The American landscape in Frost's poetry

Frost's Poetry And Landscape

The Rise of Modernist Poetry

Between the years of 1912 and 1914 the entire temper of the American arts changed. America's cultural coming-of-age occurred and writing in the U.S. moved from a period entitled traditional to modernized. It seems as though everywhere, in that Year of 1913, barriers went down and People reached each other who had never been in touch before; there were all sorts of new ways to communicate as well as new communications. The new spirit was abroad and swept us all together. These changes engaged an America of rising intellectual opportunities and intensifying artistic preoccupation.

With the changing of the century, the old styles were considered increasingly obsolete, and the greatest impact was on American arts. The changes went deep, suggesting ending the narrowness that had seemed to limit the free development of American culture for so long. That mood was not to last. American entry into the war in April 1917 divided the radicals and weakened the progressive Spirit. For many American writers, the war marked a cutoff point from the past, an ultimate symbol for the dawn of modernity. "The major careers that dominated American writing into the 1950s started during this period, and so did the modern tradition. The prewar generation was largely founded in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, Frost and Doolittle, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Conrad Aiken, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters." (Ruland, R., & Bradbury, M.).

With the crash of October 1929 the whole remarkable episode abruptly disengaged, and the "Twenties" ended. However, what had emerged was a style that would convey an independent spirit that caught not only the artistic world, but encapsulated the spirit of America herself. Until the first scents of success were carried on the breezes of American individualism, and free enterprise, this country existed in the shadow, and shape of its former colonial master.

Our culture was largely European; our language was a reflection of England which we had also left behind. Our economy was a similar step child to that of England, Germany and France, mostly agrarian with small factories collecting themselves into cities. But the turn of the century signaled a close of a chapter in American history, and the beginning of a new one. The industrial revolution had bvegun, and America was home to a burgeoning automotive industry, and a distinctly American invention, the assembly line. Our universities were earning accolades right along side of the best that England and France had to offer. As American culture, industry and education shook off some of the last pieces of the European cocoon which had spawned it, the country was also ready for new expressions in poetry, and literature.

After the war, although the experience cast a dark shadow on the optimistic American evaluation of the world, America pulled herself out of the trenches of Germany and France, and decided it had come of age. America, the fledgling democracy which was just over a hundred years in age, entered the war and turned the tide of aggression that all of Europe could not contain. With this new courage, and a national semtiment that valued the traditions of its past, America went looking for herself, and found her portrait painted by the words of the modernist poet.

In the same way that the American culture is understood by the events which define it's history, the culture and personality of a man is defined by the events which mark that man's life. So to understand the writings of Robert Frost (RF) and William Carlos Williams (WCW) this paper will examine three aspects of each. First the man will be considered, then the man as a poet, and finally the poetry of the man. In the conclusion, we will draw from the similarities and differences between these two literary giants.

Robert Frost - The Man

In the early 1900's, Robert Frost, emerging from a troubled life of poverty, sought to reform and revive his life. His efforts were met with great success. Although Robert Frost is widely known as a New England poet, he was actually born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874 (American Writers 150). His father, William Prescott Frost, was a native of New England, and his mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, was a Scottish emigrant from Edinburgh. They met while they were both teaching school in Lewiston, Pennsylvania, and moved west after their marriage (Robert Frost 5).

The relationship between Robert's father and mother was later a major influence on the subject of his poems in his collection, "North of Boston." In this collection, there were frequent appearances of instances where husbands and wives were at odds due to their inability to communicate their feelings and to find common ground.

These grueling portraits seemed to depict the Frost's failing marriage (Parini 10).

Many of the problems in the family were caused by William's overuse of alcohol. A few months after Robert's birth, William began to get an extrodinary fondness for whiskey. This once loving, caring, family man became an abusive husband while under the influence. William became so violent that Isabelle began to fear for her and her son's lives (Robert Frost: the Early Years 10).

Wanting an escape from her failing marriage, Isabelle turned to the Swedenborgian Church, whose elaborate system of beliefs kept her focused on religion rather than her unhappiness. Robert learned many things about this religion. The mysticism in his poems he accredited to his mother.

