Discord and Fuss

In later life​ , the worst thing you could call Robert Frost was ‘literary’. ‘If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better,’ he wrote to Wallace Stevens teasingly in 1935. ‘It is so we are saved from being literary … Our poetry comes choppy, in well-separated poems, well interrupted by time, sleep and events.’ As a boy, he told his friend Bernard De Voto, he had been entirely normal: ‘I wasn’t marked off from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates [sic] and Masters.’ In an interview with Richard Poirier for the Paris Review in 1960, a few years before his death, he reiterated that he hadn’t had ‘a very literary life’; he didn’t keep up with reviews or gossip. He told Poirier that when he first visited Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in London in 1913, he’d had no idea who the Imagists were. ‘You should know your fellow countryman, Ezra Pound,’ Monro said. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ Frost replied.

It was an odd narrative to insist on, given that books had been his escape from a struggle-filled, ramshackle early life. He was born in 1874 and spent his first eleven years in San Francisco, where the Frost family managed on very little, shuttling between apartments and cheap hotels; the children, Robert and his younger sister, Jeanie, were sometimes in school and sometimes not. Will Frost was a journalist and alcoholic who kept a revolver and loose bullets in his desk, tried to cure his tuberculosis by drinking fresh cow’s blood and once thrashed his son with a dog chain. When he died in 1885, his wife, Belle, took Frost and Jeanie across the country to Massachusetts. At Lawrence High School, Frost devoted himself to Latin and Greek and spent his evenings translating Cicero and Tacitus. He met his future wife, Elinor, when she emerged as his chief rival for class valedictorian. She introduced him to her favourite English poets: Sidney, Spenser, John Clare. When he was unhappy at Dartmouth (he found all the hazing and fraternity business childish), he buried himself in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

He had begun writing verse by the time he dropped out and returned home in November 1892, having lasted less than a semester. In the wilderness years that followed, he stuck to reading and writing through a bizarre series of odd jobs: ‘shoe worker, mill hand, farm hand, editor, reporter, insurance agent, agent for Shakespearean reader, reader myself, teacher in every kind of school public and private’, even, one summer, a hotel porter in Maine. No one could accuse him, he told Amy Lowell years later, of lacking life experience. As a light trimmer at the Arlington Woollen Mills in Lawrence, tasked with replacing filaments and mending dynamos, he would hide next to the belt wheel and annotate copies of Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest.

The poems in his first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913), were the product of the early years of married life. Elinor was reluctant to marry him until he found steady employment, but accepted him in 1895, under some duress. (The previous year, in a funk, he’d disappeared silently to the Great Dismal Swamp, a strip of jungly quicksand along the Virginia-North Carolina border, then had to wire his mother for the train fare home.) Their first child, Elliott, was born in 1896. Frost took up farming, the difficult New England way of life that would supply him with the central images and characters of his poetry, almost by chance. After taking a second crack at university (this time at Harvard), then dropping out in 1899 because of ill health, he was looking for something less sedentary and thought that raising chickens might fit the bill. Bankrolled by his grandfather, he bought two hundred eggs and rented a barn; the following year, threatened with eviction for letting the chickens run wild, he moved his family to a thirty-acre farm with an apple orchard in Derry, New Hampshire. They remained there for almost a decade, living so quietly that Frost was barely exaggerating when he claimed later that they had had no callers for eight years. ‘There was never a sound beside the wood but one,’ the speaker in his sonnet ‘Mowing’ observes. ‘And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.’

‘Mowing’, according to Adam Plunkett in his new critical biography, marked a shift in Frost’s early writing. It stands out not only as a poem about work (the labour of scything and seeding and building that would become his subject), but as a poem about poetry, with debts to Marvell’s ‘Mower’ series and the pastoral tradition, as well as to the mixture of dramatic speaking and self-revelation that sonnets often exhibit. In the following decades, once Frost had developed his theories about the desirability of poetry’s proximity to ordinary speech, he tended to claim that his influences came from life rather than literature. ‘I want the unmade words to work with not the familiar made ones that everybody exclaims Poetry! at,’ he wrote in 1914. ‘Mowing’ and the other poems in A Boy’s Will, he said, were merely ‘the unforced expression of a life I was forced to live’. Love and Need argues that this was not quite accurate. Throughout Frost’s work, but in his first collection especially, Plunkett suggests that he concealed the extent to which he borrowed and used his reading. ‘Frost guarded his borrowings jealously. He was private about his associations with ghosts and how much of his writing grew out of it.’

