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4 Robert Frost A Lone Striker In the late 1920s, Robert Frost’s poetic status—like his poetry itself— differed significantly from that of the other three poets considered in this book. Where Stevens and Cummings were admired by a small circle of avant-garde critics, and Williams could scarcely even boast that recognition , Frost had achieved widespread popular and critical acclaim beginning with his return to America in 1915 and climbing steadily into the 1920s. His first two books, A Boy’sWill (1913) and North of Boston (1914), published in England,received excellent reviews and sold well in the States, such that when he returned to America he found himself a success,praised by Amy Lowell in The New Republic and eagerly courted by the prominent literati of New York and Boston. His next book, Mountain Interval (1916),was equally successful—indeed,many of Frost’s best-loved poems came from North of Boston and Mountain Interval. Invitations to lecture poured in, and he accepted the first of many college teaching positions, at Amherst College, that same year. Frost had waited a long time for this recognition—he was forty-one in 1915—and had struggled so much financially that in desperation he had taken his family to England in 1912, hoping for a better response there. But when success did arrive, he never wanted for money or critical praise thereafter.In fact,he became that rarest of poets,one who could support his family by his poetry,supplemented by readings, lectures, and cushy professorial and “poet in residence” appointments . Frost’s appeal, unlike that of the other three poets of this study, derived from lyrics that were easy to read and superficially more conventional in using regular rhyme and meter—he followed “the old way to be new,”as he put it in 1935.1 But sophisticated critics quickly recognized the depth, subtlety, and ambiguity in his best poems, a thematic complexity akin to the radically different styles of Eliot, Stevens, and the other modernists . Critical honors were not long in coming:his 1924 New Hampshire received the Pulitzer Prize (the first of four Pulitzers his poetry would receive over his career). Robert Frost 115 Toward the end of the twenties, however, this delirious decade of success seemed to be waning. A trip to England and Europe in 1928 had not gone well; health problems, both physical and mental, began to plague Frost’s large family, and he himself fought against periodic bouts of depression . But the most disturbing development for Frost was that his next book of poems,West-Running Brook (1928),received several tepid reviews and a few negative ones. The critics who complained said essentially the same thing that was later said about Cummings’s ViVa and Stevens’s Harmonium in 1931: that the poet did not seem to be developing. In Frost’s case,this yardstick of growth and change was,as Jay Parini observes,quite inappropriate, since his poems often were written many years earlier and then held back:2 “Frost is not a poet who developed in any obvious ways from book to book, as didYeats or Eliot or Stevens. Instead, he grew by accretion. His peculiar method of hoarding poems (going back to them, often decades later,to revise) only adds to the difficulty of discerning ‘development .’ In a sense, Frost achieved his vision early, and he restates, recreates ,refigures this original vision in book after book.There are no great leaps forward, only deepenings, confirmations, and subtle extensions.”3 Nonetheless, while most critics praised the book, some lavishly, Parini notes that “the suggestion had been put forward that he was an escapist, a poet out of touch with his times” (267). A critic reviewing for Booklist wrote: “Mr. Frost is, unlike so many modern poets, undisturbed by the encroachments of a hard, unyielding machine civilization upon his New England quietude.”4 Granville Hicks, writing for the Springfield Union Republican, praised Frost’s “tough-minded” skepticism but complains that Frost “has created the ordered world in which he lives only by the exclusion of many, many chaotic elements in the real world. Perhaps it is this fact that explains why Frost is, even at his best, a very perfect minor poet, not the major poet for whom America is looking.”5 Other reviews were also mixed. Frederick Pierce wrote in the Yale Review: “Our admiration is for the sincerity and delicate insight with which the...

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