12. Once by The Pacific / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Once by The Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.

Great waves looked over others coming in,

And thought of doing something to the shore

That water never did to land before.

The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,

Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.

You could not tell, and yet it looked as if

The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,

The cliff in being backed by continent;

It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean-water broken

Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

• din : 소음
• lock : 늘어뜨린 머리채
• gleam : 희미하게 반짝이는

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어느 날 태평양 가에서

산산이 부서진 물이 희미한 소음을 냈다.

큰 파도들이 들어오는 다른 파도들을 굽어보며,

물이 육지에 저질렀던 전례가 없는

어떤 것을 해안에 저지를 궁리를 했다.

하늘의 구름은 낮게 머리를 산발한 것이,

머리채를 이글거리는 두 눈 앞으로 흩날린 것 같다.

단언할 수 없으되, 해안은 절벽의 뒷받침을 받고,

또 절벽은 대륙의 뒷받침을 받는 것이

정말 행운인 것 같았다.

하지만 음험한 의도의 밤이 오는 것 같았다.

하루 밤이 아니라, 한 시대가 그러는 것 같았다.

누군가 격랑에 대비하는 것이 좋겠다.

바닷물 이상의 것이 깨져버리고 마침내

불을 꺼라!’는 신의 마지막 말씀이 있을 것이다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 이 시는 1차 대전 전인 1880년쯤에 쓰였다. 일촉즉발의 전쟁 위기 앞에서, 폭풍우가 몰아치는 태평양은 이를 바라보는 이에게 곧 닥쳐올 문명의 위기를 상징하기에 충분하다.

지리적 재난을 위협하는 태평양의 격랑은 화자의 의식에 인간의 죄에 대한 신의 심판의 징조로 투영된다. “음험한 의도의 밤이 오는 것 같았다”는 화자의 공상적 비전이 “하루 밤”에서 “한 시대”로 확장되면서 단순한 지리적 변화에서 역사적 변화 즉 또 다른 어두운 시대의 도래를 경고한다.

그러나 격랑에 대비해야 할 모두(everyone)대신에 “누군가(someone)”로, 깨져버릴 모든 것(everything)대신 “바닷물 이상의 것”으로 완화하여 표현함으로써 “빛이 생겨라”(“Let there be light.”『창세기』1:3)는 하느님의 말씀을 번복한 이 시의 결론의 의미도 완화시키고 있다.

신이 불을 끄심은 노여움의 복수라기보다 보고 싶지 않은 것을 외면하기 위해 잠시 불을 끄시는 슬픈 사랑임을 감지할 수 있다. 자연의 사실들은 정신적 또는 도덕적 원칙을 담고 있는 호수 같은 것이다. 그 호수의 밑바닥을 투시할 수 있는 눈을 가진 자는 자연의 사실과 개인적 또는 사회적 일상과의 관계에서 미래에 대한 어떤 비전을 볼 수 있다.

-신재실 씀-

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youtu.be/Bsdj2kpXytc

youtu.be/1foklNjMaus

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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

“Synonymous with Kept”: Frost and Economics - GUY ROTELLA

We live in an age of epistemes as decals: depthless, portable, easy to peel and carry off. Or so we think. Robert Frost did not. But his epistemes were not firmly anchored either. Here is an example. Frost rejects the gentility and aesthetic dandyism of his immediate predecessors (William Vaughn Moody, say, or Oscar Wilde). They, politely or with disdain, luxuriated in art’s imposed or elected exemption from the commerce-based estimates of the Gilded Age. They rejected their culture’s exaltation of values associated with industrial manufacture and market capitalism, technology and business – the values of utility and commodity –as ultimate standards of worth. Frost shared their doubt that commercial viability and usefulness alone could properly eval‎uate all things, but he differed from both genteel and art-for-art’s-sake assumptions in taking it for granted that his culture’s dominant values were real ones, with their own legitimate, if partial, claims on literature and life. Thus Frost’s “realism” of subject matter and treatment, his culturally derived or driven recasting of supposedly feminine poetry as a form of manly prowess and competition, and his “commercial” insistence on “the trial by market everything [including poems] must come to” (CPPP, 845) seem to exist at a chill, even polar remove from Wilde’s heated, anti-utilitarian faith that life imitates art. But the complications twist, then turn. Frost’s passionate preference for Jamesian “wishful” thinking, his insistence that knowledge is metaphorical, his subtle but persistent intertextuality, his unmooring of meaning from fixity, and his pleasure in parodic appropriation all have a Wilde, postmodern savor. At the same time, in a century of suspicious writing and reading, Frost’s multiple subversions seem somehow “reassuring.”1 It might be put like this: extremes in Frost’s work, such as the near (if only apparent) Social Darwinist, businesslike dismissal of feeling in “‘Out, Out –’,” on the one hand, and the genteel sparing of beauty from the fiscal pragmatics of haying in “The Tuft of Flowers,” on the other, have their meanings only in relation.

Such unresolvable intricacies – the sort exemplified by the rich mixture ofconformity and rebellion in Frost’s expansively economical economic remark that “Strongly spent is synonymous with kept” –account for an emphasis that unites the diverse accents of the best Frost criticism of the past twenty years. A review of that criticism can prepare for a consideration of some of Frost’s intricate attitudes toward things economic. Richard Poirier, Katherine Kearns, and Mark Richardson stress poetry, gender, and prose poetics, respectively, in their work, but they all represent Frost as writing and thinking in terms of binary oppositions which he treats neither as mutually exclusive options nor as the poles of an ironically balanced whole. Instead, Frost treats contraries as relational parties in ever shifting arrangements behind and across borders that link what they separate. Moreover, while Frost treats oppositions as relational and unstable, he also provides a reassuring sense of stability achieved (however momentarily), and he additionally indicates that stability itself is provisional in its turn, neither enforced nor enforceable, local and situational, not global.