Plunkett’s approach works for some poems in A Boy’s Will better than others. The first line of the sonnet ‘The Vantage Point’, ‘If tired of trees I seek again mankind,’ offers the reader the sort of speculative situation from which many of Shakespeare’s sonnets unfold (‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’; ‘If there be nothing new, but that which is’). The echo, Plunkett argues, reveals the ‘make-believe’ quality of Frost’s poem, the relationship it establishes between reader and a semi-fictionalised speaker. ‘To Earthward’ – a later lyric about craving intense physical and spiritual sensations – Plunkett reads as a rejection of the delicate sensibility of Longfellow, one of Frost’s youthful influences. Both interpretations link allusion convincingly to meaning. Others are more tendentious. Plunkett’s big argument about A Boy’s Will is that, shaped as it was by the death of three-year-old Elliott from cholera in 1900, Frost structured it in imitation of Tennyson’s great poem of mourning: ‘Each of the first nine poems in A Boy’s Will bears a resemblance to the corresponding canto of In Memoriam.’ Plunkett doesn’t quote much from In Memoriam to substantiate this, and several of the ‘resemblances’ turn out not to be there at all, or to be resemblances only in the sense that many lyric poems resemble one another if you squint a bit. ‘The ninth poems in each sequence intone prayers to the wind’: this is true of Frost’s ninth lyric, but the ninth section in Tennyson’s poem (‘Fair ship, that from the Italian shore,/Sailest the placid ocean-plains’) is addressed to a ship. The sixth poem in Frost’s sequence, Plunkett claims, maps on to the sixth canto of In Memoriam because both present ‘a female figure expecting someone home from his travels whom, as we learn in the end of each poem, she will never see again’. This is accurate as far as Tennyson’s lyric goes, but Frost’s has no traveller in it, and given that his ‘female figure’ is a statue of the goddess Minerva, ‘Without the gift of sight’, how could she have seen who she is supposed to have seen in the first place?

This may sound like nitpicking, but it reveals a discrepancy between Plunkett’s critical approach and the way his subject thought about poetry. Frost talked and wrote about what he called a poet’s ‘freedom of the material’, the freedom to ‘move about’ within a wide range of reading, ‘to establish relations in it regardless of time and space’, to let a detail from somewhere unexpectedly remind you of a detail from somewhere else. Plunkett prefers systematic accounts of influence, structural explanations. In Memoriam is an ‘organising principle’ of A Boy’s Will; there is an underlying ‘logic of grief’ to the book. What’s odd is that significant local connections do exist. The ‘Old Yew, which graspest at the stones/That name the underlying dead’ in Tennyson’s second lyric may well, as Plunkett observes, have inspired the ‘stones out under the low-limbed tree’ that Frost pictures in ‘Ghost House’; similarly, the ‘stars’ that ‘blindly run’ in Tennyson’s third seem to return in the sightless, impassive night sky in Frost’s ‘Stars’. But it’s as if allusions of this order – the possibility that Frost might have seized, magpie-like, on single images of Tennyson’s, or had a subconscious memory of them – aren’t grand enough.

There are several confused readings like this. Does ‘Ghost House’ ‘allude throughout’ to Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’? Can you really think of the cellar hole in the former as ‘something of an urn, “leaf-fring’d” and open on top’? Plunkett argues that as Keats ‘used the preposition “on” in his title as a substitution for the conventional “to” … Frost in turn plays on “on” in his first line by using “in” where one would first expect “on”: “I dwell in a lonely house I know.”’ I dwell on a lonely house? The most egregious claim is that Frost’s ‘Birches’ is a wholesale rewriting of Milton’s Lycidas. The comparative method goes like this:

1. FRAME

‘BIRCHES’ 1-4

Speaker introduces himself by reference to trees beheld by him.

‘LYCIDAS’ 1-5

Speaker introduces himself by reference to trees beheld by him.

2. DESTRUCTION DEPICTED

‘BIRCHES’ 5-16

Extended description of birches brought low by ice storms, never to be righted again.

‘LYCIDAS’ 6-22

Extended description of Lycidas drowned.

