5. Atmosphere / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Atmosphere

Inscription for a garden wall

Winds blow the open grassy places bleak;

But where this old wall burns a sunny cheek,

They eddy over it too toppling weak

To blow the earth or anything self-clear;

Moisture and color and odor thicken here.

The hours of daylight gather atmosphere.

• eddy : 소용돌이
• self-clear : 

------

기류(氣流)

텃밭 담장을 위한 명문(銘文)

바람이 들판 풀밭을 황량하게 휩쓸지만,

낡은 이 담장의 뺨에 햇빛이 머무는 곳에서는,

바람들이 비틀 비틀 담을 넘다가 힘이 너무 빠져

땅이건 어느 것이건 휩쓸어버리지 못하기에,

이곳에서는 습기와 색깔과 향기가 짙어진다.

일광(日光)의 시간들이 기류를 모은다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 들판의 풀밭은 아직 황량하지만 담장 밑의 개나리는 벌써 꽃망울을 터트리기 시작한다. 들판의 기류와 담장 밑의 기류가 다르기 때문이다. 바람은 담장이 없는 들판에서는 풀을 파괴하지만, 담장 밑의 식물들을 휩쓸지 못한다. 담장이 방패막이가 되어 바람을 차단하기 때문이다.

 담장은 태양열도 흡수하기 때문에 습기의 증발도 감소된다. 이렇게 담장 밑의 식물들은 그들의 습기, 색깔, 그리고 향기를 유지할 수 있고, 이것들을 하나로 모으는 기류가 형성된다. 이 모든 것이 담장의 덕(德)이다.

기(氣)가 흩어지는 들판은 여전히 황량하지만 기(氣)가 모아지는 담장 밑은 “습기와 색깔과 향기가 짙어진다.” 담장 밑의 개나리가 제일 먼저 꽃망울을 터뜨리는 이유다. 텃밭은 그래서 담장이 있다. 텃밭에는 햇빛과 기류가 모인다.

-신재실 씀-

-----

youtu.be/y1uDERntdIc

.--------

The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost

Introduction ROBERT FAGGEN 
1  “Stay Unassuming”: the Lives of Robert Frost DONALD G. SHEEHY 
2  Frost Biography and A Witness Tree WILLIAM PRITCHARD 
3  Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
4  Frost and the Ancient Muses HELEN BACON 
5  Frost as a New England Poet LAWRENCE BUELL 
6  “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost TIMOTHY STEELE 
7  Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor JUDITH OSTER

8. Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
9  Frost and the Meditative Lyric BLANFORD PARKER 
10  Frost’s Poetics of Control MARK RICHARDSON 
11  Frost’s Politics and the Cold War GEORGE MONTEIRO 
12  “Synonymous with Kept”: Frost and Economics GUY ROTELLA 
13 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe JOHN CUNNINGHAM 

Select bibliography 
Index

Frost as a New England Poet - LAWRENCE BUELL

To classify Robert Frost as a poet in a traditional New England vein can be dangerously misleading or entirely proper, depending on how you define your terms.1 Biographically, he was a New Englander not by birth but by adoption –or rather readoption: the first canonical writer to return from the New England diaspora to his parental region and claim it as his literary home. By the same token, artistically, Frost’s tastes were cosmopolitan, not strictly regional. His first favorite poet was Poe; he was an able and zealous student of the classics, especially Virgil’s Eclogues; he once described himself as “car[ing] most for Shakespearean and Wordsworthian sonnets”2; the one significant fellow poet to whom he dedicated a poem was the English Georgian, Edward Thomas; and in the formation of his mature poetic styles no writers of the New England Renaissance era were more important to him than Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. Yet Frost was also acutely conscious of his relation to his New England precursors. Sometimes he showed it by explicit claim or allusion, more often obliquely, by imitation, repossession, echo, or parody – and not just by means of the written word. Also important to the construction of the Frost image was visual iconography: photographs like the one facing the title page of his 1949 Complete Poems (New York: Holt), which depicts the grizzled sage as serene Brahmin in a work shirt.

I shall unfold Frost’s New Englandism in four stages, laying particular emphasis upon what links him to Emerson and other significant New England poetic precursors from William Cullen Bryant through Edwin Arlington Robinson: first, a capsule summary of literary affinities; second, a narrative of the emergence of the regional sensibility that followed from those affinities; third, an analysis of some major dimensions of that sensibility; and finally an anticipation of the “So what” question –What justifies lingering on this somewhat unfashionable subject?3 

I 
Here, in summary, is what we think we know about Frost’s cognizance of fellow New England writers. (I hedge somewhat because a good bit of the evidence comes in the form not of hard proof but of assertion, often from that notorious trickster Frost himself.)4 Emerson’s Essays and Poems and Thoreau’s Walden Frost once listed among his favorite ten books. Emerson’s poetry Frost knew better and relished more than Emerson’s prose – a striking reversal of what has always been the dominant view of Emerson’s relative merits. Emerson was the one premodern writer about whom Frost wrote extensive formal criticism, not one essay but two (CPPP, 814–16, 860–66). Indeed, Frost went so far as to claim on several occasions that a particular twenty-two-line passage in “Monadnoc” “meant almost more to me than anything else on the art of writing when I was a youngster” (CPPP, 693) –of which more later. Thoreau’s Walden was the only other regional literary work that Frost credited with such a crucial influence on his own formation, remarking that a particular passage therein (unspecified) “‘must have had a good deal to do with the making of me,’” and later affirming that Walden “‘surpass[es] everything we have had in America.’” But whether Thoreau inspired Frost stylistically as well as by force of his ideas and his persona is uncertain.5 Frost read Emily Dickinson enthusiastically after her first (posthumous) Poems appeared in 1890; experimented with her compressed gnomic lines in some early poems; in later life compared his sensibility to hers; and praised her as “‘the best of all the women poets who ever wrote.’”6

Discussions of Frost in relation to “classic” New England writers tend to stop with these three precursors. That is understandable enough. After all, they have been the canonical figures in the history of New England poetics since the time Frost achieved eminence in the 1920s; Frost’s critics, memorists, biographers, and live audiences have thus taken special interest in his affinities with them; and Frost himself was usually willing to play along. But the life-tory of his connections with his New England precursors hardly ends there. In particular, Frost read the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow early and eagerly, and he defended it well after it had become unfashionable. As a turn-of-the-century teacher Frost assigned The Courtship of Miles Standish, Evangeline, and other works; and he wrote an imitation-Longfellow commemorative poem for the school’s commemoration of the centenary of Longfellow’s birth in 1907.7 He encouraged his children to memorize several Longfellow poems; he attended the Bowdoin College centenary of Longfellow’s graduation in 1925; and he selected the little-known Lawrance Thompson as his official biographer partly on the strength of Thompson’s 1938 biography of Longfellow. Although Frost did not specify what pleased him about that book (if indeed he inspected it closely), it is striking that Young Longfellow – the most penetrating and incisive study of that poet ever written – already evinces the Melvillian probing of the demonic underside of the writer’s persona that Thompson went on to pursue more famously – and very controversially – in a critical book on Melville (Melville’s Quarrel with God [1952]) and his three-volume biography of Frost. Since Thompson was also a younger colleague and friend at the Bread Loaf School of English, Frost may not have realized that he was inviting psychography, not hagiography; but in any case it tells us something both about Frost and about latter-day obliviousness to Longfellow’s range that Longfellow was one of the bridges that brought the two men together.