In the summer of 1876, Belle, pregnant with her second child, could no longer stand her husband's drinking and gambling (www.ketzle.com).She and Robert left Will, and having no money due to her husband's wasteful nature, Bell was forced to stay with her in-laws in Massachusetts. Her daughter, Jeanie, was born there on June 25, without the presence of her father (Robert Frost: the Early Years 13).

This sudden abandonment of his father had a lasting effect on Robert. Indeed, both the emotional isolation which an alcoholic tends to create within a family, and the abandonment which RF felt after his father was no longer present in the home is a theme which surfaces repeatedly in his writings. A tale similar to his own is told in frost's dialogue "The Hill Wife." Frost describes an isolated woman's fear, loneliness, and marital estrangement. Her husband doesn't understand her feelings and is surprised when she leaves without warning (American Writers 154).

After a few months of correspondence with her husband, Belle, Robert, and Jeanie returned to San Francisco. To their surprise, they found William sick in the hospital with the dreaded disease of the time, consumption. Although his condition improved, he never fully recovered (Parini 11). For the next nine years William continued to squander away the family's funds on whiskey, claiming that the alcohol eased his pain. He left his family penniless when he died in 1885 of tuberculosis (Robert Frost: the Early Years 45).

Even though Robert only knew his father for eleven years, he absorbed many of his traits. Like his father, Robert had a drive to make something of himself. He also had his father's disposition; his attitude swinging from times of self-confidence (" I expect to do something to the present state of literature in America") to times of self-doubt ("I have been bad and a bad artist"). Robert's view of religion also was affected by his father. His spiritual views lied between skepticism (from his father) and faith (from his mother.)

Robert and his family left for Lawrence, Massachusetts to fulfill their father's wish to be buried in New England and to start a new life (American Writers 151). Having only eight dollars after the burial, the Frosts were forced to live with their grandparents until Isabelle got a job. After a few months Belle began to teach the fourth and fifth grades in Salem Depot, New Hampshire and was able to get a home for family (www.ketzle.com).

Frost entered Lawrence High School in Lawrence, Massachusetts in1888.

He succeeded the most during his senior year being head of his class, a star on the football team, chief editor of the school newspaper, a prominent member of the debating team, and had already passed the Harvard College entrance exams (Robert Frost: the Early Years 108). He also started to read and write poetry. Many of his works were published in the school newspaper. At that time some of his poems were based on poems he had read (Emily Dickinson's) or nature (Parini 25).

Although Frost was considered the leading scholar in his class by most of his teachers, Elinor Miriam White was close behind him. They didn't become friends until the height of their rivalry for class valedictorian during the winter of their senior year (Parini 27). Her shared love for poetry compelled Robert. They began to court each other- walking home together, attending school functions, and critiquing each others poems (Robert Frost: the Early Years 125).

At their graduation in 1892, Elinor and Robert shared the honor of class valedictorian. After the ceremony, Frost proposed to Elinor. Because they were going to distant colleges, Elinor wanted the engagement to be kept a secret. Frost wanted to be married right away, but she argued that there would be plenty of time for marriage when circumstances were different (Parini 31).

College life did not agree with RF, and after a year, he returned home to a series of odd jobs while he waited for his beloved Elinor. During this time his live of reading poems turned to writing them. When work was slow he wrote poetry. It was then that he started "My Butterfly," a poem he had thought up when he found butterfly wings among leaves while he was at Dartmouth College. Frost later called this work his "first real poem.

Robert Frost - The Poet

It is hard to construct a broad and complete basis on which a poet finds his inspiration, but in RF's life and writings, the theme of aloneness, loss, and personal isolation are oft repeated.

Many scholars, in reviewing his poetry, look at his departure from the traditionalist styles of Pound and Eliot, Frost and Doolittle, Conrad Aiken and Carl Sandburg, and label him as ingenious because he had the courage to depart from the accepted form to write his own verse.