The now ubiquitous terms “constructivist” and “essentialist” do not appear in Richard Poirier’s Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), but they condense an important aspect of his argument there. Poirier is seismographically sensitive to Frost’s shaking up of stability, his poetry’s alertness to the slippage between sign and signified, to the arbitrariness of language and thought and of literary and cultural structures. But Poirier also marks where Frost stops short of a fully constructivist view. Some nineteenth-century writers, many modernists, and most postmodernists conceive of received religious beliefs, social and political systems, and economic and literary practices as more or less arbitrary human constructions handed down from the past. For them, it usually follows that those constructions (including language, which they see as creating or constraining rather than conveying reality) are inappropriate to contemporary needs and conditions and thus responsible for many cultural woes, especially when their conventions are made systematic and taken to be natural and inevitable. At the same time, precisely because those outworn and culpable practices are conceived of as constructed rather than natural, they are considered amenable to subversion and change, perhaps to progressive subversion and change.

Frost’s formative years were in the nineteenth century, and his work has both modern and postmodern attributes. However subversive he was in ways associated with anti-representational and constructivist explanations, Frost trusted language (despite, even because of its being slippery or opaque; we might say he made a linguistic half-turn). And Frost distrusted progressive models, refused to blame contingent social arrangements for fundamental human griefs (although grievances were another matter), and was apt to see certain of his inheritances as natural and unchangeable, perhaps in partbecause what Poirier calls “his near-mystical acceptance of responsibility for himself” would have been disabled by a fully constructivist position. When Frost’s sometimes essentialist view expands to include not only loss and death as permanent and inevitable (there, even a strict constructivist might agree) but also such matters as poverty, war, and inequality, Poirier marks him down as an essentialist who “talks as if history not only partakes of nature but is identical with it.”2 Yet Frost thinks even the inevitable might be – must be – resisted. And whatever recent and contemporary views may stress, the proportions of the essential and the culturally constructed in our condition are as resistant to exact measurement as the mixture of nature and nurture in our selves. As Poirier says, what he judges to be Frost’s “limitations of historical vision” are also “the necessary conditions of an ennobling achievement,”3 an achievement that shows Frost both as “constructively” subverting essentialist thinking and as subject to such thinking. To put it in other terms, Frost could say and mean both this: “When the meaning goes out of anything, as happens, forms crumble” (CPPP, 756), and this: “When in doubt there is always form for us to go on with” (CPPP, 740), and a good deal in between.

Katherine Kearns’ examination of Frost and gender in Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite (1994) reflects similar complications. She argues that Frost’s poetics is aroused by a paradox: the human desire for rational behavior is housed in bodies (the human body and the world’s) that refuse rational control. Frost erects a “sexualized metaphorical structure” upon that paradox. Within that binary structure, whatever in the self and world is erotically attractive yet likely to lead to formless exhaustion is projected on a “female” other that includes women, nature, poetry, and language, while whatever in the self and world resists attraction and exhaustion is figured as male. Kearns demonstrates that Frost operates within the terms of this conventionally essentialist sexist projection, but she also shows that he does so while remaining thoroughly doubtful about the meaning and value of all of its constituent, apparently hierarchical parts: man and woman, prose and poetry, silence and speech, order and wildness, reason and appetite –ambivalent in ways that subvert essentialism as well as confirm‎ it. Thus Frost’s use of irony, his treatment of women characters, the role of eros in his work, his thinking about poetic form, and his embrace and spurning of lyric all involve a relational multiplicity which prevails over any system. For all its appearance of rational, manly candor, Frost’s poetry nonetheless shares the dangerous, transformative powers he fearfully identifies as female. Even his defenses are invitations; he insists on polyvalent interpretations and undercuts meaning to keep the reader at bay and draw the reader in.

Mark Richardson’s The Ordeal of Robert Frost (1997) restores Frost’s prose poetics to their place within the literary and cultural debates of his day (in places following leads set out in Poirier’s work and in Frank Lentricchia’s Modernist Quartet). Matters of gender also figure in those debates, and, again, Frost’s negotiations of opposed pairs are shown to be irresolvably intricate and remarkably shaded. The general feminization of culture in latenineteenth and early twentieth-century America exempted poetry, along with religion, children, and women, from the arenas of competition, aggression, and acquisitiveness that concerned it most. Whether it meant to demean and exclude or to idealize and protect, the dominant culture tended to group the poetic, the spiritual, the innocent, and the female together at the culture’s margins, thus rendering them all effectively irrelevant to a public center focused on business and manufacture. Male poets born in the Gilded Age and reaching maturity at the turn of the twentieth century confronted a context in which a business-dominated society judged their chosen work not to be worthwhile work at all, and certainly not manly work. Responses were often extreme. Genteel poets welcomed their exclusion from masculine business culture, for instance. They made irrelevance a virtue and saw their refined, elevating poems as a refuge from the “crude,” “lowering” materialism around them. Others, Ezra Pound is an example, “manfully” rebelled, reasserting poetry’s virile, socially central place and offering modernist experiments as correctives both to the culture-destroying values of business (beauty “Decreed in the marketplace”) and to the supposedly effeminate squeamishness about reality of genteel verse (“emotional slither”).

Frost’s position is more delicate than Pound’s and more vigorous than the genteel poets’. More nuanced, it is obedient and rebellious at once, as Richardson shows. Frost both resisted his society’s feminization of the poet’s work and honored its privileging of commercial competition and conventionally manly virtues when he praised the marketplace, likened the poet’s words to battle-cries and military or business ultimatums, and compared the poet’s craft to the male athlete’s physical prowess. But he also idealized poetry, exempted it from the rules of the marketplace, and considered it feminine. To some readers, such flexible maneuvers signal spiritual drift or a manipulative, self-serving trimming of sails to current conditions. But manipulations, those endless adjustments, maintain a craft’s motion. Richardson suggests that Frost’s seeming inconsistencies, here and elsewhere, derive from his locating within individuals those opposites which individuals are usually thought to select from, so that the Apollonian or Dionysian choice the genteel poets or Pound could make, Frost could not, or would not – did not, in any case.

