VI. “PAN WITH US”

It is difficult to overestimate the aridity of the minds and feelings of poetry editors in the United States during those years when Robert Frost was writing and teaching and farming in New Hampshire. Not by his own wish did he remain practically unpublished, for once a year at least he made up packets of his verses and sent them to the editors of Scribner’s, Century, the Atlantic Monthly and one or two others. Almost uniformly they came back: the few exceptions were the Forum and Youth’s Companion whose editor, Mark de Wolfe Howe, stretched a point or two of his editorial policy to include them. But the market for poetry was extremely limited, and the story of the insensibility of those who ruled the market has already been sufficiently told. Yet looking back, one still is mildly surprised that their taste did not welcome Robert Frost’s work. It was fresh work, but yet not too far beyond their canons, not like the verses of Ezra Pound, for instance, who had impetuously denounced Hamilton Wright Mabie and voyaged to Spain.

Certainly, Frost was not a persistent and resourceful salesman for his poems, and perhaps the fault lay partly in him for his lateness in publication.

Occasionally, he admits, he looked at the poetry printed in the magazines, felt distaste for its mediocrity and lack of tang, and felt likewise jealousy and envy of the author because after all he had been published. Yet his own pride prevented him from making any energetic plan for breaking through the editorial attitude toward his scripts.

After the year at Plymouth he concluded that it was to be “now or never” with him so far as the Muse was concerned. The ten year conditions on his farm had elapsed and he succeeded in selling it. Now he would set aside the next three or four years for complete devotion to poetry. But where?

John Bartlett was getting on well at Vancouver, B. C., and in September, 1912, planned to marry a Pinkerton girl out there. Frost hesitated between going to Vancouver and going to England, and corresponded with his former student on the problem. But in August he wrote that it was to be England for him. A letter about the cost of living from the British Consul in New York and certain talk in the family about living under a thatched roof had decided the matter: he would spend his free time abroad. So he sailed in September, 1912, and, as has been noted before, Harriet Monroe’s Poetry: A Magazine of Verse first appeared in October, 1912. Frost left his country just one month before the event which is usually taken as the beginning of a new, more enlivened and more extensive interest in contemporary American verse, and he stepped into England during a particularly hopeful and exciting season in the arts.

England just before the war of 1914–1918 was full of idealistic movements and a new era seemed about to open its buds. There was an upper crust of writers—Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Conrad, Hudson, Carpenter, Galsworthy, Chesterton, Cunninghame Grahame, Max Beerbohm—that was distinguished enough or respected enough to make it worth while to continue their work or to resist it or to try to supplant them. There were coming up such figures as D. H. Lawrence, Compton Mackenzie, and Gilbert Cannan for Henry James to cast a keenly appraising eye upon. There were at least two brilliantly edited reviews—Ford Madox Hueffer’s (now Ford) English Review and A. R. Orage’s The New Age—which sought for new work and instigated new literary developments. There were the Irishmen across their Channel working up a little re-birth on their own. Ezra Pound was everywhere, fighting, initiating, infusing fresh vitality into poetry and poetry discussions. Wyndham Lewis was breaking bonds in painting and prose. Imagism and vorticism, the Bloomsbury groupings and the reactionary schools, all made the scene stirring and great things were expected. Then the war crashed in and the fragility of all the movements became sooner or later apparent. But that was two years after Frost arrived.

At first Frost was not aware of this metropolitan ferment. He repaired to T. P.’s Weekly which conducted a department of country walks and inquired for quiet places in the countryside where he wished to live. The conductor of this department was an ex-policeman (and therefore as becomes a London “bobbie” intelligent in giving directions) and Frost took a fancy to him. On his advice he settled in the little suburban town of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire.

One night Frost sat before his fire spreading out before him his poems and reading them over. As was his custom, a certain number were discarded. Of those that remained he pondered on making a selection that might form some sort of coherent book. He shuffled through them, arranged and rearranged, and gradually A Boy’s Will came to birth. He had a book of manuscript but no publisher in mind.

In this pass he recalled his friend, the ex-policeman, and determined to ask his advice on a publisher for poetry! The former policeman was equal to the call. He suggested Elkin Matthews, but said that as a rule he required subsidized manuscripts. Frost objected to that, and his counsellor brought up the name of David Nutt. This appealed to Frost: he remembered that David Nutt had been Henley’s publisher: and thither he went one afternoon only to be told that he could not see David Nutt that day, but if he called the next day he would be able to do so. Coming at the time directed, he was ushered into a private office for an interview with a lady in dark clothes who informed him she would speak for David Nutt. Later he learned that David Nutt had been deceased for several years, and the lady was his widow, but at this time the whole proceeding impressed him as mysterious.