New England’s other “Fireside” or “Schoolroom” poets8 mattered less deeply to Frost, although he certainly knew their work to some extent. By the eldest among them, William Cullen Bryant, “the American Wordsworth,” who was one of Frost’s mother’s favorite poets, he memorized when young at least one piece, “To a Waterfowl” (APNC 1: 125–6); and he alluded to Bryant occasionally in his mature work. Frost enjoyed John Greenleaf Whittier’s poetry selectively but distanced himself from Whittier’s moralism. The two other figures in the standard constellation, James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, seemingly did not interest Frost much, if indeed he read them at all beyond his schoolboy exercises, despite Lowell’s experiments (and Holmes’ to a lesser extent) with backcountry New England intonations.

With one exception, the other nineteenth-century New England verse and prose poets who died before Frost reached maturity he did not know or care much about. Emerson’s sometime protégés, Jones Very and Ellery Channing, did not exist for him, nor did their hinterland contemporary, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. Nathaniel Hawthorne mattered to Frost only in the general sense of being as a precursor in the regional gothic line, and by the 1920s he retained only the most shadowy recollection of Hawthorne’s work. And Frost paid no attention at all to such less canonical writers of antebellum regional prose as Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Lydia Maria Child. Harriet Beecher Stowe meant “abolitionist” to him rather than “regionalist.” The one exception mentioned above was the Connecticut-orn adoptive Californian Edward Rowland Sill, whose poems collected in the 1880s (cf. APNC 2: 397–400) impressed the youthful Frost for their restrained philosophic expression‎ of elegiac melancholy.

With the later nineteenth-entury local colorists or “regional realists,” whose careers were ending about the time Frost began publishing, his work has close affinity, particularly his many dramatic monologues and dialogues of regional life: the New Hampshire writer Alice Brown (whom Frost thought of as a friend), Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rowland Robinson, and Celia Thaxter. Both early reviewers and later critics have sometimes defined his originality as a contributor of poems to a then predominantly prose genre.9 But although Frost was well aware of the vogue these writers had created for New England outback scenes, replete with “abandoned farmhouses, the miles of stone walls gridding whole townships long since reverted to forest, and the tottering and fallen stones of family graveyard,”10 it is not clear that their writing much interested him, even though several of them also wrote poetry, Thaxter especially. The one elder regional contemporary whose work Frost is known to have read faithfully was Maine poet Edwin Arlington Robinson. Robinson figured for Frost first as an admired, senior, more established presence (“‘the best of the moderns,’” Frost called him in the 1930s: a telling indication of his own conservatism), then as a rival whom he increasingly criticized, although he wrote a gracious introduction to Robinson’s posthumously published last book, King Jasper (1935) (CPPP, 741–48).11 Indeed Frost later declared that this was “the nearest I ever came to getting myself down in prose” (CPPP, 773).

The other New England poet of Frost’s own era now reckoned as truly great, Wallace Stevens, published his first book only after Frost’s mature style crystallized and his international reputation was secured; and despite halfhearted attempts at making acquaintance (including recollection of Harvard ties), they did not get along either biographically or artistically, but wound up patronizing each other. Frost was flustered by Stevens’ urbanity, and Stevens was acutely self-onscious of Frost’s being (and knowing himself to be) much more of a literary lion than he. Poet-critic Amy Lowell mattered mainly to Frost for her condescending commendation of him as an authentic New England primitive.

So much for “the facts” about Frost’s regional literary affinities. Now for a look at his exfoliation as a regional bard. 

II 
The sequence of volumes that formed the basis of Frost’s first Poems (1923) shows an initially hesitant but increasingly assertive embracement of a regional persona that was to empower, define, and by the same token delimit him.

The title of A Boy’s Will (1913) is taken from the first part of the refrain of Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth” (APNC 1: 406–8), a reminiscence of boyhood scenes in Portland, Maine (“‘A boy’s will’ is the wind’s will/ And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts”); but the collection as a whole is hardly place-specific. New England figures chiefly as “a setting for [the poet’s] sentimental education,” as Kemp shrewdly puts it.12 Tellingly, Frost lifts the least “local,” the most “archetypal” part of “My Lost Youth”: a scrap Longfellow himself quoted from an old Finnish poem. Lost-youthishness is certainly a distinctive Longfellow motif (cf. the young lovers of Evangeline, separated in the forced Arcadian diaspora reunited only in old age) but no more so than for Wordsworth or Byron or Arnold. Again, the pastoral ambiance of most of the poems in A Boy’s Will (“In a Vale,” “Mowing,” “The Tuft of Flowers,” “My Butterfly” [CPPP, 24, 26, 30, 36], is vague enough to suggest any number of rural places. And the book’s most ambitious piece, “The Trial by Existence” (CPPP, 28), is literally out of this world: an allegorical Shelleyan dream vision of metempsychosis. Frost was clearly still – and never wholly ceased to be – the poet who at the age of twenty affirmed to his first literary editor that his favorite poems were Keats’ “Hyperion,” Shelley’s Prometheus, Tennyson’s “Morte d’Arthur,” and Browning’s “Saul.”13

A Boy’s Will does also show Frost starting to bond to more recognizably New England subjects. Its seasonality, for instance the fall colors celebrated in “October” (CPPP, 35), had been for three-uarters of a century a canonical hallmark of New England nature writing, as had the sereness of brown November. A number of the poems ventriloquize specific New England voices. “A Late Walk” in autumn “through the mowing field” amidst falling leaves across “the headless aftermath” which “Half closes the garden path” (CPPP, 18) reprises Longfellow’s “Aftermath,” which also treats the moment when “the Summer fields are mown” and “dry leaves strew the path” as symbolizing the poet’s own slim pickings (APNC 1: 426). “To the Thawing Wind” (CPPP, 21) tries out the jaunty trochaic tetrameter with which Emerson invokes “The Humble-Bee” as a muse (APNC 1: 272): 

Bring the singer, bring the nester; 
Give the buried flower a dream; 
Make the settled snowbank steam 

[Frost] 

Let me chase thy waving lines, 
Keep me nearer, me thy hearer 
Singing over shrubs and vines. 

