Robert Frost's accidental late start

a biographical fragment

Robert Frost only gets a passing mention in Second Act, so here’s a short account of the time when he finally started his poetry career, nearly halfway through his life. As ever, if you want to know more about late bloomers, you can pre-order Second Act today. It’s out in two weeks…

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(And remember, for paid subscribers, the next Shakespeare Book Club is 12th May, 19.00 UK time: we’re reading Much Ado About Nothing.)

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I’ve been to a marvellous party

Robert Frost first joined literary society when he gatecrashed a bookshop party in the winter of 1913. Frost had no invitation. He was a poet, but he had published no book. He was in London, the city of poets, but he was a mountain farmer from Vermont with only thirteen poems in American magazines that no-one here had read. He had come to England to finally start his writing career. He was thirty-eight. 

This party was opportune. It introduced him to established poets for the first time. It got him a connection to Ezra Pound, the man whose writing, editing, reviewing, and advocating was helping to create modernism. 

When he arrived at that party, Frost was unknown. Within a year or so, everyone knew his collection North of Boston, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and he began his career as the great American poet of his generation and of the century. Before he died, he became a household name, quoted by schoolchildren, whose work was used in advertising and at a Presidential inauguration.

England was in a period of huge poetic invention. Dozens of writers were experimenting with ways of writing verse that got beyond the saccharine, twisted, archaic, rococo, stuffy excesses of late Victorian poetry. There were traditionalists like Hardy and Graves, Georgians like Rupert Brooke, Imagists like Pound and H.D., and modernists like T.S. Eliot. Poetry journals were established, manifestos and polemics propounded, whole ideologies of poetry competed to own a great age of writing. Within a few years, a large amount of the most influential poetry of the century was published. 

And the bookshop where Frost attended the party, known as The Poetry Bookshop (though then called The Poetry House), was at the middle of this vortex. Frost had come to the right place. Harold Monro, the owner, had edited the new Poetry Review, read and knew everyone, and was writing his own interminable poem about the death of God. His shop was involved with the whole of poetry. Monro published traditional poets like Rupert Brooke. His shop was where T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ was first read. W.B. Yeats once gave a famous reading where he clutched his lapels, rocked on his heels, and intoned his lyrics with a lock of hair curled across his forehead.

The Poetry Bookshop was in a Queen Anne house, on a street that sat between the grandeur of the British Museum, and the slums and city trams to the south. It was a shabby area. Kipper bones and bananas were dropped from windows. Filthy children ran in the streets. But this was about to become the new heart of literary London. Now the little ragamuffins would run in the street alongside men in sweeping cloaks and outsized hats. 

Monro wanted to bring poetry to everyone, and for a while he seemed to succeed. In 1912 Poetry Review sold out. People who wanted copies couldn’t get them.  Ezra Pound said everybody wanted to get a copy.  The reason was a fifty-nine page review of the current scene in French literature. It was an age of poetry. And for English readers and  writers, old and young, the Poetry Bookshop became, for a while, mythically important: it was where the greats read their work and where literary children bought poetry posters for their bedroom walls (including a young Penelope Fitzgerald).

Robert Frost had to come to the one party, at just the right time, where one might feasibly begin a career as a poet.

He got there quite by accident. That afternoon, Frost had been walking around London, and came across a shop window where books of poetry were being displayed. He saw the announcement about the opening party. Many poets had been invited, the assistant told him, but he was welcome to try and get in. Frost lived in a bungalow in Buckinghamshire, twenty miles away. The only thing that had brought him to London that day was a wandering mood. He decided to try.

The party was crowded; every bad poet in England seemed to have turned up to smoke and loiter. Three hundred people were said to be there. Many aspirants had sent their poetry to Monro, “songs of a simple, serious nature”, “astronomical pieces”, written by “lovers of the Muse.” Frost, of course, was not an amateur, though he might have seemed one.

“Are you a poet?”
“I accept the omen.”
“Have you a book?”
“No!”

That was how Frost met Mary Gardner, wife of an eminent archaeologist, whose daughter Phyllis had a secret and unhappy affair with Rupert Brooke. Mary enjoyed associating with poets, and Frost’s family became friendly with the Gardners, though Frost himself thought the Gardners’ literary pretensions were insufferable, calling them “the kind that hunt lions” who “picked me up cheap before I was made.” 

But he made another, much more important friend that night—Frank S. Flint, a poet, a member of the Imagist movement, the man who had written the sell-out article about modern French poetry. In March that year, the American magazine Poetry ran an interview with Flint (though in reality it was all written by Ezra Pound), that was part of a series of pieces announcing the new style of imagist poetry: direct, musical, spare, concrete. On meeting Frost, Flint immediately recognised him as an American. When Frost asked how he knew, Flint replied: “shoes.”

Flint asked if Frost had met Ezra Pound. Frost gave the same answer he’d given Mary Gardner: “No!” 

“Well you should!” Flint replied, and Frost received a card with Pound’s address in the post a few days later. 

From here, Frost’s life permanently changed. He became part of a group of poets, eventually moving to Dymock in Gloucestershire, including a deep friendship with Edward Thomas. Although his first small collection was with a publisher when he went to the party, and Frost very much made himself into a poet, without that friendship he would not have written “The Road Not Taken.” Pound reviewed his work.

Something about England changed Frost. It was here that he wrote “Mending Wall” and “Birches”—verses that would make his name. Verses, too, that are quintessentially American. It is odd to think that many of the poems in North of Boston, one of the most American sounding poetry books, were written in the English countryside.

His early period is one of slow work and revised drafts. Many poems that appeared in the early collections were early works that Frost revised. “The Vantage Point” dates from the early 1900s, but was revised in 1913. “The Little Things of War” was from a similar period, revised for the 1915 collection Mountain Interval. “The Trial by Existence” was written in 1892 but complete in 1906. “Nature’s Neglect” was written in 1901 but revised for his collection West Running Brook in 1928. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was written half in 1900, half in 1920. “Birches” was begun in 1905 but finished in England.

Frost was now immersed in a culture of poetry, and had other poets to talk with. Poets whose works he knew and was inspired by. He met all the poets still living who were in the Oxford Book of Victorian verse that he treasured. The America he left had nothing like this poetic culture. Frost had taken himself to the heart of English-language poetry. He now got reviews from Pound and the approval of Yeats. He got stimulation from the only people in the world who could be interesting to him in that way (and remember, it was a small group).

By moving to England, he moved to poetry. Isolation and contemplation were swapped for conversation and a sense of group purpose. It wasn’t just the years of reading and writing and revising that made Robert Frost into a poet, it was the move to England—getting away from earth awhile, as he wrote in “Birches”. And it was that party he that turned up to, uninvited, and entirely by chance.