Meanwhile, for all his emphasis on multiplicity, provisional maneuver, inconsistency, and subtle gradation, Frost also affirms an essential duplicityunderlying whatever cultural construction obtains in this or that time or place. In some sense this duplicity is permanent, but any actual manifestation of it in the momentary realizations of lives, works, and cultural arrangements involves duplicity’s components in ever shifting relations. One set of Frost’s names for those components is “conformity” and “formity”; another is “alien entanglements” and individual “will.” Essentialist and constructivist views might be yet another. As Richardson puts it, in literary terms, the convergence of opposed “disciplines” from without (nature and culture) and within (the individual self) is Frost’s . . . “constant symbol of the poet’s struggle to socialize his art in an audience and in the literary marketplace and yet preserve its singular integrity and temper.”4 More generally, the engagement of the individual poet’s will with received poetic and linguistic forms to see what can be changed and what persists is, in Frost’s poems, a type or metaphor of the endless engagement of individual human wills with life and with the received religious, political, and social forms built from and upon it in order to see what in them is conventional, culturally constructed, and amenable to experiment and reconstrual, and what, if anything, is essential and ineluctable. Although they may not please either thoroughgoing essentialists or constructivists, including those who see the self as not at all constructed or as wholly so, such engagements – including “momentary stays” –are irresolvably relational for Frost. They characterize the treatment of economic matters in his life and work, matters which are themselves present there not in isolation but enmeshed with other experiences, subjects, and themes.

Horatio Alger’s final book appeared in 1900; it is called Out for Business, or Robert Frost’s Strange Career.5 The poet Robert Frost was twenty-six then, and he probably had little call to distinguish himself from Alger’s hero, since any observable progress from rags to riches by pluck and luck on his part was well in the offing. The first half of Frost’s long life, his “strange career,” was marked more by economic decline than improvement; conversely, though, the second half was marked by considerable public acclaim and relative financial success. Perhaps it is not surprising that Frost’s attitude toward his economic circumstances –as toward so many other things: inherited poetic forms, for instance – mixes obedient acceptance of those circumstances (seeing them as not only given but natural) with elements of rebellion, critique, and subversion that resist his circumstances and call their “naturalness” into question.

Frost’s grandfather had risen from farmer to mill foreman and overseer; his son, Frost’s father, graduated from Harvard before marrying a fellow teacher and moving to San Francisco to make a sometimes precarious living in newspaper writing and politics. When, after a series of career disappointments and increasingly unbalanced behavior, his father died of tuberculosis in 1885, Frost was eleven. By the time his mother had paid the funeral expenses and sold the furniture from the family’s rented rooms, they had $8. 00, and Frost’s paternal grandparents were required to send the fare to bring Frost’s mother, himself, his younger sister, and his father’s body “home” to Massachusetts. The Frost family’s version of the classic American journey West for freedom, fame, and profit had failed, and Frost’s association of death and displacement with the collapse of his father’s hopes for preferment and economic advancement by way of party politics may have contributed to his lifelong distrust of systematic solutions – especially political solutions –to social and economic woes. In the meantime, young Frost had also heard about alternatives or adjustments to capitalism. For almost nine years his father worked for Henry George’s Daily Evening Post. George in those days was writing and promoting Progress and Poverty (1879), his socialist manifesto; Frost’s parents were friendly with George (who went out of his way to visit the widow and her children after their move to Massachusetts), and they were sympathetic to his promotion of free enterprise without private monopolies, a kind of economic freedom within restraint Frost might have liked.

The Frost family’s declining fortunes were especially precipitous for Frost’s mother. Orphaned in Scotland, she was raised in the Ohio home of her uncle, a prosperous, socially prominent banker. Having in some eyes married beneath her, now widowed and poor, alone with two children, her dour in-laws somewhat grudging of financial help, and herself proud against charity, she struggled to make ends meet by teaching school. The work was physically demanding (maintaining discipline was beyond her, a fact that cost her several positions), but it was also work in keeping with her genteel sense of propriety and status. Mrs. Frost’s wages were low, and the family lived in a series of cheap rented rooms in Lawrence and Methuen and in Salem, New Hampshire. Soon, Frost was taking odd jobs to help with family finances. In the period between 1886 and his graduation from high school in 1892, Frost worked for brief periods in a shoe factory and a back yard leather-cutting operation, at cutting hay, as a handyman at a seaside resort, as a farmhand, and as bobbin-boy at one woolen mill and a gatekeeper at another. If he enjoyed the varied people he encountered and the new skills he was learning, he often quit his jobs in boredom or frustration. Then and later, his times of regular employment were punctuated by periods of illness and idleness which some characterized as evasive, shiftless, or lazy. The family’s persistent, sometimes desperate need for money, Frost’s memory of his father’s financial efforts and failures, his mother’s gentility (including her intense admiration of poetry and books), his own temperamental rejection of his paternal grandparents’ real or perceived tendency to equate humanvalue with property and economic position (a rejection that also partially internalized the values it meant to put aside), and a passionate preference for the leisure to read and write, all combined to make Frost deeply ambivalent about work and worth.

As we will see, in poetry, Frost’s conflicting feelings and ideas about those (as other) duplicitous matters could meet and be expressed. They would not be resolved. Although such a sentence as “Strongly spent is synonymous with kept” promises resolution, seeming to unify idler and worker, spender and saver in an activity so intense (say, making love, or poems) that mere economic laws are suspended, it also reasserts those laws in just the divergent oppositional terms (“spent,” “kept”) the epigram intends (or pretends) to overcome. As Richardson puts it, resolution or transcendence “constitutes . . . an enduring concern” for Frost, but he “finally entertains this transcendence only as a kind of unrealizable ideal.”6

To return to Frost’s life, after his aborted term at Dartmouth, little changed. A number of minor teaching and tutoring jobs alternated with periods of unemployment and job-seeking, a brief turn at newspaper writing, an even briefer stint promoting an elocutionist’s recitations of Shakespeare, and work as a lamp trimmer in one more woolen mill. There, Frost had the experience of being locked out and having his pay docked for turning up late; he responded by simply walking away from his job. That event gave rise to “The Lone Striker,” a poem typical of Frost’s mixed attitudes toward economic matters: he protests against the petty rigidities of capitalism and its punishment of those who can least afford it, but he makes his “social” protest a private matter. Enacted by a capable agent rather than a victim, that protest is a rebellion of avoidance or evasion rather than confrontation, a rebellion that leaves the system that prompted it more or less comfortably intact.