Three days afterward he received a letter stating that the firm of David Nutt would publish A Boy’s Will. The long period of twenty years of frustrated publication was almost closed, and the first drops of the exhilaration England was to give him had touched his lips.

More were to follow presently. Walking in London one day he noticed that Harold Munro’s Poetry Book Shop was opening its doors that very evening with a reception and reading. Although uninvited, he walked in with the crowd that night and sat on the stairs during the festivities. A man sitting below remarked, “I see by your shoes you are an American,” and introduced himself as F. S. Flint. Frost confided to him his engagement in writing poetry, and Flint asked if he knew his countryman, Ezra Pound. Frost had never heard of Pound and was promptly cautioned not to betray that fact to Pound himself.

Flint must have spoken to Pound about the new arrival, for shortly there came to Frost’s suburban home a post card bearing an address, the name of Ezra Pound, and beneath it: “At home sometimes.”

Some months later Frost called at Pound’s address and happened to find him at home. Piqued at first because Frost had been so leisurely in responding to his card, Pound soon warmed to his rugged caller with the boyish face and when he learned that possibly proof sheets of A Boy’s Will might now be secured at David Nutt’s he insisted on going at once to the office. The proof sheets were ready, and the pair returned to Pound’s studio. Frost was directed to occupy himself in some way while Pound turned immediately to reading the poems. Satisfied that here was sound poetry, Pound then dismissed his guest with the remark that he had a review to write, and in a short time the first salutation to A Boy’s Will appeared in type over the distinguished name of Ezra Pound.

A Boy’s Will was received quickly and warmly by the literary press: the general tenor can be felt from a quotation from the notice in the Academy. It said: “We have read every line with the amazement and delight which are too seldom evoked by books of modern verse.” The poetry-reading public was lured.

Pound had a new “find” and he began to take Frost here and there to luncheons, studios and parties, and among the most delightful of the last were the Tuesday evenings at T. E. Hulme’s. Frost was pleased and interested, but did not change his stripe.

All the time his capital was decreasing, for although he was now a “success”⁠[4] in a moderate way, he never succeeded in winning any royalty statements from David Nutt. A Boy’s Will had appeared in 1913 and the following year the same firm gladly brought out North of Boston which was greeted by the Times Literary Supplement with the statement that “poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind breathes upon smoldering embers,” and there were more buyers. But only a success of estimation for Frost. To eke out his capital, he fell back upon farming and in the winter of 1914 leased a small farm called Little Iddens near Leadbury in Gloucestershire. His near neighbors were Wilfrid Wilson Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie.

Gibson enjoyed joshing Frost about America. It appeared that Gibson’s poetry aroused various people in America to write him letters of gratitude that sometimes began, “Dear Bro.,” and proceeded to give other signs in orthography and grammar of semi-literacy and raw taste. Frost himself now received his first letter from an American admirer. It was on stationery of high quality from a farm in Stowe, Vermont, called Four Winds Farm. The neat script merely informed him that the writer and her mother had enjoyed his poetry, and the signature was that of a lady named Holt. It was a publisher’s wife, though Frost did not suspect the fact. But the letter did enable him to return triumphantly Gibson’s joshing: he displayed it to him as an example of the way farmer’s wives wrote in America as well as evidence of the kind of people who read his books.

Gibson has commemorated this delightful time in a poem entitled The Golden Room printed some time ago in the Atlantic Monthly, and for the sake of the picture the first two stanzas may well be quoted here.

Meanwhile the war was increasing its diabolical momentum and the arts in England were going under. Poets went to the front instead of to studios and review offices, and among them was Edward Thomas with whom Frost formed his most congenial friendship on English soil. Thomas had been a critic and author of several biographical studies and travel books. Frost fanned the critic’s hitherto latent talent for writing poetry to a quiet blaze and the outcome was the volume, Poems, by Thomas in 1917, a volume that was gratefully dedicated to Robert Frost. Thomas was killed on Easter Monday in 1917 and Frost has commemorated both the poetry and his friend.

Two years before the death of Thomas, in March of 1915, Frost had left England for America, bringing with him the fifteen year old son of his friend.

He had gone through years of non-recognition: in a foreign land he had been exhilarated with a modest success and the sympathetic praise of fellow poets: all had been engulfed in the horror and sadness of the greatest war in our history: and now Frost faced again the uncertainties of America. There was a surprise awaiting him.