Frost’s Mission

One does not have to read far into this first volume of what is projected as a four-volume edition of Frost’s extensive correspondence to encounter the personality and character of perhaps the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. In the very first surviving letters, those squirreled away in her pencil box by Sabra Peabody, Frost’s childhood sweetheart, we see him exercising his powers of persuasion in the promotion of his lover’s cause. Retain the notion of “love,” and you can account for most if not all of the striking letters in this collection. For even during those years in which he worked at his marriage, at raising a family, at making a success out of farming and teaching, all the while building a reservoir of poetry destined to speak beautifully to hordes of future readers (but at that moment unpublished) Frost was driven to explain himself, his mission as a poet of the marriage between sound and sense. And thus his urgent, unabated need to persuade, first, his friends of his originality no less than of his importance as a poet and theorist of poetry and, then, editors and reviewers who would be instructed in how to read his poems, understand his poetic mission, and publish his work. As in one of his poems, it may be said that every word in these letters has a purpose. Frost may not have always succeeded in bringing his correspondent to his side, but he never abandoned his always sincere ambition to promote his poetry.

Many of the most fetching letters in this volume have been in print for a goodly number of years, in, for example, Lawrance Thompson’s selection two generations ago or those to Sidney Cox, say, or to Louis Untermeyer. But to see such letters in the context of the others Frost was writing at the time is to see how he was explaining himself and his commitment to poetry every chance that came his way and to whomever he felt it was necessary to bring over to his side. No one has more than one great idea—a shibboleth of my time—and most people have none. But Frost knew he had one, and it involved the sound and sense of poetry, and he wanted to write that poetry. Of course he had as much to say about other poets—his predecessors and his rivals—as he did about politics in the broadest and in the most private senses; but it all developed out of his sense of his own place in the literary sphere. As his letters show, he knew that he had a voice, that his voice must be heard, and that the wise would accept his wisdom and follow him. No one born and bred in northern New England was more of a determined individualist than this California-born freethinking poet.

In his letters there are no transparent answers as to how he came to write such resonating poems time and time again, but there are clues, if one surmises aright, to possible (or partial) answers. As for Frost as a literary letter-writer, I put him up there with my favorites—Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway, and Elizabeth Bishop. In my book, that’s the top.