[Emerson] 

In “Stars” (CPPP, 19), Frost both echoes Emerson in stanza one (“tumultuous snow” recalls the “tumultuous privacy of storm” in Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm” (APNC 1: 274) and experiments with Dickinsonian laconics in stanza two:14 

As if with keenness for our fate, 
Our faltering few steps on 
To white rest, and a place of rest 
Invisible at dawn, – 

Altogether, the regionalism of A Boy’s Will was persuasive enough to set the Yankee farmer-poet image-making going among his reviewers. But without the hindsight advantage of knowing Frost to be a New England bard, these echoes do not seem much more telling than others from “the worn book of old-golden song” mentioned in another poem (CPPP, 24) (doubtless Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English poetry: Frost’s favorite anthology, which as a teenager he had read “literally to rags and tatters”)15 – a poem whose rhetoric is redolent of Keats and even the preromantic William Collins (“the bat’s mute antics”) (CPPP, 23).

The poems in North of Boston (1914) announce themselves far more explicitly as products of a regional imagination, although the chief genres (dramatic monologues and dialogues in blank verse) is rather in the vein of Shakespeare and Browning.16 The volume provides a kind of anthology of familiar upcountry New England workways, landforms, and psychographs. Wall-building, blueberrying, apple-picking, hay-making. Reclusive bottledup neurotic cottagers, rural poverty, strange bumpy contours. The poetic language has a more “oral” quality than in A Boy’s Will, especially in the fictive voices, but also in the poet’s “own” voice, as in the “I sha’n’t be long” of the opening poem, “The Pasture,” which eventually became the preface to the Complete Poems as a whole (CPPP, 3). Though Thoreau never wanted to be a dialect poet, he did strive for a counterpoint between poetic rhythm and prose syntax, complicating this further in his dramatic poetry with a second counterpoint between formal and vernacular; and North of Boston achieves both breakthroughs.

The world portrayed therein is pretty much that of late-entury regional realism: a world otherwise today chiefly known, now that Robinson’s Tilbury Town poems are less and less read, through the stories and sketches of Sarah Orne Jewett, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. It is an intensely local agrarian world that time has passed by, a world populated by reserved folk either inarticulate or nervously garrulous, a world where city people and institutions figure as largely absent aliens and/or exploiters. In a predictably male vein, Frost stresses solitude more than sociality and portrays female community not at all; but – possibly through osmotic absorption of the female local colorists – he is also more critical than not of male harshness or failure of understanding of women and sympathetic to female impatience with male stolidity and narcissism. “Home Burial” shows that Frost, unlike all the men in Susan Glaspell’s story “A Jury of Her Peers,” would definitely have understood if not approved the emotions of the farmwife who killed the husband who strangled her canary.

Frost places “himself” most fully in the context of that turn-of-the-century upcountry world in “The Black Cottage” (CPPP, 59–62). A garrulous local “minister” takes the persona on a tour of a “forsaken” “little cottage” inhabited for decades by a Civil War-widowed dowager of strict, demanding old-time rectitude. 

She had her own idea of things, the old lady. 
And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison 
And Whittier, and had her story of them. 
One wasn’t long in learning that she thought 
Whatever else the Civil War was for, 
It wasn’t just to keep the States together, 
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both. 
She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough 
To have given outright for them all she gave. 
Her giving somehow touched the principle 
That all men are created free and equal. 
And to hear her quaint phrases – so removed 
From the world’s view today of all those things. 

The minister proceeds to muse inconclusively about that “hard mystery” of Jefferson –whether the Declaration’s free-and-equal clause really is true – caught between his own dubieties and his respect for the widow’s indomitable “innocence,” which might just “at last prevail” in the wider world just as it did in his parish, where the old lady’s opposition kept him from liberalizing the language of the worship service.

From the minister’s rambling talk, the dead woman emerges as a figure whom the neighborhood has consigned to an antiquity so remote that it takes this spokesperson a great effort to conjure it up, and even then she remains a mysterious and ghostly figure for all her personal staunchness and residual power as a cultural superego. For the persona-interlocutor, that bygone world, the glorious New England Renaissance moment of righteous eloquence in poetry (Whittier) and oratory (Garrison) must feel all the more distant. An additional measure of the distantiation is that the poem’s central image, the ruined cottage, is obviously not New England-specific but transatlantic, indebted whether directly or indirectly to the dialogue at Margaret’s ruined cottage in Book I of Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), the long poem by which America’s favorite British Romantic was best known in the nineteenth century. Yet despite such stylizations, even as the poem reduces Whittier almost to a cartoon figure of bygone zealotry, it seems teasingly to reinvoke him when the minister discovers a nest of bees in the wall and they abruptly exit. Might this seriocomically allude to one of Whittier’s most sensitive and touching poems, “Telling the Bees”? – in which the lover returns after an absence to find the servant-girl telling the bees that his sweetheart has died (so they will not desert the farm) (APNC 1: 468–70). Might the minister’s monologue be a fumbling unconscious equivalent of this ritual of propitiation; or, even if that is too rarefied, might the poem be wanting to keep at arm’s length the stiffish side of its precursor (Whither the “Quaker Militant”) while honoring Whittier the humanitarian? However this may be, the poem clearly wants to offer an image of visitors standing bemused amidst the relics of a cultural tradition that continues to exert a certain force and authority upon those who listen closely to it, but which takes a great effort even to begin to understand.

During the next decade, Frost planted himself solidly within that New England world. Whereas in North of Boston, except for “The Pasture,” the persona pictures himself as less embedded in its premises than his local characters are, in Mountain Interval (1916) the persona starts to become another character in the dramatic ensemble, the local who refuses to sell his balsam firs to a city slicker (“Christmas Trees” [CPPP, 103]), the farmer who stops mowing to help his child save a nest of birds he almost cut through (“The Exposed Nest” [106]), or one rustic meeting another on equal terms (“The Gum-gatherer” [134]). In these poems, the posture of witness to outback obsolescence partially gives way to that of the naturalized villager, with an old-timer’s hostility to creeping commercialism, even to basic technology like telephone and telegraph (“An Encounter,” “The Line-Gang” [121, 135]). Frost has begun more actively to play the inheritor of the lost world of the widow of “The Black Cottage.” As one reviewer of his next collection put it, “where Lowell and Whittier observed and reported the New England peasant, Frost has become one.”17