For most of his life, Frost would live on the margins of middle-class versions of career, respectability, and success (and dress the part): he never took a college degree, he changed jobs and houses often and irregularly, he lived by his wits, and until he was well past sixty his finances were nearly always strained. This was an implicit critique of capitalist economics and an active refusal of its rules and values. Yet Frost also admired – and was apt to see as inevitable – an economic system seemingly based on what he considered “natural” competition and struggle, one that rewarded performance and prowess. His own prowess enabled him to make his living at the system’s edges, in its nooks and crannies, without suffering its harsher alienations and without surrendering the free time he wanted and needed to do his own supposedly useless creative work. Later in life, when that work had given him reputation and employment, he would sometimes recast his past in laissezfaire terms, implying that his own meritocratic rise from obscurity andpoverty proved that the system works, a position that kept his own achievement on view to be admired by keeping the economic circumstance of his victory in place and its rules in play. Those attitudes were also partly determined by the capitalist–communist agon that dominated US economic and political discussion and action from the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, when Frost was in his early forties, until his death during the Cold War (although Frost could praise Marx for seeing through an old metaphor and installing a new one, he deeply distrusted collectivism of any stripe). Frost’s notorious dislike of the New Deal is related to those matters, too, as it is also related to “his near-mystical acceptance of responsibility for himself,” to quote Poirier again, and to his Judeo-Christian and psychological (and capitalist) emphasis on the inevitability and necessity of a final judgment, based on merit and “works,” and exercised by an ultimate authority, whether construed as God, his absent father, long-term literary reputation, or the free market’s final judgment of winners and losers, saved and damned. In Frost’s view, too much economic determinism or too much financial assistance would render both individual performance and final judgment nugatory or moot and would empty life and work of meaning.

To come back once more to chronology, Frost’s most extended employment in the years after he left Dartmouth was teaching in his mother’s school, which he continued to do until 1897, when, borrowing tuition money from his grandfather (he later won a scholarship for the excellence of his work), Frost entered Harvard as a special student, hoping to qualify as a high school teacher of Greek and Latin. In the interval, he had married, and he and Elinor had had their first child. Frost’s financial responsibilities had grown; now he wanted to improve his ability to meet them without wholly giving up his hope to have leisure to write, although “leisure” is hardly the word.

Near the end of his second Harvard year, himself ailing, and worried about Elinor’s second pregnancy and his mother’s illness and increasing need for help with her teaching, Frost resigned from the college and returned to Lawrence. Advised by his doctor to engage in outdoor work (there was fear he had tuberculosis), Frost decided to become a farm-poultryman, raising chickens for eggs and meat. Perhaps this felt like a reversion to the position from which his grandfather had risen, as his failure to graduate from Harvard might have seemed a falling off from his father’s attainment. Frost rented a house and barn in Methuen, borrowing money from his grandfather in a formal business arrangement (an interest rate was determined and promissory notes were drawn). Soon, the Frosts’ second child was born, and poultry farming was successful enough (and sufficiently troublesome, too: the Methuen landlady complained about slow payment of rent and of chickens invading her kitchen) that his grandfather bought a Derry, New Hampshire, farm, where the business could expand. Frost’s grandfather held the deed and provided a handyman. On his own but greatly dependent, Frost felt these economic arrangements as both a help and a hindrance; for years he had difficulty sorting out his mixed feelings of gratitude, shame, and resentment, and he retained a lifelong ambivalence toward his grandfather’s conventional ideas about the virtues of labor, success, and financial stability, as he also did toward matters of personal achievement and outside assistance.

Shortly before the move to Derry, the Frosts’ first child, Elliott, died of cholera infantum, and Frost and Elinor suffered and somehow endured the desolating marital strains suggested in “Home Burial.” Shortly after the move, his mother died in a sanatorium. Frost’s grief was sometimes suicidal, but he survived, and then, in 1901, his grandfather died. The will of William Prescott Frost, Sr. granted Frost “free use and occupancy” of the Derry farm for the first ten years after his grandfather’s death; then the farm would belong to him. In addition, Frost would receive $500 annually during those first ten years and $800 a year thereafter. This was generous, of course, but also sternly pragmatic; it may have seemed grudging: the will’s language insisted that Frost’s ten-year free occupancy was “subject however to the duties imposed by law upon life tenants as to taxes, insurance, and repairs.” Perhaps Frost’s grandfather, although in the long run he was wrong in hardheadedly dismissing his grandson’s ability to make a living as a poet, had good reason to impose some safeguards on his sometimes wayward heir. In any event, during the Derry years, Frost’s farming was desultory, he was sometimes spendthrift, was often in debt, once borrowed a considerable sum he never repaid, and frequently harried the executor for advances on his annuity. He was also writing splendid poems, although with nearly no success in placing them (five poems were taken in the twelve years from 1895 to 1906), and he tried to make money by writing prose (Frost sold eleven short pieces on the economics – and extra-economic pleasures – of keeping chickens, at ten dollars each – the pieces, not the chickens). By 1906, Frost’s financial difficulties caused him to seek regular employment, and he took a teaching job at Pinkerton Academy, where he stayed until 1911 (the family left the farm in 1909). In 1911, his classroom methods having garnered attention, Frost was recruited to teach at the Plymouth Normal School. That same year, and as soon as he legally could, Frost sold the by then twice-mortgaged Derry farm, probably for less than his grandfather had paid for it, although in later years, by some inventive accounting, he idealized the sale as a financial coup.7

The Derry years had been a time of loss and recuperation, failure and success, dependence and independence. Frost’s work as a farmer had been unremunerative, but it had allowed him the freedom to write, and he had been able to find conventional employment when he needed it, and of a kind in which his imaginative performance won him praise and increased his selfconfidence. He had been both improvident and resourceful. Now in his late thirties, he had a large family, a stable position with prospects, and a considerable sheaf of fine if mostly unpublished poems. He was close to achieving the sort of respectability and financial status his grandfather could have admired, and with at least some room in his life for writing. But teaching increasingly threatened to reduce that room to nothing, or to exhaust him to the point where he could not use what room he had. Frost’s well-known response was to resign from teaching and leave for England, where he had no prospects whatever. In the period just before departure, he had begun to have greater success in selling his poems to magazines, but the famous events of the British publication of A Boy’s Will and North of Boston by Nutt were nonetheless startling. When the Frosts returned to the US in 1915, he was almost overnight a well-known poet, able to use his grandfather’s annuity (which continued to be paid until 1923) to buy a New Hampshire farm, and ready – at the late age of just over forty – to set out on that combination of writing, teaching, and “barding around” that defined the rest of his life.

