A Divided Poet REVIEW
David Sanders’ book A Divided Poet: Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the Drama of Disappearance is a thought provoking look at Robert Frost’s conflicted relationship with the subjects of the poems in North of Boston. Each of the poems in the book receives some form of treatment and analysis and Sanders strays from his central theme from time to time but the path he takes through the work has a definite direction. What Sanders finds so interesting about the work as a whole involves the complexity of Frost’s attempt to capture the essence of a region and its people while interacting with them as an outsider (if not actually then psychologically). Frost lives and farms (or teaches) in Derry, New Hampshire as he writes most of the poems included in the book but he lives there as one waiting for the day when he will not have to live there.
It may help to understand the context. Robert Frost married his high school sweetheart and they began to have children quite young. In order to provide for his family, Frost raised chickens and taught high school, neither of which did he particularly enjoy. His nature was far more intellectual and contemplative for the grinding demands of these necessary occupations. Fortunately, his grandfather left him some annuities that helped to augment his paltry earnings and allowed him to write. The same grandfather gave him the farm he lived on (freeing him from mortgage payments) and made it a condition of Frost’s possession of it that he could not sell the farm for ten years.
This seems to have had a marked impact on how Robert Frost interacted with the farmers of Derry. Frost knew that eventually, he would be selling the farm and using the money to pursue a career as a poet and so, he bided his time collecting the material for those poems and giving himself a literary head start when the time of his emancipation came. All the time that he was engaged in listening to his neighbor’s stories he knew that he was planning his escape by means of those stories. His work would be a poetic version of the work anthropologists do. He was therefore, among them but not of them. He no doubt understood this and they, no doubt, suspected it. No one in Derry could imagine Robert Frost as a man who was committed to handing his farm down to his children. As Sanders puts it,
“As a labor of ambition as well as love, North of Boston registers indirectly but unmistakably the tension between the poet moved to celebrate a fading culture and the poet determined to find his place in the modern economy that was pushing rural Derry toward the past.”
Robert Frost in Derry was somewhat like a Jane Goodall watching gorillas. He was too smart and too educated and too ambitious and too financially secure to feel trapped like the trapped people he writes about. But he was unable to break away just yet because of the conditions laid upon him by his rich grandfather. He was a “Man without a country.” “The literary world didn’t want to hear from me when I was a farmer in New Hampshire,” Frost said decades later. “I had mud on my shoes and that didn’t seem right to them for a poet.” At the same time, his neighbors could not quite embrace him as a member of their community either. “Perhaps it will help you to understand,” Frost wrote a friend in England years later, “if I tell you that I have lived for the most part in villages where it were better that a millstone were hanged around your neck then that you should own yourself a minor poet.”
Derry’s own history of its first 150 years, From Turnpike to Interstate: 1827 to 1977, suggests that the people of Derry were later glad to have had Frost as a neighbor but offer that up with the following qualifications. The book describes the poet as,
“a lover of nature but not a farmer, a dreamer whose chores would come second to the dream, a man careless with his credit. Such a way of life was alien to people who could never have built their town under such conditions. In truth, this man of thought, temporarily curtailed in his activities due to hayfever and the weakness in his lungs, remained a stranger in the midst of a town whose residents were traditionally energetic and hard-working.”
Louis Mertins reports that Frost, when older, often laughed at a reputation he got among his farm neighbors“ and quotes him directly:
“They would see me starting out to work at all hours of the morning - approaching noon, to be more explicit. I always liked to set up all hours of the night planning some inarticulate crime, going out to work when the spirit moved me, something they shook their heads ominously at, with proper prejudice. They would talk among themselves about my lack of energy. I was a failure in their eyes from the very start – very start. Certainly I couldn’t be a farmer and act like this. Getting into the field at noon! What a farmer!”
According to the author, Frost was compelled to make a rather Faustian decision about these people of New Hampshire. His poetry would celebrate their lives and their virtues but it would document the slow steady demise of their economy and culture and the impact that the harsh weather and stony soil and declining real estate values would inflict upon their joie de vivre. Frost would be respectful but ultimately, he would coin their hardships into his own fame and fortune. Sanders’ central point is that his conscience felt this transaction and that it was not always comfortable with it. While Frost would not be the first person or the last to make his bread off the hardships of the downtrodden peasant, he at least saw what he was doing and confessed his reticence about it.