When it becomes clear that the two poems have very little in common beyond a pastoral setting and a vision of transcendence, Plunkett offers negative comparisons, as if the positive case barely needs making. ‘In structural terms, the great difference between the poems is that “Birches” lacks [Milton’s] long and incomparable theo-mythological interlude.’ (‘Incomparable’ being the word.) ‘It is of the essence of [Frost’s] poem that its manner of presenting theology is the opposite of Milton’s.’ Worse: ‘If this sounds rather far afield from “When I see birches bend to left and right”, Frost may well have wanted it that way.’ This does no one apart from Milton any favours: its main effect is to make you want to put the book down and reread Lycidas.

A Boy’s Will might not have been published had Frost not upped sticks and relocated his family – Elinor and four young children – to England in 1912. He was 38. He had placed individual poems in American magazines but no publisher had shown interest in a book, and the teaching he had undertaken to supplement his farming income was exhausting and impossible to do in tandem with writing. The gamble paid off almost immediately. In a quiet house in Beaconsfield, he completed A Boy’s Will and wrote many of the poems that would make up his second collection, North of Boston (1914); he approached a publishing firm, David Nutt, as represented by Mrs M.L. Nutt, ‘a woman dressed all in black, as if she had just risen from the sea’, who bought the first book and an option to publish the next four.

Through the Imagist F.S. Flint, he secured an introduction to Pound, who did the very Poundian thing of seizing on him as a disciple, whisking him around Soho to meet everyone who mattered, then ruining things by publishing a faintly insulting review of A Boy’s Will (it suggested that the Frosts had lived in a ‘midden’) and being demanding about Frost’s art: ‘He says I must write something much more like vers libre or he will let me perish of neglect. He really threatens.’ In retaliation Frost voiced some coded suspicions about Pound’s character – ‘[he] hides his lower jaw in a delicate gold filigree of almost masculine beard’ – and sought out writers who struck him more as ‘plain folks’. He found a kindred spirit in Edward Thomas, then a struggling prose writer, who considered him the ‘greatest friend’ of his life (not long before Thomas enlisted in 1915, he seriously considered relocating to New Hampshire to farm and help Frost run a ‘lecture camp’). For a spell in 1914-15, Frost rented a cottage in Gloucestershire to be near the Georgian poets Wilfrid Gibson and Lascelles Abercrombie, and had the Thomases to stay for weeks at a time. The intimacy with Thomas, which lasted until the latter’s death at Arras in 1917, was a rare instance of a literary association that Frost didn’t bring to a premature end through what he called ‘my Indian vindictiveness’. ‘You mustn’t tell me a single thing about Gibson if you don’t want to detract from the pleasure of your letters from fifty per cent up,’ he instructed a mutual acquaintance in 1915. He had decided that Gibson was ‘a coward’ and ‘the worst snob I met in England’. Walter de la Mare’s failure to write to him about a visit to the US in 1916 was inexcusable: ‘I have been in no mood to meet de la Mare. He is one of the open questions with me like what to do with Mexico.’

By February 1915, when the Frosts returned to New Hampshire, North of Boston had been published by the American firm Henry Holt and everyone was talking about it. Amy Lowell reviewed it in the New Republic and invited Frost to supper. The editor of the Atlantic, Ellery Sedgwick, who had previously communicated with Frost through rejection letters, was suddenly ‘all bonhomie’ and offers of publicity. Invitations arrived from schools and universities to read and lecture; the following summer, Frost accepted the offer of a faculty position at Amherst, with the idea that a decent salary and light teaching load might give him the freedom to write. The contours of what would become a distinctly modern poetic existence were forming: a combination of writing, teaching and what Frost called ‘barding around’, performing his work and discussing his theories of poetry in lecture halls around the country, from Vermont to Michigan to Colorado.

He believed that his poetry had changed as his social world opened up. In the early years in New Hampshire, he might go days without speaking to anyone but his family. Then he became interested in his farming neighbours, their gossip, the way they told stories, and he honed his own storytelling in classrooms and on front porches. ‘Shyness is a thing one can’t keep if one wants to,’ he noted in 1913. The kind of poetry that went along with this depended on careful listening, attending to and redeploying what Frost called, in one of his favourite ambiguous critical inventions, ‘sentence-sounds’:

A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung. You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothesline between two trees, but – it is bad for the clothes … The sentence-sounds are very definite entities … They are gathered by the ear from the vernacular and brought into books.

‘Living’ poetry – including, for Frost, centuries-old works such as Lycidas and Don Juan – contained such recognisable units of sound imported from speech. Dead poetry was any that did not. ‘It is not for us in any Greek or Latin poem because our ears have not been filled with the tones of Greek and Roman talk,’ he wrote. ‘I say you can’t read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken.’