The poet was in his twentieth year when he realized that the speech of books and the speech of life were far more fundamentally different than was supposed. His models up to that period.. had been literary models. But his found quite by accident that real artistic speech was only to be copied form life." (Interviews with Robert Frost, 4) However, it is quite possible that the traditional structure of large words, measured meter and rhyme did not suit the naked emotions with which RF felt compelled to write. It was less a stroke of genious as it was the necessity for real words and real settings, and images real to the common reader that RF chose to communicate his emotions.

His verse convincingly deals with social fragments.

Possibly his own fragmented familial history made him particularly sensitive to the same themes in human nature and society.

His call was one for individual thought, and moving away from sublime, overworked themes of traditionalist writers. His desire was for "American poets to only try to use all the tones of life, and will drop the eternal sublime and se that all life is a fit subject for poetic treatment... We must have a new subject matter, new treatment of it, and we must employ the neglected tones and forget the overworked ones." (Interviews, 14)

Frost does not allow his premise full development by the anthropocentric person. In other words, characteristics of his writings mean the same to Frost as his predecessors. Emily Dickinson's "The Soul selects Her Own Society" is a perfect example of characteristics. "Society" means to Frost very much what it means to Emily Dickinson, moreover, "divine majority" consist of not more than two souls more often than not. Sparingly, Frost denies an individual's achievements, and the denial is deeply implicated in much of his work.

Robert Frost finds freedom of movement out of a sense of restraint, another tactic he finds as an outgrowth of the conflicting moods and feelings within himself. The movement of one extreme is provoked by the imminence of another. "The Wood-Pile" is like a sequel to "Home Burial" with the person wandering from "home." More a meditation than a dramatic narrative, it offers the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape.

Soon after writing his first real poem, RF learned that "The Independent," a prominent literary paper, would publish his poem "My Butterfly: an Elegy" and would pay him fifteen dollars. Pleased with his achievement, Frost once again tried to get Elinor to marry him. He was turned down, and in despair, he traveled to the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. The swamp had been regarded by poets like Longfellow and Thomas Moore as a good place for those who had lost hope to run away to. One poem he wrote while in his gloomy environment was "Reluctance," where his frustrations were mirrored by his surroundings. It ends with one of Frost's most heart-wrenching stanzas:

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

Frost returned home November 30, determined to win the heart of Elinor White no matter what the cost (Parini 50). Robert's wish was finally granted when he married Elinor a in December 1895, a year after he had run away to the dismal swamp.(Chalton 42). Their first son Elliot was born on September 25. However, sorrow was not long absent from the Frost home. Not long after the Frost family had begun, it too was met with a traumatic loss. Their first son died in 1900 of cholera. The death of his son caused Robert to plunge into deep, prolonged depression. Frost's works, "Home Burial," "Out, Out-," and A Masque of Mercy were influenced by the death of Elliot. They contain description about the sadness he felt from losing a child (Parini 68).

In 1901, the Frosts moved to a farm in Derry, New Hampshire paid for by Robert's grandfather. The farm and its beautiful surroundings were the subject of many of Frost's poems in his two poetry books A Boy's Will and North of Boston. Later in his life, Frost himself said, "To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm. Poems growing out of this, though composite, were built on incidents and are therefore autobiographical. There was something about the experiences at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was trapped there for poetry in the years that came after (Parini 73). It is from this time forward that RF began to write, publish, and gain renown for his poetic genius.

Robert Frost overcame so many hurdles in his life to become one of America's favorite poets. His poverty, tragedies, and illnesses could have hindered him, but instead he used these experiences as a basis for his poems. By using simple themes and structures, Robert Frost found his way into the hearts of average Americans, making him an important part of American literature.

Robert Frost - The Poetry

Boy's Will - 1913

From the first lines in his early collections, RF's recurring lonliness, and the extent he associated with the lonliness of life appear in verse.

Ghost House

DWELL in a lonely house I know

That vanished many a summer ago,

And left no trace but the cellar walls,

And a cellar in which the daylight falls,

And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield

The woods come back to the mowing field;

The orchard tree has grown one copse

Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;

The footpath down to the well is healed.

A dwell with a strangely aching heart

In that vanished abode there far apart On that disused and forgotten road

That has no dust-bath now for the toad.

Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout

And hush and cluck and flutter about:

hear him begin far enough away Full many a time to say his say

Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.

I know not who these mute folk are Who share the unlit place with me -- "

Those stones out under the low-limbed tree

Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,

Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad, -- "

With none among them that ever sings,

And yet, in view of how many things,

As sweet companions as might be had.

For those who live in a city setting, much of the intimacy of this poem could be lost. But to a country boy, the mixture of a deserted farm house, living, and healing paints a lonely man longing for a time, or place in his life that is no more. Time has passed on, but he remains, living in a ghost house. He dwells, and still resides in a lonely house, his own of childhood, that vanished many years ago. What he can still identify, like most of us can identify from our childhood home, is the foundation, and the setting in which this house stood. The walls are gone, but sunlight, his favorable memories, still pour into the foundation. The fences are ruined, and the forested part of the land has regrown right up to the edge of the mowing field. Time and overgrowth has retaken that which he tended, and mowed, but his heart is still there, cutting and mowing the fields. The only activity today is the wood pecker 'chopping' at the woodpile.

It is interesting that RF ends the second stanza with 'The path to the well is healed.' At the time of his dwelling there, the path would be worn, and barren, now it is regrown. But as RF views this landscape of sorrow, and emptiness, he choose to use 'healed' in referring to the path. Is this what the poet is hoping for, healing? For the next line says that he still is living with a 'strangely aching heart.' In this plaxe that used to be the center of his life's activity, there is no longer a visitor on the road. No one comes along the path on horse or carriage that might give the idle toad a dust bath. The only activity are the bats, visiting the place under cover of darkness.

My November Guest

MY Sorrow, when she's here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:

She's glad the birds are gone away,

She's glad her simple worsted gray

Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.

This poem sets the lonely tone from the title, to the final verse. November is a time when all the farming country side of upper Massachuets is preparing for winter. There is wood to cut, food to store, repairs to be made on the house. All these are activities for groups, families, and fellowship. And November is also the celebration of Thanksgiving, another time of family, and community. But RF's experience of this time is that the slonliness of a rainy day is a beautiful as life can be. The bare withered tree, and the soggy pasture lane (little more than a bog after a rainy day or two) are 'as beartuful as a day can be.'

There is beauty in the autumn colors, reds, oranges, yellows on the maple trees, but this is not the picture RF paints. He uses the words deserted, desolate trees, devoid of life; and a faded earth and heavy sky, these are the beauty he sees. His companion, sorrow, seed the same thing, but even she does not acknowledge his talent for identifying the same beauty. RF used these barren metaphors of nature that is moving toward the stillness of winter to expose his own barrenness, his own lonliness.

Stars

HOW countlessly they congregate

O'er our tumultuous snow,

Which flows in shapes as tall as trees

When wintry winds do blow! -- "

As if with keenness for our fate,

Our faltering few steps on To white rest, and a place of rest

Invisible at dawn, -- "

And yet with neither love nor hate,

Those stars like some snow-white

Minerva's snow-white marble eyes

Without the gift of sight.

This simple set of 12 verses again paint the poets lonliness, but to this he adds his perspective on life in general, that like the stars which appear every night to over look the land, they are capable of neither love nor hate. They are countless in number, they can illuminate the entire wintery landscape of snow and cold winds, yet in the morning they disappear into the white rest.

The metaphor of winter is present in these early works, and winter for the upper eastern seaboard is a harsh time when life and activity stops. The agrarian lives of the early 20th century lived in synchronism with nature. Srring was a planting season, a time of life, renewed friendships, and love. Summer was a tiem to work, harvest, plan for the coming seasons, and enjoy the outdooes, Autunm signaled the coming winter, and preparation were made for the same. Packaging food, canning and freezing crops, and meats. By the time the cool air turned to cold rain, winter was near, and the rhythm of life slowed to a lonely crawl as families sought protection form the weather and waited out the season. The winter is unyielding, it cannot be changed or oversome, but only submitted to as the families waited for the warming air of spring. It is this season, late autumn and winter that RF associates his active poems, and from the summer he draws pictures of the same lonliness, as in Ghost House.