“Integral to the Frost who loved this Derry world was the poet determined not to vanish with it,” Sanders writes,
“and here lay something of a problem. Frost knew, that to be the poet he wished to be, to make his act of poetic creation one of economic advantage, he must turn the people and culture of Derry into a salable commodity, bringing North of Boston into the commerce of capitalism and allying himself with the economic interests that the book portrays as an indifferent and sometimes hostile force.”
“There is a kind of success called of esteem and it butters no parsnips,” Frost would later explain to a friend,
“It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my own legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it - don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviar to the crowd the way my quasi- friend [Ezra] Pound does. I want to reach out.”
Frost did “reach out.” In North of Boston, he attempts to do for New England what Mark Twain did for the culture of the Mississippi River: He sets out to capture the sound of people talking.
In the book’s last poem, “Good Hours,” Frost describes his relationship with the villagers and his intention while living among them.
I had for my winter evening walk—
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.
And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.
I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.
Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.
I thought I had the folk within, he says. “I had the sound of the violin.” In this book of poems, he is saying, “I think I captured the essence of these people. If you read my poems, you will have heard the sound of them talking.” The poem suggest that he has been an observer of the entire village, voyeuristically peeking in their windows and listening in on their conversations from one side of the town to the other. He turns his invasion of their privacy into poetry (referred to here as “creaking feet.” This activity is something that he feels some shame about as he refers to his decision to go back to town as “a repentance.” His presence and the resulting poetry is something he refers to as a “profanation” – a word that implies that he has used something sacred for a commercial purpose.
He can only say that he has done so “by your leave.” In other words, it is an offense that the reader has given him permission to do. It is as if to say “go ahead and blame me for how I have looked in the windows of the people of my town but the fact that you bought this book of poems means that you wanted me to. The sin is not mine alone.” In making North of Boston, Sanders concludes, the poet has “exchanged the community of rural neighbors to which he was never fully joined for an audience of readers of which he was far from assured.”
As it turns out, frost’s instincts were sound. North of Boston became an almost instant best seller. People did want to reconnect with these struggling farmers in New Hampshire. It may well be that many of the people who bought the book could see their parents and grandparents in it. It connected them to the places that they had, like Frost, left to survive. They appreciated Frost’s ability to capture for them all that they had lost in leaving and all that they hoped that they had not lost. “Much as he would look back to [Derry] with longing,” says Sanders, “[Frost] was never quite ‘of’ that place, never rooted there as his poetic subjects were, and when it came time to leave, he had the poetic craft, the courage, and just enough cash to do so. . . . Unlike the people of his forthcoming book, he had the talent and the will to leave, and in 1911, when the farm became his to sell, he had the funds as well.”
There were many Americans who, like Robert Frost’s father, had moved to California for precisely the same motives. They were financially better off there in Chicago and san Fransisco and Seattle, but they felt – the word here is “deracinated” – a fancy word for “uprooted.” Frost’s North of Boston was something of an antidote. His elixir was “just what Americans needed in their disconnection and Frost understood that he had a market before the market knew that they were looking for what he offered. “My dream,” Frost said,
“would be to get the thing started in London and then do the rest of it from a farm in New England where I could live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier.”
Ironically, the title of the book itself, North of Boston, was one of the headings under which the Boston Globe listed country properties for sale. Frost’s own farm had been purchased by his grandfather and bargain prices and no doubt some struggling farmer had sold the farm for less than he had paid for it. Allen Ginsberg, Sanders explains, once referred to Robert Frost as “the original intrapreneur of poetry.”
I particularly liked the way that David Sanders expressed his central theme in the following passage.
“Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, sole survivor of the wrecked Pequod who makes a life preserver of Queequeg‘s intended coffin, Frost’s escape from that Derry world depends on what he can make from the remains of his former community. . . . In Frosts case, that burden includes an awareness of life‘s inequities, which include his personal fame and fortune gained an apparent exchange for way of life that he could save only in imagination.”
Question for Comment: Do you think there is anything necessarily wrong with benefitting from other people’s suffering so long as you are not the one causing it and so long as what you are doing is in some way a comfort to that suffering?
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