Frost’s timing was good, and lucky. Although he was nearly broke when he returned from England, interest in poetry in America was suddenly strong: magazines and publishers wanted his poems. Public readings were popular, and colleges were about to experiment with hiring artists-in-residence. Frost, overcoming timidity and demonstrating skills of self-promotion, was gradually able to cobble together a living from activities related to his poetry – readings and talks and teaching brought in far more than royalties or magazine payments – while keeping the poetry itself largely free of commercial pressures: he would not write to order or force his rate of production. On the other hand, his cobbled living was just that, and rarely stable. For many years, Frost’s teaching positions were temporary and uncertain and his schedule of readings and talks a burden on his writing time, his family, and his health. Several of his children remained dependent on him throughout his life, adding to his financial responsibilities. Although the Depression barely harmed his earnings, and he left a considerable estate at his death in 1963 (with the bulk of its value his manuscripts, his Cambridge house, and the Miami and Ripton, Vermont, prefab and log cabins), he never had significant savings or investments. His homes were spartan and his style of living abstemious. He was open-handedly generous with his children and with certain of his friends, but he could also drive hard bargains, as with his publisher and the colleges who vied for his presence. In any case, even the narrowly economic events of Frost’s nearly fifty remaining years are toomany and too complex for summary here. My concern has been to suggest some of the biographical sources and contexts of Frost’s mixed attitudes toward the economic circumstances in which he found himself. Now I want to discuss a few representative examples of how those mixed attitudes of resistance and acceptance appear in his work.

In the years after court patronage and before the National Endowment for the Arts and university creative writing programs, a major economic issue for most poets was the basic one of how to earn a living. Among Frost’s contemporaries, T. S. Eliot worked in banking and publishing, Marianne Moore was an editor and a librarian, H. D. received financial support from Bryher, and Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams had careers in insurance law and medicine, respectively. In his twenties and thirties, Frost used a combination of farming, teaching, and his grandfather’s liberating and burdensome financial assistance to free enough time from remunerative labor to permit him to do the poet’s work. Then, from mid-life on, he got his living from activities connected with writing. Book royalties and magazine appearances brought in some money, but most of Frost’s later income came from teaching and from readings and talks, as he exchanged public display of an increasingly honed platform persona for salaries, honoraria, and fees. But well before Frost worked out his successful accommodation with economic necessity, considerations of economic and other vocational conflicts appear in his work, usually quite indirectly and, to say it again, enmeshed with other experiences, subjects, and themes. The early poem “In Neglect” can serve as an example. 
The poem’s title implies a social position, and “In Neglect” is a condensed social comedy; it lightly mocks both policing adult authorities (the parental “they” who expect the young to prove productive in the world of work) and the idle young lovers who evade those expectations (“we”). In the process, and by treating contraries as relational rather than as mutually exclusive or as amenable to synthesis or resolution, the poem conceives a society whose rules and limits (some of them economic) are both more roomy and more ineluctably real than either profit-demanding adults or work-avoiding young lovers presume them to be. 

They leave us so to the way we took, 
As two in whom they were proved mistaken, 
That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook, 
With mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look, 
And try if we cannot feel forsaken. 
(CPPP, 25) 

The poem has a biographical context. Family elders on both sides doubted the wisdom of Frost’s marriage to Elinor White. Although this promising pair had been co-valedictorians of their high school class, Frost was without prospects; he had dropped out of college and wanted to be a poet, work without pay. He could not expect to meet the masculine responsibilities of keeping a wife and children. No doubt parental disapproval felt to the young couple like neglect or punishment (a shaming), and the poem like revolution or revenge. “In Neglect” does make love’s and poetry’s case against the dully reasonable demand that Frost get a job and make a living. Ignored by others, the lovers luxuriate in being left to their own devices. They devise a bower of bliss, a sexually charged “nook” where their idle and erotic waywardness makes itself Edenically at home in a place without economics where they can try on roles more various than those society would fix them in. Their disruptive extravagance is a carnival and carnal celebration. It playfully subverts the workaday certitudes of categorical logic (“proved mistaken”) and the disappointed adult values the quoted phrase implies, including the practical American expectation that scholarly successes would lead to social and financial ones.

But if its carnival strain disdains and avoids the “responsible” worlds of money and work, “In Neglect” has a chastening counter-strain as well, just as the luxuries and lecheries of carnival signal a farewell to flesh and precede a term of laborious self-denial. For all their energy and seraphic grace, the angelic young lovers are also coy, even stuffy, as if in posturing – playing, theatrically, to an audience (note the italicized “try”) – they have already begun to fall toward the “socialized” adult economies they believe they are exempt from. More important in terms of Frost’s characteristic inclusiveness in such matters, the neglected lovers are themselves guilty of neglecting the permissive role their “neglectful” elders have played in actually granting to them – by seeming to neglect them – the safe trysting and trying place they imagine they have created for themselves. This, too, has economic resonance. If the terms “proved mistaken” and “neglect” reflect Frost’s sense that his grandfather’s strings-attached financial aid was both too intrusively helpful and not nearly helpful enough, the exposure of the young lovers’ complicitous mix of innocence and knowing manipulation reveals both gratitude and guilt.

To put it in other ways, the poet who writes the poem knows more than does the aspiring poet in it. If familial, social, and financial limits constrict, they also urge stretching; what some lovers, parents, and poets consider as opposed –individuals and society, youth and age, freedom and limitation, lovers and parents, poetic play and unpoetic work, love and money – this poem presents in relation. More generally still, “In Neglect” suggests that, for its own safety, society needs the experienced knowledge that lovers are mistaken when they trust they need not work, will never be forsaken, andcan live on love (without money). It equally suggests that, for its very life, society also needs the imaginative, disruptive urge of lovers to resist such labored wisdom. The mixture is inherently unstable, a personal economy that is both resistant to and snug within the wider economy it evades and inhabits. There is something healthy in this paradoxically rebellious acquiescence to societal givens; there is a risk of compromised smugness in it, too, for it takes and holds a position from which no meaningful rebellion against more threatening entrenched oppressions could possibly be mounted.