The process of regional identification reaches an end point of sorts in New Hampshire (1923), whose title and lead-off poem, the longest in Frost’s canon except for the two late-ife dramatic “masques,” wryly but assertively declares allegiance to that state (and to Vermont as well) (CPPP, 151–62). This is a poem Frostians like to dislike, and for good reason. It teeters awkwardly between genial humor and ingratiating self-irony (“when I asked [a Boston poet: Amy Lowell] what ailed the people,/ She said ‘Go read your own books and find out’” [CPPP, 157]), and the kind of self-focused complacency into which one too easily gets drawn once one becomes conscious of becoming publicly defined as a spokesperson of a certain sort. Kemp judges “New Hampshire” “an excruciatingly ostentatious and affected attempt on Frost’s part to come to terms with his adopted regional personality”:18 a harsh but understandable verdict. Failures, however, are often revealing performances, and so here. “New Hampshire” highlights at least three things about Frost’s “reinhabitation” of New England – to borrow an apt term from ecocriticism.19 First, it was a process involving continual selfrevision. For example, he tries to counter, without retracting, the image of himself (warranted, he realizes) as an anti-New Hampshire gothicizer by a combination of boosterism and portrayal of himself as a perpetually hypersensitive person who would be disaffected in any environment. (Frost does not explicitly link his ingrained disaffection to his adopted New Hampshireness, though the link is strongly implied and elsewhere exploited more piquantly.) Second, regional self-implacement means a certain displacement of forebears as well as rapprochement with them. The poem takes aim at two eminent Victorians Frost particularly admired: Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson, with sideswipes at Bryant and Whittier along the way.20 Indeed, “New Hampshire” largely turns on the charge laid down in Emerson’s quasi-abolitionist “Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing” that “‘The God who made New Hampshire/ taunted the lofty land with little men’” (APNC 1: 283), against which Frost wants to argue that this goes to show that between the two neighbors the provincial is Massachusetts, not New Hampshire. Third, implacement will always remain performative and thereby somewhat factitious. The speaker does not, it turns out, want to make a choice that irrevocably boxes him in; and even if he did, at most he would be “a plain New Hampshire farmer/ With an income in cash of say a thousand/ (From say a publisher in New York City)” (CPPP, 162); and even if he could stay put as a plain New Hampshire farmer, he would not be satisfied because the disaffected side of him recognizes the partial truth of Emerson’s charge. Altogether the poem is a classic example of self-conscious belatedness about cultural identity: of identity being not “natural” but constructed; of identity being asserted in the context of having been defined previously by others; of identity as a role one wants to act out without being bound by – though amidst and despite that self-consciousness he cannot but be aware that it must entail binding himself down in some fashion.

So Frost’s pilgrimage toward regional identification, entailed a double movement: from one form of “naivete” to another (from more-or-ess ungrounded romantic pastoralism to a more grounded local character or sage persona) and, concurrently, from one form of poetic self-consciousness (earnest romantic aestheticism of the “I dwell with a strangely aching heart/ In that vanished abode there far apart” variety [CPPP, 16]) to another (affectionate-satirical regionalism of the “trust New Hampshire not to have enough/ Of radium or anything to sell” variety [CPPP, 154]). The typical weaknesses of his mature repertoire, both of which mar “New Hampshire,” are sententiousness on the first wavelength and triviality on the second.

Though Frost has a unique historical place as New England’s first great returnee after the invention and canonization (only now being seriously contested) of New England as the nation’s dominant culture region, virtually all the traits so far described, and more, are already visible in the work of his regional forebears, notwithstanding his swerves in “The Black Cottage” and “New Hampshire” away from Whittier, Emerson, Bryant, and others – as we shall now attempt more fully to assess. 

III 
There are at least five ways of situating poetic practice vis-à-is regional identity. (1) Biographically, via the writer’s life-experiences, including the evidence of reading in attentiveness to sociality with other regionalist practitioners. (2) Geographically, via the cultural-environmental repertoire of the writer’s represented world, including (for the traditional New England hinterlands) rustic villages with their standard spatial layouts, meeting houses, and other architectural landmarks together with the civic and religious rituals associated with them, ethnically homogeneous populace, churchrelated rituals, small-scale agrarianism, stone walls, and other folk architectural motifs, typical flora and fauna both cultivated (apple trees, elms, and oaks as decorative or commemorative trees) and the fortuitous (steeple bush, blueberries). (3) Ideologically, via attitudinal traits like towncenteredness, self-sufficiency (post-)protestant religiosity, moralism, the work ethic, historical and genealogical self-consciousness. (4) Linguistically, via distinctive idiom (“interval” for narrow valley between mountains), pronunciation (“sh’an’t” in “The Pasture”), syntax (“What I like best’s the lay of different farms/ Coming out on them from a stretch of woods” (CPPP, 53), and tonality (wry, dry, laconic restraint). (5) Formally, via preferred genres and metrics, as well as allusions to particular precursor works. The first dimension we covered reasonably well in section I. Concerning the second and third, far more can be said than was said in section II about both the typicality and the idiosyncrasy of Frost’s New England thematics. Very broadly speaking, he stays away from village centers and public rituals, concentrates on privatistic experience, takes georgic scenes and rustic character to a new level of textured particularity relative to earlier poets, and in the area of nature imagery extends the range and subtlety of his precursors particularly in the areas of regional flora and – rarely noted in Frost criticism – the look and feel of sky and stars. But in order to grasp Frost’s poetics in their New England context, and specifically in relation to the “Fireside” group that comprised the first American poetic canon, it is best to concentrate especially on criteria four and five.

Given that most of Frost’s Brahmin precursors have been ignored for decades by literary scholars and are likely to remain so for the indefinite future, the results may seem surprising. Although virtually none of Frost’s “major” poems could have been written by any of them, virtually everything in Frost’s poetry is anticipated here and there in their work. The fuller significance of that point I shall develop in the final section of this chapter. But first, let us sift the textual evidence.

Like his New England precursors, Frost favors either bound prosodic forms (meter, rhyme, stanza) or blank verse. When he praised Robinson for staying “content with the old-ashioned way to be new” (CPPP, 741) he was both being true to the taste that prompted him to rate Whitman’s poetry below Emerson’s because Whitman could not write good conventional verse, as well as to his own poetic practice.21 One marks that this commitment was a faith in the possibilities of highly formal verse structures like the rondeau (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” [CPPP, 207]), the narrative sequence in stanzas of couplets (“The Tuft of Flowers” [30]) or triplets (“A Star in a Stone-Boat” [162]), and especially the sonnet (“Mowing,” “Design,” “For Once, Then, Something,” and so on [26, 275, 208]), which was a well-established New England genre thanks to Longfellow, Lowell, and Robinson (not to mention Very and Tuckerman).