The narrative poems in North of Boston and Mountain Interval (1916), hard tales of New England poverty and struggle, are curious because they both do and don’t sound familiar. ‘In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, “Oh yes I know what you mean,”’ Frost told his friend John Bartlett in 1914. This might be a recognisable turn of phrase, a comprehensible attitude or predicament. Familiarity comes through in the narratives in their ordinariness of tone, which you hear ringing through the modified blank verse: the way the old mother throws her hands up in ‘The Housekeeper’ (‘I can’t keep track of other people’s daughters’), or the way the husband refuses to make excuses in ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ (‘What help he is there’s no depending on’), or in the cadence of the narrator’s pitch-black humour in ‘The Vanishing Red’ (‘Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right’), or in the gossipy sound of the woman’s fear in ‘The Hill Wife’ (‘He’s watching from the woods as like as not’).

But there’s also an uncanny, unfamiliar quality to the narratives, recounting as they do episodes in the lives of characters whom Frost called ‘special cases’: men and women pushed to the edge by circumstance, doing their best in extremity. ‘A Servant to Servants’, a rare example of a Frost dramatic monologue (most of his long poems have counterpoint voices), features an exhausted, overworked Vermont woman, slaving at a lakeside boarding house for hired labourers, who engages a tourist in conversation. The poem mixes what sounds like reasonableness, Frost’s special briskness of tone (‘There’s two can play at that’; ‘Other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?’), with instability, hints of the insanity in the family to which the woman alludes.

It isn’t the remarkable kind of instability shown by many of Tennyson’s and Browning’s monologuists; there’s no lurid malice or derangement, just a threadbare quality in the speech, an impression of competence unravelling. Towards the end of the poem, the woman explains that she’s grateful to be married to her husband, Len, and safely out of the family home with its dark secrets:

I was glad though, no end, when we moved out,
And I looked to be happy, and I was,
As I said, for a while – but I don’t know!
Somehow the change wore out like a prescription.
And there’s more to it than just window views
And living by a lake. I’m past such help –
Unless Len took the notion, which he won’t,
And I won’t ask him – it’s not sure enough.
I s’pose I’ve got to go the road I’m going:
Other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?
I almost think if I could do like you,
Drop everything and live out on the ground –
But it might be, come night, I shouldn’t like it,
Or a long rain.

Much here is oblique: we don’t know exactly what ‘notion’ Len might or might not take, or what it is she can’t be ‘sure enough’ about (though given she was once committed to an asylum, we can guess). Many things are oblique to her too, as appears from the ‘expressive breaks’ in her speech, in Reuben Brower’s phrase, those ‘seeming ineptitudes of the monologue’: ‘I don’t know!’; ‘I almost think if …’; ‘But it might be …’ Often, she seems happy to remain in the dark. Browning’s monologuists are performers, rhetoricians at the top of their game. Here, the speaker can’t parse her own feelings, let alone persuade others of theirs. ‘It’s got so I don’t even know for sure/Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything,’ she says. The incompetences of speech – the artless repetitions, incomplete clauses, non sequiturs, illogical transitions – are more eloquent than full sentences for what they reveal: a patchy, impressionistic intelligence, seeing dimly, up against something it doesn’t have the answer to.

The narratives in North of Boston, which Thomas called ‘the most revolutionary’ book, aren’t much discussed in Love and Need (nor are those in Mountain Interval). Presumably Plunkett felt that they supplied him with little fodder for his argument about Frost’s borrowings from literary tradition. But he does give an interesting account of Frost’s longest narrative, ‘New Hampshire’, a poem that critics have tended to dislike. ‘New Hampshire’ is voiced by a persona a lot like Frost himself (a writer who used to live in Massachusetts before moving to New Hampshire), who gives, over the course of four hundred lines, an animated defence of New Hampshire and its inhabitants from the sneers of sophisticated cosmopolitan Boston and New York types. The poem is not only densely allusive but self-allusive. When it was first published in Frost’s fourth book, New Hampshire (1923), it was peppered with footnotes, which directed readers to other poems in the collection. A line about deserted rural communities, ‘Whole townships named but without population’, has a note that points you to the poem ‘The Census-Taker’, which describes ‘The melancholy of having to count souls/Where they grow fewer and fewer every year’. ‘New Hampshire’ appeared at the beginning of the book; Frost called the poems that followed ‘Notes’ and ‘Grace Notes’, as if they were extended footnotes themselves.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this sounded familiar. Frost wasn’t the only major American poet to publish a highly allusive, footnoted, four hundred or so line poem about the mythology of place in the early 1920s. In his own account, he composed ‘New Hampshire’ in its entirety one night in July 1922, in a rush of inspiration that also brought him ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. In fact, Plunkett shows, it was probably written later, at the end of December 1922 or in early 1923, as a kind of enabling frame for the collection’s poem/footnote conceit, and in response to a particular irritant. Frost was operating, Plunkett says, in a ‘spirit of reactive pique’. The Waste Land had just been published in the US in an edition including the notes. For those who could read the runes, Eliot’s presence in ‘New Hampshire’ wouldn’t have been hard to detect. His essay collection The Sacred Wood (1920) opens with a discussion of Matthew Arnold; in ‘New Hampshire’, there is a ‘prude afraid of nature’ who appears in a literal wood, ‘a grove of trees’, out of which he flees spouting Arnold (‘Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood’). This satirised Eliot figure would rather spend his time indoors, reading and pontificating: ‘The only decent tree had been to mill/And educated into boards, he said.’ He is hyper-aware of ‘the line where man leaves off and nature starts,/And never overstepped it save in dreams’. He remains ‘on the safe side of the line talking’.

