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Robert Frost |
It takes a certain sturdiness of soul to be a farmer in New England, but in a lifetime of great difficulty, great achievement, and great honor, Robert Frost returned again and again to his rural world. He inherited a New Hampshire farm from his grandfather in 1900 and wrote his first poetry there. In 1912 he took his wife and four children to England and wrote an even better book. In 1915, now published in America, Frost came home to a new farm in New Hampshire and then another one in Vermont. And by 1923, with his fourth book and first of four Pulitzer Prizes, he had found his voice: stoic in the face of death, with a pagan pragmatism and a farmer’s faith in spring.
He cultivated the public persona of country crank, and often said he had “a lover’s quarrel with the world”. But it was more love than quarrel, and in time the world loved him back. A long second career as a university lecturer brought him a little financial security, and by 1940, at the age of sixty-six, he was living in a cabin on his farm again while his secretary and guests lived over in the main house. His writing had all but stopped. His wife and four of his six children were dead. He was welcome in the grand houses of Cambridge and Amherst, but he preferred the misty demons of Vermont. “Who better could appraise, the kindred spirit of an inner haze”.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |