Robert Frost by Jay Parini

Author:Jay Parini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466877801
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

15

BUILDING SOIL

1931–1934

All experience ever is is confirmation anyway.

—FROST TO THEODORE MORRISON, JUNE 27, 1930

“I am just starting to write letters again, letters or anything else, after a long sickness of public life,” Frost had explained to Untermeyer in the summer of 1930. “I hardly know my own handwriting. I hardly know myself seated at a desk.” Continuing in this meditative vein, he wondered what had become of the years between 1912, when he left for England, and the present. It had all seemed “no very real dream.” While awaiting the publication of his Collected Poems, he’d said, “I wonder what next. I don’t want to raise sheep; I don’t want to keep cows; I don’t want to be called a farmer.” He groused that an acquaintance had recently asked him if he’d written anything in the past two months. “Me! Write anything in two months! It used to take me ten years to write anything.” He guessed it would take him twice as long now.1

Frost had spent so much time before the public in the past decade, reading and lecturing, that he seemed to have lost track of the inner self that formed poems. It would, as he predicted, be a slow haul to his next slim volume, which would not appear until 1936. In the meantime, Frost would see, if anything, a widening of his role as public poet. The demands for his presence on platforms around the country seemed only to grow as word of his remarkable performing abilities spread. “If you got wind of a Frost reading, you changed whatever plans you had and went to see him,” Richard Eberhart recalled. “I saw him in the late twenties, and again in the early thirties. He seemed to get better each time. He had a way of taking a word and turning it on its head, making witty comments, seizing an old New England saying and making it sound twice as profound as it was. There was always a sparkle in him, an impish quality. It was tremendously charming, and very self-conscious, though nobody minded that. It was a performance, and taken as such.”

One of the main stages from now until Frost’s death would be Bread Loaf Mountain in Ripton, Vermont. In 1921, Wilfred Davison of Middlebury College had founded the Bread Loaf School of English on the mountain campus of the college, twelve miles from the center of Middlebury itself. Five years later, at Frost’s suggestion, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference had been started by John Farrar, a New York publisher. (Frost once referred to the conference as the Two Weeks Manuscript Sales Fair—a sign that he resented the commercial aspects of the conference, which had been promoted by John Farrar.) Frost’s presence on the mountain became a huge part of its attraction to would-be writers, and he would lure to Bread Loaf many of his friends, including Untermeyer, who seemed never far behind whenever Frost appeared somewhere.

Untermeyer had become a student, not only of Frost’s verse, but of his lecturing.

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