Many things about The Waste Land seem to have annoyed Frost, some of which stemmed from his old disagreements with Pound. He disliked free verse, which (like Thomas, who called it ‘discord and fuss’) he considered a lot of hot air and revealing of ignorance; for aspiring modern poets, he told a friend in 1913, metre seemed to be the ‘all important thing to know nothing about’. He also disliked what he called ‘obscuration’ in poetry (the ‘Beautiful and Dimmed’), the vexation or concealment of meaning apparently for the sake of it. From his comments on the subject, though, it appears that the bigger problem may have been allusion. ‘An American poet living in England has made an Anthology of the Best Lines in Poetry,’ he wrote to the president of the Poetry Society of America in January 1923, as if issuing a formal objection. ‘He has run the lines loosely together in a sort of narrative and copyrighted them so that anyone using them again will have to enclose them in double quotation marks.’ Eliot, with his footnotes, seemed bent on making allusion a sort of intellectuals’ parlour game: ‘They [Eliot and Pound] quote and you try to see if you can place the quotation.’ Familiarity with literary tradition was supposed to be another thing that vers libre poets had abandoned; now there was The Waste Land, threatening to replace old-fashioned, unobtrusive acquaintance, ‘freedom of the material’, with this showy promiscuity. In ‘New Hampshire’, the allusions are pointedly ham-fisted – there is a misquotation of Arnold, in quotation marks – and recessive, as Frost footnotes himself and bounces the reader back and forth between his own poems. The only form of quotation that seems alive is that of ordinary, pungent speech. At one point, the speaker hears a ‘wiry gang-boss’ exclaiming to himself as he conquers a logjam: ‘Wasn’t she an i-deal/Son-of-a-bitch? You bet she was an i-deal.’

Frost’s attitude hardened over the following decades. On one of the rare occasions when he and Eliot were in the same room, at a literary society in Boston in 1932, Eliot agreed to read a poem on the condition that Frost did too; Frost pretended to extemporise one that he’d written months earlier. (‘There was dutiful applause.’) In an essay he wrote after the death of the poet E.A. Robinson, which was supposed to be about Robinson’s work, he instead made pointed remarks about ‘new ways to be new’. He began to think of the worldliness and scholarliness of Eliot and Pound’s modernism in contradistinction to his own localism and isolationism. ‘Long before I’m interpersonal,/Away ’way down inside I’m personal,’ one of his speakers remarks in ‘Build Soil’ from 1932. ‘Some minds are so confounded intermental/They remind me of pictures on a palette.’ (‘Intermental’ is a fantastically obscure way of saying all the things he might have meant here: outward-looking, cosmopolitan, receptive, influenceable.) In public, at readings and lectures, he had long been acting the part of Mr New Hampshire, spokesman for the old Yankee ways; now he wore the costume in private too. ‘You have been acting against your nature under pressure of the bad smart talk you have listened to and learned to share in the society you have cultivated in your own New York salons,’ he scolded Louis Untermeyer in 1928. ‘Talk no more – unless you can talk unclever, unsophisticated, simple goodness.’ Partiality and local attachments became artistic desiderata for him. ‘All that makes a writer,’ he declared in 1926, ‘is the ability to write strongly and directly from some unaccountable and almost invincible personal prejudice.’