It might seem a revisionary swerve on Frost’s part that he also tried to some extent to “open up” or “subvert” the sonnet. The burden of “Design,” for instance, is to turn the traditional theme of providential and, by implication, aesthetic design into a question; and “For Once” is an inverted sonnet (6–8, not 8–6), about the failure of a hoped-or epiphany (and by extension the poem itself) to yield a clear vision. But Frost’s “subversions” are nothing compared to his younger contemporary Cummings’ modernist contortions of sonnet form and, more to the point at hand, Frost’s predecessors had been there before him. One common mark of Fireside sonneteering is a diminuendo in the sestet that threatens to unravel what came before, like the “– Though” in Longfellow’s “Mezzo Cammin” when his aspiration to fulfill his dream to build a “tower of song” is chastened by the vision of Death (APNC 1: 382). Emerson’s “Days” (APNC 1: 324) is formally a truncated sonnet, thematically about foreshortened vision. One of Frost’s favorite poems by Robinson, sometimes considered an influence on “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (CPPP, 206) is a sonnet that develops a beautiful tableau of green wheat metamorphosing into “a thousand golden sheaves,” only to pull the plug at the end with an autumnal metaphor – “As if a thousand girls with golden hair/ Might rise from where they slept and go away.”22 Frost’s own sonnet, “The Oven Bird” (CPPP, 116) thematizes this diminuendo tradition and articulates its premise at the close (“what to make of a diminished thing”).

As these examples suggest, the theme of cultural or spiritual “aftermath” was by no means something Frost derived from turn-of-the-entury upcountry ethnography or from the local colorists alone. One of Emily Dickinson’s best critics has identified the aftermath of mysterious trauma as “the crucial” experience in her poetry.23 Aftermath in the sense of lonely senescent decrepitude, which Frost wrote about feelingly in “An Old Man’s Winter Night” for example (CPPP, 105), had also been a favored theme of Robinson before him (Frost particularly admired “Mr. Flood’s Party”) and before that Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “The Last Leaf,” Longfellow’s “My Books,” and in a more reverential mood Whittier’s “To My Old Schoolmaster.”24 Aftermath in the more culturally contexted sense that North of Boston and a number of later poems imagine it – the vision of a regional Yankee culture past its apogee, however admirable for wit, stoicism, and rectitude – had been quite fully unfolded by Whittier, especially in his immensely popular nostalgia piece Snow-Bound, which memorializes farming family life in the preindustrial era across the chasm left by the Civil War (APNC 1: 476). Like Frost, Whittier was also the wistful memorializer of roads not taken (“of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been’” (APNC 1: 462), of lost intellectual vitality (“How has New England’s romance fled”), and of the need to make the best of sparse local cultural resources – as the world sees it, anyhow (“Here swells no perfect man sublime, / Nor woman winged before her time, / But with the faults and follies of the race, / Old home-bred virtues hold their not unhonored place”).25 Like Emerson and Dickinson and like Frost after them, Whittier was repeatedly protesting that despite the harshness of the landscape and the provincialism of the culture compared to Europe and various other dream-places, he loved his piece of earth anyway. In short, a Frost poem like the masterful “Directive” (CPPP, 341–42), which leads its readers back through the ruined landscape of hill country memory in what proves also to be a dream-reinvention of childlike arcadia, is a distillation from a regional imaginary long set in place.

Sonnet and elegiac disposition were by no means the only traditions that tied Frost to the Fireside poets. Another was ballad. “Brown’s Descent” (CPPP, 132), for example, recalls various seriocomic efforts like Whittier’s “Cobbler Keezar’s Vision.”26 In later years, Frost also turned out numerous short sententious epigrammatic wisdom poems like Emerson’s mottoes and epigrams. Emerson’s haunting conclusion to “Brahma” (“But thou, meek lover of the good/ Find me, and turn thy back on heaven,” which Frost said haunted him for many years (APNC 1: 319; CPPP, 815–6), is reprised in Frost’s own “We dance round in a ring and suppose/ But the Secret sits in the middle and knows” (CPPP, 329). Still another shared genre was the short lyric in rhymed symmetrical stanzas on a discrete natural object, in which the meditation proceeds from composition of the image to a moral inference.

The first New England poem Frost is known to have memorized, Bryant’s “To a Waterfowl,” follows that very pattern. The first seven stanzas chart the flight of the waterfowl in a mood of joyous pensive affirmation, then the last points the pious moral (APNC 1: 125): 

He who, from zone to zone, 
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, 
In the long way that I must tread alone 
Will lead my steps aright. 

The genre extends back, of course, to the British romantics and thence to Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan – but then so does much else in traditional New England poetics, of which more in section IV. Longfellow’s “Snow-lakes,” Emerson’s “The Rhodora,” Holmes’ “The Chambered Nautilus,” and Lowell’s “To the Dandelion” are all variations on this same pattern, as is Bryant’s own “To the Fringed Gentian.”27 Within this tradition, Frost innovates to the extent of stressing descriptive texture relative to moral reflection and ambiguating the latter so as to undermine the sense of moral or metaphysical certainty. For instance, by “resolving” the eerie tableau in “Design” of dead fly caught by fat dimpled spider with the question “What but design of darkness to appall?” rather than an assertion; or dissolve the incipient allegory of snowscape as cosmic wasteland that “Desert Places” starts to build into a confession of its status as personal fantasy, that he’s scaring “myself with my own desert places” (CPPP, 275, 269). Yet to distinguish between the Fireside poets and Frost in terms of “traditional closure” vs. “modernist openendedness” is too cut-and-dried. For example, in the “closure” to Bryant’s “To the Fringed Gentian,” which compares this late-blooming native woodflower to the end of human life, an element of modernist dubiety is already evident: “I would that thus,” pleads the speaker, “when I shall see/ The hour of death draw near to me/ Love blossoming within my heart/ May look to heaven as I depart” (APNC 1: 125). He hopes that his life-closure will be as tidily secure as the gentian’s, but he cannot be sure; after all, this was the same poet whose career was launched with the resolutely stoical “Thanatopsis” (122), who later wrote that “Ahaz”-like neopagan tribute to the groves as “God’s first temples” (CPPP, 161, APNC 1: 153). Frost, for his part, when he came to write his own poem about the same flower, on the one hand secularized his pursuit into an almost purely narrative-descriptive affair, but on the other hand ended his quest with a much more cozily reassuring closure (CPPP, 311): 

And I for one 
Said that the fall might come and the whirl of leaves, 
For summer was done. 

