think what they wanted to think.

“He had a Woodrow Wilson sense of loyalty. I never knew a person who was more sensitive to slights, rebuffs and acts of unfriendliness than Frost or who seemed to carry the scar of them longer, and I have never met one whose loyalty was more thoroughly of the lasting kind.

“I remember how I came back to Derry late in 1910, having left college ‘between two days,’ defeated and defiant, meeting disapproval and condemnation. I was a boy getting hit by life and receiving no friendly overtures when I needed them most. Frost heard I was back and walked miles to see me and take me over the country roads for a talk. I remember how a few months later he speeded me on my way to British Columbia with a handshake and a look in the eye. There was a book at that parting, Chesterton’s Heretics. I read it three times on the way out. I remember letter after letter as I sought a way to fit in at Vancouver, and the frequent letters as I finally started in newspaper work. Letters all about me, my problems. That was what friendship meant to Robert Frost, help to the maximum when a boy needed it.”

One year after John Bartlett graduated, the teacher who had impressed him so strongly also left Pinkerton. The principal, Mr. Silver, had been appointed head of the New Hampshire State Normal School at Plymouth, New Hampshire, and as often happens in such cases he wished to take the pick of his faculty with him. Frost went to Plymouth for the school year 1911–1912, and while there formed a friendship with a teacher in the high school, Sidney Cox, now assistant professor of English at Dartmouth and editor of various texts. Professor Cox has furnished certain notes on his memory of this year which, like those of Mr. Bartlett, merit first hand presentation and thanks.

“I met Robert Frost,” says Professor Cox, “in the fall of 1911 at a Normal School dance where both of us were against the wall. The next day he came to the high school to ask me to go for a walk. I went, and when I reached home I had felt from that one talk, as I had never done before, what the real nature of poetry is. Scales had been gently lifted off my eyes. After that came many walks, and long casual whole-souled talks. Mr. Frost had no congenial colleagues with whom to walk, and for both of us it was the first, and as it turned out, the only year in Plymouth.

“I found that Mr. Frost was having exciting times teaching psychology, that he wasn’t following any chart, but improvising his own courses, and having the girls read real books. He made me interested in Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile when he was in the midst of them with one of his classes. He sometimes mentioned a student who seemed exceptional, but he didn’t suppose he was making any great discoveries.

“Perhaps it was on the walk at the end of which Mr. Frost treated me at the drug store to the delectable beverage of white grape juice that he first made me realize the absurdity of letting students write compositions on the adventures of a penny, and gave me a realizing sense of the distinction between unconditioned speculation and creative imagination. He didn’t put it in any such deadly abstract terms as that. He told me that at Derry he had directed his students to write about what was ‘common to experience but uncommon to expression.’

“Sometimes we talked incidentally about things I was likely to take up in class. I remember his praising Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, and critically admiring the craftsmanship in Mark Twain’s The Jumping Frog, Stevenson’s The Bottle Imp, Hawthorne’s Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe, and H. G. Wells’ The Country of the Blind. He invariably made me see something new. I first learned of Whitman from him, and at the same time found out that he was what I should formerly have considered objectionable and, without the point being formulated, that it wouldn’t do to dismiss him because my taboo was infringed.

“One particularly beautiful snowy walk took us through an evergreen aisle for miles, down to the Interval and so to the turnpike from Boston. On the way up that state road to Plymouth I remember something started us talking about sex behavior and instruction in sex hygiene. Mr. Frost was skeptical about the latter and said he thought perhaps reading Shakespeare was more likely to avert catastrophe than any amount of scientific talk. Another time I told him about the jumpiness and over-earnestness of one of the woman teachers in high school who boarded where I did, and I was permanently convinced of the wisdom of his remark that what she needed was an emotional education through poetry. He was always interested in people and never spoke of anyone slightingly. On the other hand, he was keenly aware of shams and stupidities, and he was not tender toward them.

“Besides the walks, there were a number of unqualifiedly delightful evenings at his home in the little white house, which he shared with the temporarily bachelor principal. His was a poor man’s living room, but there was a bookcase with a lot of attractive books, many of them thin volumes of poetry,—I remember his drawing my attention to the exquisite Mosher books,—and there were two or three comfortable chairs. On such evenings the children went to bed and we older ones got comfortable, and Mr. Frost read aloud, or we talked. I suppose two of my favorite plays will always be Arms and the Man by Shaw and the Playboy of the Western World by Synge because of hearing Mr. Frost read them. I don’t know anyone who can do the Irish so well. One evening he read from Mr. Dooley.

“He had supervised a triumphant production of one of Sheridan’s plays at Derry, and he scorned the notion that good things were too exacting for school children. The State Superintendent had discovered that he was the best of the English teachers under his administration soon after Mr. Frost had been invited away from his farm. And the Principal of Pinkerton had found that he was wrong in assuming that this teacher was hardly the man to address a farmers’ institute. Regardless of the effort it was to overcome his nervousness before a crowd, Mr. Frost had showed that he had something to say, and could say it well. He took a sly pleasure in surprising people who automatically underrated him because he didn’t have a college degree.

“In early spring Mr. Frost, the principal of the Normal School, one of my fellow teachers in the high school and I went a little way north to a farm for a week-end. Our host and hostess seemed rather flashy and hard people, New Yorkers I think they were. The woman was particularly metallic and thick, like a successful vaudeville performer; and I was much impressed with the considerateness and attention with which Mr. Frost kept up a two-sided conversation with her. They agreed, I remember, on admiring the New York skyline from the harbor. We talked until late that night, and the next morning after breakfast we walked over the snow to a large maple sugar camp. The religious and other metaphorical use of the lamb has always, since that time, been affected by the memory of Mr. Frost’s waving his hand back and forth within an inch of the eyes of the lady’s cosset, and pointing out that it never batted its eyes. I was unaccountably downcast on the way back to Plymouth and mentioned my mood. Mr. Frost commented, ‘It’s well to have all kinds of feelings, for it’s all kinds of a world.’

“Not long after that I had to assume the duties of baseball coach, and Mr. Frost’s lifelong interest in baseball helped me. He often talked of players and teams, and once he taught me how to work the short throw to shortstop when there were runners on first and third, and so catch the man stealing home. He was interested in tennis, too, and taught me very clearly what he had recently learned about three different cuts to use in serving.

“I think his one time of attendance at church in Plymouth was so disturbing to his sensibilities that he had a religious motive for staying away.”

It is clear from the notes of these two friends that this was the crystallizing period in Robert Frost’s life. He became during it certain of what he knew as a youth and as a matter of fact a great deal of his published verse was written during these years. He had formulated his central article for his private ars poetica—to give an uncommon expression to what was common in experience—and he was not to deviate from that in his future course. By adhering to this, he was very soon after the year at Plymouth destined to be discovered and recognized by the literary public, but essentially the rest of his life has been a prolongation of the Derry-Plymouth phase. The enthusiasm of his friends, Sidney Cox and John Bartlett, when multiplied to the enthusiasms of critics, poets and readers at large did not, that is to say, alter his habits or his aims or his quality. He has continued to do a little farming, some teaching and some writing just as he did between 1900 and 1912.