New Hampshire​ won Frost his first Pulitzer Prize. He received another for his Collected Poems in 1931. He had a string of well-paid, low-obligation academic positions at Amherst, Michigan, Harvard and Dartmouth. But the starriness of his public profile masked the dramatic way in which his private life was falling apart. Marjorie, his youngest child, whom he and Elinor had nursed for years through a series of illnesses, developed tuberculosis in 1930 and died in 1934. Carol, his son, a would-be writer who was convinced that his life had been a failure, shot himself in 1940. Irma, the second youngest, ‘severe, high-strung, and fastidious’, whose mental health had long been unstable, had to be committed in 1947. The worst loss was that of Elinor. In March 1938, in a rented house in Gainesville where she and Frost had gone for the warmer climate, she had a fatal heart attack. In the aftermath, Lesley, their eldest daughter, screamed at him that ‘artists should not have children.’ By the end of the summer, grieving and lonely, he had fallen head over heels in love – it seems, unrequitedly – with his new secretary, the younger, married Kay Morrison.

Frost was untrustworthy when it came to narrating the story of his life. Often the lies he told about himself served to hide things that he was ashamed of, or ‘the pains he took in his own self-interest’, as when he claimed that he had never written poetry to order (in fact he did so in 1906 to get a teaching job in New Hampshire). He also, Plunkett argues, spun narratives in the opposite direction, particularly after Elinor’s death, emphasising his guilty conscience, his ‘native badness’. He had been a terrible husband and an inadequate father, he told Lawrance Thompson, a young academic he had befriended; he had pushed Elinor into marrying him, not supported her, not done enough to encourage the children. Thompson stored it all up for one of the most influentially rancorous biographies of all time. His association with Frost, Plunkett points out, ‘began after Frost had grown convinced of his own badness’: ‘what account could he give of Frost’s life after growing cynical about Frost’s every motive?’ (To give Thompson his due, it wasn’t as if he didn’t have much to go on in these final decades. Over Thanksgiving in 1941, Frost set fire to a pile of workbooks belonging to Morrison’s four-year-old daughter.)

Love and Need seems to morph into a book about Thompson rather than Frost towards the end, which means that the poet’s later work goes largely unexamined. In Plunkett’s view, there is little to say. Frost’s poetry after ‘New Hampshire’, he thinks, was clearer and ‘more polished’ than before, but it lacked the observational texture of the earlier lyrics and narratives. ‘The poems began to proceed from ideas instead of having their ideas emerge from the mess of experience.’ This was, he suggests, especially true of Frost in the 1930s, when pre-formed ideas dominated the ‘editorialising verse’ that the poet produced as he grew more interested in politics.

It’s true that ‘experience’ is messy and ‘multifarious’ in Frost’s earlier work, coming out around the edges in ways that can be confounding. In ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, after arguing back and forth with her husband about wages and need and what they can and can’t afford, Mary, an ordinary farming woman, looks up at the moon: ‘She put out her hand/Among the harplike morning-glory strings,/Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves.’ Does Mary really see the glistening vine strands as ‘harplike’, little lyrical metaphors? Or is it wrong of us to be surprised that she might? It’s an effect that you continue to find in Frost’s work of the 1920s and 1930s, where the poetry has a way of lifting its gaze – with a heightening of register, a grand image, a weighty allusion – and seeming to dare you to shake your head in disbelief. ‘You think this is incongruous?’ it says. ‘You think this didn’t happen?’ In ‘West-Running Brook’, the title poem of Frost’s fifth collection, from 1928, a pair of newlyweds observe a stream together. The young wife remarks fancifully that it reminds her of their marriage; then Fred, her husband, in a blank-verse speech that seems straight out of Hamlet, makes it existential, as an image of life running out: ‘substance lapsing unsubstantial;/The universal cataract of death/That spends to nothingness’. The strangest example of the effect may be in ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’ (1934), one of Frost’s ‘political’ poems of the New Deal era. The speaker, chopping wood in his yard, is approached by a pair of unemployed lumberjacks hoping for work, whom he declines to help. There is a ‘message’ – you shouldn’t separate what you do for a living from what you do for the love of it – but the tone and register keep flickering. They waver back and forth from the bluff commonsensical (‘You know how it is with an April day’; ‘They thought all chopping was theirs of right’) to something unaccountable: distracted and distracting, self-reflexive, silly even, getting triumphantly in its own way. You think this is incongruous?

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in colour he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.