Only the tiniest disquiet is residually present here, in the mismatch between the alternating pentameter and dimeter lines. The effect recalls the last of his “Hill-wife” poems, “The Impulse,” where the same meter is used to register the snapping of the bond between husband and wife. This willed asymmetry of lineation, however, is itself anticipated in such Fireside efforts as Whittier’s “Ichabod,” decrying the fall of Daniel Webster (tetrameterdimeter quatrains) and Longfellow’s lament for the untimely death of “Hawthorne,” his work incomplete (pentameter-trimeter).28 One of the traits for which Frost admired Longfellow was his wry modesty; “he took himself with the gentlest twinkle.”29 As evidence Frost cited, among other works, “The Birds of Killingworth,” a poem from The Tales of the Wayside Inn that narrates the story of a Connecticut town that resolved to kill its birds as pests to crops despite the local schoolmaster’s eloquent plea – for “Men have no faith in fine-spun sentiment/ Who put their trust in bullocks and in beeves” – but then suffered a plague of insects, repented, and welcomed the birds back.30 Here and in many other poems – The Courtship of Miles Standish being another – Longfellow loved to set up quietly satiric contrasts between stolid linear-minded practicality and a more complex aesthetic-intellectual sensibility, and to chasten the former by according the latter moral if not literal victory. Frost loved to do the same, most famously in the face-off between the poet and his neighbor in “Mending Wall,” the stolid countryman who cannot “go behind his father’s saying” and therefore does not get the benefit of even hearing the speaker’s playfully anarchic musings, shared with the putatively sympathetic reader alone, about the desirability of dismantling walls (CPPP, 39–40). Frost was similarly drawn to Emerson’s tones of bemused detachment. Indeed, possibly the single most important service these two precursors performed for Frost was to help him figure out the right tone to set as a New England sage: the right balance between satire and sympathy, between the passionate and the cerebral, between explanation and insinuation, as well as the right balance between colloquial and formal utterance. In his comments about poetry, nothing preoccupied Frost more than the necessity of coordinating prose syntax with metrical form. A late epigram encapsulates his leading idea (CPPP, 329): 

The sentencing goes blithely on its way, 
And takes the playfully objected rhyme 
As surely as it keeps the stroke and time 
In having its undeviable say. 

Poetry should read like unaffected prose, but it should also keep “stroke and time” in a way that interanimates both by the concurrent pleasures of how “natural” it feels (“blithely on its way”) and resistance to/ within the grid (“playfully objected rhyme”). Frost could have derived this article of his artistic conscience from any number of the great English or Roman poets,31 but the proof text to which he kept returning was that twenty-two line passage in Emerson’s “Monadnoc” on the vernacular wellsprings of good (regional) poetry.32 

Now in sordid weeds they sleep, 
In dulness now their secret keep; 
Yet, will you learn our ancient speech, 
These the masters who can teach. 
Fourscore or a hundred words 
All their vocal muse affords; 
But they turn them in a fashion 
Past clerks’ or statesmen’s art or passion. 
I can spare the college bell, 
And the learned lecture, well; 
Spare the clergy and libraries, 
Institutes and dictionaries, 
For that hardy English root 
Thrives here, unvalued, underfoot. 
Rude poets of the tavern hearth, 
Squandering your unquoted mirth, 
Which keeps the ground and never soars 
While Jake retorts and Reuben roars; 
Scoff of yeoman strong and stark, 
Goes like bullet to its mark; 
While the solid curse and jeer 
Never balk the waiting ear. 

Judging both from Frost’s reflections on poetry and from his poetic practice, at least four things would have appealed to him about this passage. First, the Wordsworthian commendation of peasant speech as the vital force behind good poetry, and the aesthetic of pithy simplicity underlying it, discommoding both pedants and aesthetes. “I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds,” Frost affirmed in 1913, not to “make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does” (CPPP, 668). Frost wanted to be a “public poet,” much in the way that William Charvat characterizes Longfellow in a wonderfully instructive essay that sheds much light on the craftsmanly ethos of the whole Fireside group and Frost as well.33 It was fitting that Frost became the nation’s first professional poet-pedagogue, pioneering the artist-in-residence idea, and in such a way as to make that post serve as a platform for communicating far beyond the academy’s confines.

Second, however, it was no less important to Frost that “Monadnoc” does not go all the way in the direction of the vernacular: does not itself talk the language of Jake and Reuben, though it begins to suggest the force of such language through the “bullet-like” briskness of the tetrameter couplets with their terse end-stopped lines, folksy contortions of meter (not by chance is “libraries” metrically twisted into doggerel), and pithy monosyllables –“scoffs,” “rude,” “mirth,” “balk,” “stark.” Emerson’s performance both gave Frost a mandate for developing a more grainy vernacular of his own, as he did especially in his dramatic monologues and dialogues, and a model for a more distilled, distanced celebration of vernacularism – which remained Frost’s own primary wavelength as latter-day regional sage, not the dialect poetry James Russell Lowell pioneered in his Biglow Papers.

Third, and similarly, as we have seen already, Frost would have relished “Monadnoc”’s amused detachment from the objects of its commendation, typical of many Emerson poems and the drift of his later prose style from “New England Reformers” on. Unlike Wordsworth’s exalted defense of the speech of humble rustics in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (and unlike Coleridge’s equally solemn refutation of Wordsworth’s doctrine in Biographia Literaria), Emerson can take Jake and Reuben with a twinkle as well as himself, the “schoolman.” 
Fourth, Frost himself was deeply precommitted to fathoming the implications behind Emerson’s notion of “our ancient speech” – for reasons we shall review in the next and final section. 

IV 
Any thinking person at the turn of the twenty-first century who starts to press the connection very far between Frost and traditional New England poetics must confront a host of real or imagined adversaries. Who wants to listen, anyhow? Who cares about Longfellow and Whittier anymore? And as for Emerson and Thoreau, has it not been established that their real poetry was in their prose and that their verse was “klunky” by comparison? And even if we can find a certain amount of really good verse in that traditional New England archive, why bother? Is not the American poetic tradition that really counts a more experimental form-resistant tradition – the Whitmanian tradition, particularly? And among poets who favored more traditional metrics is not Dickinson a far more interesting case of form-resistance than Emerson or Frost? Is it not the case that an examination centered on Frost and the Brahmins leaves us in an anti-modernist cul-de-sac of white male Anglo-Saxon Protestants? Surely, if we want to do right by Frost – and maybe we cannot, because everybody knows that his stock has sunk since the 1970s – what we ought to stress are his quasi-affiliations with the modernists instead: we ought to do our best to establish Frost as an inhabitant, albeit uneasy, of the moment of Pound, H. D., Williams, Stevens, Crane, Cummings, and that laureate of African American urban folklife, Langston Hughes.