John Dewey argued that societies derive their particular ways of knowing from the means of production predominant in them, their economies; Dewey called this “occupational psychosis.”8 Psychotic or not, societies – and poets –often borrow economic language to make and examine metaphors of value. Frost was no exception: consider these lines on a once-proud mercantile city now in ruins, “Not even the ingenuities of debt/ Could save it from its losses being met” (CPPP, 363). So much for deficit spending as a permanent means of possession. Frost, who said “All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it” (CPPP, 723), frequently uses capitalist figures of ownership both tightly to tie and slackly to loosen connections between possession and self-possession. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for instance, the relation between the speaker’s uneasiness that he might be caught trespassing, on the one hand, and his poised, Thoreauvian sense that he has extra-economic rights to be where he is, on the other, is a small version of the poem’s broader meditation on the positive and negative aspects of both obedient and rebellious individual responses to conventional economies of social responsibility or public promise-keeping.

The lighter poem “Trespass” treats similar matters from the owner’s point of view (when an interloper stops to ask a property holder for water he makes both trespassing and ownership bearable by restoring the owner’s property rights without requiring the owner to enforce them), while in “The Gift Outright” the historical politics of national possession are constructed almost entirely from possessive pronouns and apostrophes denoting ownership, recalling Frost’s later notion that “All there is is belonging and belongings” (CPPP, 800). Frost’s frequent play with the equation and mismatch of possession and self-possession is central in the early poem “Storm Fear,” which may convey some of Frost’s anxiety about his dependence on his grandfather’s financial assistance. During a snowstorm so powerful it erases landmarks and cuts the farm off not only from town but also from some of those parts of itself that communicate and nourish (“Dooryard and road ungraded,/ Till even the comforting barn grows far away”), the speaker says, “my heart owns a doubt/ Whether’tis in us to arise with day/ And save ourselves unaided” (CPPP, 19). The verb “owns” admits to possible weakness, as in “owns up,” but it also asserts firm ownership of even the most desolate feelings, a claim that joins with sterner terms of measurement, attention, and inscription (“count,” “mark”) to reassert the speaker’s own self-possessed and self-reliant survivor’s poise, or pose.

Similar patterns appear in the much later “Desert Places,” with an altered emphasis. There, a loss of self-possession (“I am too absent-spirited to count”) involves ownership by others: “The woods around it have it –it is theirs.” But the speaker, frightened (and not) by astronomers’ “empty spaces between stars,” reasserts ownership when he says, “I have it in me so much nearer home/ To scare myself with my own desert places” (CPPP, 269). Of course, the claim to possess an internal or other local emptiness large or intense enough to compete with interstellar vacancy carries its own threats to self-possession. Such intricate economies are also at work in “Home Burial,” where Frost uses the husband’s and wife’s relentless employment of singular possessive pronouns to indicate each one’s self-absorbed failure to empathize with the other’s language for grief, forms of self-possession so disastrously complete that they self-destructively alienate all others.

One result of Frost’s partial attachments to local color writing and to realism and naturalism is that the characters in his dramatic and narrative poems are quite firmly placed socially and economically. In those poems, competing ideas about such economic matters as the obligation to charity, the meaning and value of work, and the relationships of labor to gender play important roles. Not surprisingly, considerations of the extent of public and private responsibilities to assist the indigent and unemployed are treated most prominently in Frost’s A Further Range, his one book of the 1930s, the decade of the Great Depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal. But perhaps because the political and economic pressures they seek to address were too near or too great for the cool distance Frost’s best and warmest work requires (as Simon Schama wrote in another context, “a dispassionate eye is the condition of a compassionate intelligence”), the serious political poems there, say, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” and “A Roadside Stand,” seem smug or sentimental. Lighter or comic treatments, “Not Quite Social,” “Provide, Provide,” are more successful. But it may be that all these overtly political and economic poems – and especially the economics-drenched so-called “political pastoral” “Build Soil” – say more about Frost’s vocational choices, his compromising evasion of both capitalism’s rules and consequences, than they do about broader economics or ethics. They often seem besieged and defensive, as if Frost were protecting a narrowed version of the facts and conditions of his own having found both a refuge and a goad in poverty and then proved himself in victory over it. As early as 1920, he was a little glibly (but self-critically, too) praising poverty as “a kind of institution of refuge”(CPPP, 698). In any event, there is more conviction about the opposed but intertwined claims of social obligation and private contentment in the early “Love and a Question” than in the more overtly economic poems of A Further Range. In my view, Frost’s negotiations with economics are more effective when more concrete and less direct, when economics is not, in a narrow sense, the subject.

Work is an issue in many of Frost’s dramatic and narrative poems. In “The Death of the Hired Man,” it merges with concerns about charity and social obligation, understood in familial and local terms rather than state or national ones. Fiscal language is prominent at the poem’s outset and its conclusion: these phrases cluster near the start: “the market things,” “‘a little pay,’” “‘I can’t afford to pay/ Any fixed wages,’” and “‘pocket money,’” and these near the close: “‘Silas has better claim on us you think/ Than on his brother?,’” “‘His brother’s rich,/ A somebody – director in the bank’,” “‘need,’” and “‘Worthless though he is’” (CPPP, 40–41, 44). Mary, having in the course of the poem subtly prepared Warren to modify his initial reasonable and practical economic resentments of the unreliable and irresponsible Silas, herself assumes and sums up Warren’s judgments by calling Silas “worthless” at just the moment when she knows that Warren has been prepared to defend him in extra-economic terms of worth: his artist’s skill in building a load of hay, his standing up for the practical values of the community he and Mary and Warren share against the college-educated Harold Wilson’s schooled rejection of dowsing and his art-for art’s sake claim that “He studied Latin like the violin/Because he liked it” (CPPP, 42), and his (Silas’) turning to them rather than to his brother out of a combination of pride and affection that exceeds merely “legitimate” obligations. But if the poem’s movingly instructive modulation from abstract economic justice toward fellow feeling and mercy protects Warren, it cannot save Silas: “‘Warren?’ she questioned. /‘Dead,’ was all he answered” (CPPP, 45). Frost’s poem shows the virtues and limits of a range of justice-based or merciful economic attitudes and systems which are themselves as relational as family and community arrangements; it also shows that beneath or behind those attitudes, systems, and arrangements are griefs upon which they have no purchase.