Yet there are also cogent reasons for reversing the medal and insisting on the unacknowledged significance of the unfashionable Fireside–Frost continuum instead. For one thing, Frost’s commitment to “the old-fashioned way to be new,” to repeat what he wrote about Robinson, has never really become obsolete despite whatever can be said about the modern salience and “American” distinctiveness of Whitmanian open-form poetics or formbreaking modernist avant-gardism more generally. Not only can we point to a continuation of talented if subgalactic latter-day poets who are self-consciously Frostian, like Robert Francis, Wendell Berry, and Philip Booth, but also to the fact that some of the most significant voices in twentieth-century American poetry have been at least as attracted to bound forms as open forms, even some of those typically arraigned on the other side like T. S. Eliot, who expressed a fastidious skepticism about “free verse” oddly resonant with Frost’s. Elizabeth Bishop, John Crowe Ransom, Sterling Brown, the young Theodore Roethke and the young Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Robert Hayden, William Stafford, and the eventual American W. H. Auden to name just a few. If we change our central criterion for defining that continuum away from matters of prosody to matters of language and tone, to an aesthetic of emotionally guarded expression‎ rendering prose syntax in measured lines within a modulated tonal register ranging from sententious to wryly ironic, a number of these same names again basically fit (Bishop, Wilbur, Stafford, for example) and we can add many others: Marianne Moore, James Wright, John Haines, Simon Ortiz, Rita Dove.

This is, be it noted, by no means an androcentric or an ethnocentric list, notwithstanding the male Yankee homogeneity of the Fireside poets and Frost; and by the same token it shows the risks of trying to correlate “progressive” politics with “progressive” poetics. On the contrary, just as Frost and his Brahmin antecedents favored traditional metrics, retention of prose syntax within those forms, modulated passion, and shareable vocabulary partly that they might be accepted as public poets, so too for more “marginal” voices with more “subversive” agendas, as intimated by Langston Hughes in Montage of a Dream Deferred:34 

Cheap little rhymes 
A cheap little tune 
Are sometimes as dangerous 
As a sliver of the moon. 
A cheap little tune 
To cheap little rhymes 
Can cut a man’s 
Throat sometimes. 

The same aesthetic is no less well adapted for purposes of personal or communal self-defense, as Frost demonstrated at the personal level in his homely totem animal poem “A Drumlin Woodchuck” (CPPP, 257) and Paul Laurence Dunbar demonstrated at the level of cultural assertion in his great poem about the necessary agony of protective deception, “We Wear the Mask.” Nor have the potential uses to which the Fireside aesthetic has been put by non-WASP poets been confined to “the political” in the ordinary senses of the term, as Hughes reveals in the epigrammatic poem he contributed to a late-life poetic gathering in Frost’s honor:35 

God, in His infinite wisdom 
Did not make me very wise – 
So when my actions are stupid 
They hardly take God by surprise. 

Hughes might, of course, have chosen primarily for strategic reasons to depoliticize his rhetoric here, to strike the cosmic rather than the activist note here out of deference to the mainstream sage, to preserve decorum by resort to moral abstraction. Yet it is also the case that Hughes was by disposition a poet who habitually wrote in many different registers including this one and that it is specious in any case to try to disaggregate “moral abstractionism” from “the political” in Fireside aesthetics. Although their work is conventionally believed (and often appears) to want to evade political engagement to the “privatistic” realm of family life, nature, and moral abstractions, virtually all of them (from Bryant down to Frost himself) wrote a goodly number of explicitly political poems and – more directly to the point at hand –they looked, with considerable justice, upon moral abstractionism as a potential form of political intervention, not as a separate sphere. Frost’s “The Black Cottage,” examined in section II above, shows this very clearly: although it has nothing specific to say about the American political process as such it is deeply preoccupied with its key ethical mainspring: the troubled legacy of the Declaration’s “free and equal” clause.

All this is by no means to say that most of the poets listed above were profoundly touched by Frost, much less by Emerson and the Brahmins (although certainly Dunbar was), only that the prism of the Fireside–Frost aesthetic refracts a wider spectrum of poetic possibilities than we are conditioned to think, beginning, among the unshakably canonical poets of the United States, with the oeuvre of Emily Dickinson. 
To stress the Fireside–Frost continuum has the further advantage of reopening the broader issue of what counts as national poetics. Frost wanted no less than Whitman or William Carlos Williams to write in an “American grain” that would be faithful to vernacular idiom and rhythm, but he followed Emerson’s notion in “Monadnoc” that the path to recovery of “our ancient speech” in the hinterlands led not to a dictionary of regional dialect but to the discovery of “that hardy English root” lost in the parlance of “clerks” and “statesmen.” This was more a “classist” than a “culturalist” conception of vital language – or, rather, an “anti-classist” conception, since the vision of an accessible poetic was basic to it – and it led Frost to take a position at first sight paradoxical but on second thought quite self-consistent: “that the colloquial is the root of every good poem” but that “colloquial as I use the word” might extend not only to “the beauty of the high thinking in Emerson’s Uriel and Give All to Love” but “all the lyric in Palgrave’s Treasure for that matter,” like Herrick’s “To Daffodils” (CPPP, 693).

In short, Frost believed, as for the most part did the Fireside group as a whole, in a species of poetic colloquiality which would be locally nuanced, but which would also, and by the same token, take its place in an Anglophonic symposium to which Yeats and Hardy and Robinson, Emerson and Longfellow and Arnold, Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Keats, all rightfully belonged. The assumption of a shared Anglophone poetic (without sacrifice of local particularity) and the goal of a publicly accessible poetic communication (without sacrifice of complexity) were the two most basic coordinates of Frost’s conception of what the historical and social position of poesis should be. This ethos of cosmopolitan localism, or localist cosmopolitanism may not, as doctrine, sound particularly striking or glamorous; but its best poetic results have been admirable, and in a deeply divided but intractably global world it merits a fresh look. 