Similar intricacies are involved in “Blueberries,” which considers rights of “property” and the varied proprieties of hoarding and sharing; in “The Code,” which explores the relational claims of ownership and labor, worker and boss; and in “The Self-Seeker,” which examines the power and weakness of money to recompense for losses past repayment. These poems are all from North of Boston, and their treatment of economic among other intricacies differs in kind and quality from those in A Further Range; Frost wasright to fear the poem thought through in advance or written to reach a foregone conclusion.

Several Frost poems concern the connections between gender and economies of work. In “The Hill Wife,” too little work deranges a woman; in “A Servant to Servants,” too much work does the same, although the woman of the first poem may escape, and the woman of the second compensates for being put upon and exhausted by male demands and privileged presumptions with her own inventive power, as do others of Frost’s female characters, the witch of Coos, for instance. In one of the earliest of Frost’s dramatic monologues, “The Housekeeper,” all the economic themes I have been discussing come together: matters of vocation, competing valences of ownership and self-possession, the relative claims of charity and independence, the worth and value of work, and the relation between labor and gender. “The Housekeeper” (CPPP, 82–89) is based on a “true” story, that of John Hall, an acquaintance of Frost in the years when he was raising chickens in Derry. Hall was an expert poultryman, but he kept his birds more for pleasure than for profit, preferring expensive “fancy” breeds he could show to win blue ribbons over prolific layers of eggs he could sell for cash. Hall lived a casual life with his “housekeeper” – actually his common-law wife – and her mother. When Hall’s housekeeper left him to marry another man, Frost suspected that the rage and grief Hall felt may have caused his death.

Frost’s poetic version of Hall’s experience emphasizes Frost’s own concerns in the Derry years, especially his uncertainty about how best to combine socially approved commitments to family, farming, and financial success with his less acceptable preference for poetry, a version of Hall’s “weakness” for prize-winning fowl. Autobiography stalks biography here; like the poem’s character, John, Frost was a “‘bad farmer’” “‘brought up by his mother’” and did not “‘make much.’” And “The Housekeeper” presents conflicting economic, social, and aesthetic values related to Frost’s own situation. Hall’s passionate preference for show birds over other niceties (keeping up appearances or profits) may flout conventions harmlessly, even healthily. His enthusiasm converts Estelle and her mother, creating a family bond more intense and intimate than a sanctioned public marriage might. At the same time, though, his preference masks ineptitude and thoughtlessness. Still worse, selfish inattention prevents him from recognizing Estelle’s real need for more conventional marital and household arrangements. That unmet need causes family and farm to “smash.” Meanwhile, Estelle’s desire for a “proper” marriage may be driven more by personal pique than social commitment. However that may be, in spiting John she spites herself and abets destruction, including a real threat to her “unmovable” mother.

From a slightly different angle, the hint that Estelle is pregnant lends added force to her decision to marry, especially since she inhabits a society intensely concerned with regulating economies of sexuality and reproduction. Competing claims define the poem’s other pair as well: the visitor speaks for well-intentioned but meddling outside social intervention; the mother, for stoic or desperate resignation in the face of troubles surpassing solution. The resonance of these matters with details of Frost’s life and with his mixed views about economies of independence and dependence will be apparent.

Matters of gender in “The Housekeeper” may reflect Frost’s unease about the propriety and economic viability of poetry as a man’s vocation, anxieties connected to the casting of poetry as effeminate and useless by his mercantile era. John has an artist’s care for his materials, but there is something “unmanly” about him, surrounded as he is by hens “‘having their plumage done.’” Estelle and her mother fill and hold the purse; he is an impotent hoer. The delicate but suggestive sexualized language of those details, like the question “‘What will satisfy her?’,” implies a lack of virility in a man who cannot keep accounts or house or “wife.” At the same time, such views may be merely social conventions, especially if pregnancy by John prompts Estelle to marry someone else by way of keeping up appearances. In either case, Frost both invokes and questions essentialist views of gender. John’s “unmanly” gentleness is risky but also beguiling: “‘he’s kinder than the run of men’”; “‘He’s fond of nice things.’” And Estelle’s “unwomanly” energy and initiative prove to be both dangerous and creative: her decisive action breaks old bonds and forges new ones; it may also abandon her mother and kill the man she loves. Similarly, Estelle’s mother’s forcefully poetic speech is attractive and gripping but impotent to alter what it comprehends. To use the term again, Frost does not choose between or resolve the poem’s competing economic and other positions but presents them in ever-shifting relation. He had considered calling “The Housekeeper” “Slack Ties,” a title recalling his saying a poem should be easy in its harness. Frost may have thought a similar economics works in human lives. This poem’s “slackly” unresolved perspectives suggest “easier” forms of life than chafing social bonds permit; its harnessed containments imply that without some ties things smash.

Examples of poems in which Frost’s relational treatment of opposed views of economic matters play major or minor roles could easily be multiplied, but I want to conclude with brief discussions of two additional areas in which economic ideas, attitudes, and language appear in Frost’s thinking. The first is very general, the second more specific. In a brilliant series of books, Marc Shell has demonstrated the connections between “the money form” and the crisis of representation in philosophy, literature, and art.9 He argues that the crisis was initiated in ancient times when stamped coinageopened a gap between the intrinsic or natural values of things (a coin’s metal) and their nominal or symbolic value (a coin’s inscription, denomination, and “backing”). This crisis might be said to underlie all Western philosophical and aesthetic debates about mind and matter, about knowing as discovery or imposition, about being as authentic or invented, about systems as essential or constructed, and about art as true or fraudulent feigning. It has intensified in stages, first as money’s symbolic value increasingly diverged from its metal value, then as intrinsically valueless paper backed by reserves of gold or silver replaced actual coins, then again as paper backed by the more abstract full faith and credit of a government replaced gold or silver certificates, and yet again as money grew –and grows – increasingly disembodied and electronic.

Frost did not live to see this most recent intensification of the mind–matter problem, any more than his somewhat postmodern distrust of representation comprehends the extreme expansions of media simulacra and imagebased brand-name and celebrity consumer capitalism in the years since his death (although in his own small way he did participate in media and celebrity culture: consider his managing of editors and book reviewers, his making a name for himself through theatrical performances, his canny sales of autographed and rare editions, and his appearances on Meet the Press and at the Kennedy inauguration). But if electronic money was beyond Frost’s ken, he would have understood it. He witnessed the shift from the gold standard to Keynesian deficit spending; more important, debates about money as substance or substanceless sign were a critical issue of American political life during Frost’s formative years. The well-known Thomas Nast cartoon in which an “inflated” doll is offered a cash-like slip of paper bearing the words “This is milk by act of Con[gress]”10 appeared two years after Frost’s birth, and trompe l’oeil paintings of paper money by William Harnett, John Haberle, Ferdinand Danton, Jr., and Victor Dubreuil, done in the 1870s, 80s, and 90s, joined Nast cartoons in jokily raising serious questions about paper money’s dissolution of materiality in ideation and about the related artificialities of money and art.

Frost was twenty-two when Bryan delivered his “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic national convention and he made his own jokey economic reference to Bryan in an uncollected poem: “There was a young man from Vermont,/ Who voted for Bryan and Want” (CPPP, 504). He wrote a semi-comic poem “On the Inflation of the Currency, 1919,” in which “The pain of seeing ten cents turned to five” is felt as someone “cutting us in two alive” (CPPP, 535). In distinguishing between incurable griefs and curable grievances in his “Introduction to Robinson’s King Jasper” Frost compares being asked to give up patience in the face of grief to being required to surrender gold (CPPP, 743). And his poetry, prose, and talks are saturated with economic language and metaphors. I loosely gather all of this to make the point that Frost’s philosophical and aesthetic doubts about perception, conception, and representation in such poems as “Hyla Brook” and “For Once, Then, Something,” to mention just two of many, are powerfully connected to the money debates of his own cultural moment, debates which were as much philosophical and aesthetic as they were economic. Those debates were part of and partly responsible for still larger cultural crises of faith and confidence continuous with our own, crises visible in the nineteenth-century, modern, and postmodern fear of and fascination with counterfeiting, copies, fakes, and confidence tricks, and with self-referential art. Frost participated, as, for instance, in “The Mountain,” “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books,” and the “Preface to Memoirs of the Notorious Stephen Burroughs.” Frost was deeply knowing about art’s counterfeit, but as to that, as about so many other things, he was also pragmatic, which is part of why his deeply disturbing relational poems are also reassuring. If language is apt to be more opaque than transparent, it might be rendered translucent, made more or less to represent; if money confuses real with symbolic values, and is subject, like us, to waves of inflation and deflation, it can still be kept or spent.

To close, I return to the lovely, impossible epigram I have echoed: “Strongly spent is synonymous with kept.” Narrowly taken, the sentence recalls Frost’s sometimes attractive or defensive calculations: his being “instinctively thorough” about his “crevice and burrow” (CPPP, 257); his saying, “Do you know, I think that a book ought to sell. Nothing is quite honest that is not commercial. Mind you I don’t put it that everything commercial is honest”(SL, 8–9); his writing, when just over forty, that he knew at twenty a writer is exhausted – spent – at thirty and “took measures accordingly . . . I have myself all in a strong box where I can unfold as a personality at discretion . . . Great effect of strength and mastery!” (SL, 29–30) or his stating his preference for a success that butters parsnips over the kind that’s “caviare to the crowd” (CPPP, 667–68). Broadly taken, the epigram reflects Frost’s magnanimity: his saying “What a man will put into effect at any cost of time money or lives is what is sacred and what counts” (CPPP, 683); his writing “Belief is better than anything else and it is best when rapt above paying its respects to anybody’s doubts whatsoever” (CPPP, 702); his asking “For what have we wings if not to seek friends at an elevation?” (CPPP, 782); his calling the god of the “great issues” a god of “magnificent waste” (CPPP, 868); and his preference for “extravagance” over everything else. Parsimony and extravagance, practical economics and spiritual risk appear together in Frost’s down-to-earth remarks on E. A. Robinson’s fiscallycharged phrase, “‘There are no millers any more.’” It is an edict Frost thinks has the widest application. 

It is a sinister jest at the expense of all investors of life or capital. The market shifts and leaves them with a car-barn full of dead trolley cars. At twenty I commit myself to a life of religion. Now, if religion should go out of fashion in twenty-five years, there would I be, forty-five years old, unfitted for anything else and too old to learn anything else. It seems immoral to have to bet on such high things as lives of art, business, or the church. But in effect, we have no alternative. 
(CPPP, 746–47) 

When the stoic, elegaic mood of the Robinson piece shifts slightly, this circumstance –Frost’s duplicitous sense of the human condition – sends up “superfluity” (CPPP, 702), “the wonder of unexpected supply” (CPPP, 777), the “great, great, great expense – everybody trying to make [the universe] mean something more than it is” (CPPP, 903), and the elating thrill of “risking spirit in substantiation” (CPPP, 446). So it is that cautious keeping and vigorous spending oppose and intersect in the economies of Frost’s essentially constructivist relational poetry and poetics, where “enthusiasm tamed by metaphor” is crossed by and crosses “the breathless swing . . . between subject matter and form,” where when something’s held back, it’s “held back for pressure.” 

NOTES 
1 Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 4–11. 
2 Ibid., p. 233. 
3 Ibid., p. 238. 
4 Mark Richardson, The Ordeal of Robert Frost (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 2. 
5 Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), p. 59. 
6 Richardson, Ordeal, p. 10. 
7 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1974–1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), pp. 367–68, 573–75. 
8 Richardson, Ordeal, p. 23. 
9 Marc Shell, Art and Money (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 
10 Ibid., p. 77.

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"