NOTES 
1 My sincere thanks to my research assistant Ansley Dalbo for her help in preparing this chapter. 
2 Quoted in Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973), p. 75. 
3 References to the traditional New England poets are from American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, ed. John Hollander, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1993) (abbreviated in the text as APNC). 
4 The most extensive critical studies to date are John C. Kemp, Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), which emphasizes Frost’s strategic fabrication of a New England identity and George Monteiro, Robert Frost and The New England Renaissance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), which, to the contrary, stresses inherent affinities of sensibility and practice between Frost and selected New England precursors. More specialized influence and affinity studies are cited below. Also indispensable is Frost biography, especially Lawrance Thompson’s richly documented but contentious trilogy Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938, and (completed by R. H. Winnick) Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 (New York: Holt, 1964, 1970, 1976); William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Both the biographical and critical studies often anchor their claims of Frost’s New Englandism to his rather copious ex cathedra statements, written and oral, about poets and poetry, a good number of which (but by no means all) have been collected in CPPP. 
5 Quoted from letters of 1915 and 1922, respectively, by Eric Carl Link, “Nature’s Extra-Vagrants: Frost and Thoreau in the Main Woods,” Papers on Language and Literature, 33 (1997), 182, which proceeds to stress plausible affinities but judiciously leaves the influence question open. 
6 Quoted from the report of a 1959 conversation in Monteiro, Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, p. 25. See also Elizabeth Wahlquist, “You Don’t Have to Go to Niagara To Write about Water: Robert Frost’s Defense of Emily Dickinson,” Literature and Belief, 10 (1990), 90–102, the notes of her 1959 experiences studying Dickinson with Frost and Stephen Whicher at Bread Loaf School of English. 
7 “The Later Minstrel” (CPPP, 511) wistfully opens: “Remember some departed day,/ When bathed in autumn gold,/ You wished for some sweet song, and signed/For minstrel days of old.” 
8 “Schoolroom,” because together with Emerson and Longfellow they comprised the “first canon” of important American poets as defined by late nineteenth-century critics and publishers in the northern United States; “Fireside,” because they were promoted and accepted as edifying family entertainment. I shall use both terms interchangeably below. In conventional twentieth-century usage the group includes specifically Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Holmes. In this chapter, I blur the border between them and Emerson, whose poetry came to be placed in the same authorial constellation (although justly considered more ruggedly original), as well as Emily Dickinson and E. A. Robinson, who were never considered part of that group but whose own poetry was strongly influenced by it. 
9 Amy Lowell, “North of Boston,” New Republic, February 20, 1915, rpt. Critical Essays on Robert Frost, ed. Philip L. Gerber (Boston: Hall, 1982), p. 22; Perry D. Westbrook, “Robert Frost’s New England,” Frost: Centennial Essays (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1973), pp. 239–55. 
10 Westbrook, “Robert Frost’s New England,” p. 244. 
11 Quotation from Meyers, Robert Frost, p. 172. The fullest study is Robert P. Tristram Coffin, New Poetry and New England: Frost and Robinson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1938); one of the most judicious is Barton Levi St. Armand, “The Power of Sympathy in the Poetry of Robinson and Frost: The ‘Inside’ vs. the ‘Outside’ Narrative,” American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 564–74, which contrasts the two as the cultural insider who tried to wean himself away vs. the cultural outsider who consciously worked his way in. 
12 Kemp, Robert Frost and New England, p. 87, overall a strikingly intelligent demystification of Frost’s New England spokesperson persona (and the public image of such), weakened only by a tendency to take a good thing too far. I follow Kemp’s account at a number of points in this section. 
13 22 April 1894 to Susan Hayes Ward, Literary Editor of The Independent, SL, 20. 
14 According to Wahlquist, “You Don’t Have to Go to Niagara,” p. 94, Frost himself said of this poem that “‘some say [it] has an accent of the lady from Amherst.’” 
15 Quoted in Barry, ed., Robert Frost on Writing, p. 75. 
16 The Fireside poets as a group did not favor blank verse for either lyric monologue (except for Bryant) or dramatic poetry, except when they turned their hands to poetic drama, as in Longfellow’s Christus trilogy, of which Frost is known to have admired portions of Part Two, The Golden Legend. Indeed, they wrote few dramatic monologues or conversation poems at all. As to lyric monologue in blank verse, notable examples include Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” “Forest Hymn,” and “The Prairies” (APNC 1: 122, 153, 162); Emerson’s “Musketaquid” (308), and Lowell’s “Under the Willows” (695). 
17 Anon., “Robert Frost,” from The Literary Spotlight, rpt. Critical Essays on Robert Frost, ed. Gerber, p. 59. 
18 Kemp, Robert Frost and New England, p. 199. 
19 See Gary Snyder, “Reinhabitation,” A Place in Space (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995), pp. 183–91; and John Elder, Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 25–26, a sensitive and searching literary–critical–autobiographical essay about the author’s own construction of regional identity, from Californian to Vermonter, using Frost’s “Directive” (CPPP, 341–42) as one of his chief guides. “Reinhabitation” for Snyder implies especially the principled outsider’s aspiration to “become native” to a place insofar as possible, to approximate the commitment to it integral to the traditional folkways of its aborigines, the first “inhabitors”; but for Elder and a number of other bioregional writers (and for Snyder too) settlers can, in principle, effectively become “natives.” 
20 The Bryant reference is a gently satiric allusion to the opening line of “The Forest Hymn” (APNC 1: 153): “Even to say the groves were God’s first temples/ Comes too near to Ahaz’ sin [pagan tree-worship] for safety” (CPPP, 161) – one of many instances where Frost canon disowns the romantic pantheism to which he is also intermittently attracted. Matthew Arnold, in a much lengthier previous passage, is made to play Bryant’s opposite number: the neurotically anti-nature person (161) (Richard Poirier discusses Frost’s quotations from Arnold in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing [1977; rpt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], pp. 46–48). Earlier, Frost takes a bizarre droll-affectionate-satiric poke at Whittier, remembering how Salem, New Hampshire, used to have “a company we called the White Corpuscles/ Whose duty was at any hour of night/ To rush in sheets and fools’ caps where they smelled/ A think the least bit doubtfully perscented/ And give someone the Skipper Ireson’s Ride” (154–55). Frost could not have failed to realize the ironic discrepancy between the borderline KKK charivari troupe of Salem, New Hampshire, and the Marblehead women’s tarring and feathering of Skipper Ireson (in a ballad whose rollicking meter is meant to jar against its very serious core), who in direct violation of the code of captaincy ethics had fled his sinking vessel and abandoned their loved ones to their deaths. In pretending to praise New Hampshire here, the poem, whether deliberately or not, trivializes Whittier and incriminates New Hampshire – and perhaps itself as well. 
21 Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 111. 
22 Edwin Arlington Robinson, “The Sheaves,” Tilbury Town: Selected Poems, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 119. 
23 David Porter, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 9–24. 
24 Robinson, Tilbury Town, p. 102; Holmes, Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 1; Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Horace Scudder (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), p. 357; Whittier, Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1888), p. 173. 
25 Whittier, Poetical Works, pp. 127, 210. 
26 Ibid., p. 270. 
27 APNC 1: 423, 272, 557, 161; Lowell, Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), p. 83. 
28 APNC 1: 454; Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, p. 289. 
29 SL, 299. 
30 Longfellow, Complete Poetical Works, p. 242. 
31 Or from Longfellow’s “Birds of Killingworth,” for example, where the notorious awkwardness of ottava rima stanza (abababcc) in English, is not flaunted as in Byron’s Don Juan but subsumed to prose rhythm to a remarkable extent. 
32 The Complete Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward W. Emerson, vol. IX (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–4), pp. 66–67. 
33 William Charvat, The Professor of Authorship in America, 1800–1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1968), pp. 106–54. 
34 “Sliver,” Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Knopf, 1994), p. 425. 
35 Collected Poems of Hughes, p. 455.

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"