Notes
☙ 149 Notes Introduction 1. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Francis’s poetry are from Collected Poems, 1936–1976. 1. A Cautious Distance 1. In an essay on Robert Francis published in the New York Times Book Review on March 10, 1985, Richard Gillman quotes James Merrill, who introduced the older poet on the occasion of his being awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship in 1984: “[He] would be a first-rate poet for his unostentatious craftsmanship alone, but the character that informs his work—at once humane and austere, open and retiring—places him on a somewhat less populated pedestal.” Cited in the same essay, Richard Wilbur comments, “In reading Francis, we seldom have a sense that a garrulous someone called ‘I’ is standing between us and selected phenomena, telling us how he feels about them and what they signify. . . . Because the poet effaces himself, because he writes so transparently, his formal felicities—though they have their effect—are not felt as part of the performance.” In a different essay, “Two Poets Named Robert,” a passage from which David Graham quotes (81), and which I also quote later in the book, Donald Hall says that Francis is “invisible” in his poems (121). 2. Gordon Lawson McLennan, who oversaw publication of the manuscript, writes in an afterword to the book that Francis had read the essay to him at his home in 1977, after which he placed it in his hands and said, “It’s yours. Perhaps sometime you will publish it” (44). McLennan adds, “The text printed here is an edited version of Robert’s original manuscript, which was written prior to 1970” (47). 3. Francis moved out of the Hopkinses’ house several years before the house was uprooted “from its foundations, put on rollers and rolled away” so that Amherst College, which owned it, could build a theater on the site. “She must have rejoiced at the prospect of a theater in the neighborhood,” Francis wrote in 150 ❧ Notes to Pages 10–15 Mrs. Hopkins. “Apparently the need to put it precisely where she herself had for so long been put, persuaded her” (33). 4. McLennan sets forth the account of Francis’s acquaintance with Mrs. Hopkins in the book’s afterword. Familiar with Francis for over a year prior to his move into the Hopkinses’ home, she encouraged him to go to the Belchertown State School, an asylum in a nearby town for people afflicted with mental diseases. Based on his experiences, Francis wrote an essay, “Two Days Among the FeebleMinded ,” which she sent “to friends and acquaintances, and to Lewis Mumford, the distinguished editor and cultural historian” (43–44), who commended Francis ’s writing talent to her in a letter dated January 20, 1932. One year later, Mrs. Hopkins introduced Francis to Frost on the evening of January 24, 1933. A description of the circumstances leading up to their meeting appears in his autobiography : “She told me she had an errand somewhere in town and asked me to chauffeur her. We drove to Sunset Avenue and stopped in front of a Victorian sort of house standing well back from the street. Leaving me behind, she went up to the door and disappeared. Within a few moments Robert Frost came out on the porch, peered down at me through the darkness, and beckoned me to come up and in” (201). 5. Just before this scene, Francis tells of “a face-to-face talk” with Mrs. Hopkins during which, as he puts it, “she had told me that my personality had slipped a cog somewhere,” “that I lacked the fear-inspiring element,” and “that I was too inexperienced to write with authority.” Glancing back on this conversation, Francis recalls its effect on his young self: “To be given so much truth about myself in one dose was a little overwhelming” (17). 6. Years before he moved into Fort Juniper, Francis “began learning how to economize ,” according to Richard Gillman’s prefatory remarks to the poet’s journal. His departure from home was, Gillman observes, “helpful preparation for a life that would almost always be lived at a near-subsistence level”; furthermore, the poet recognized “that material possessions were not what he wanted for himself, but rather the power to think, write, read, to walk through woods and meadows when he wanted to—which also meant meeting people only when he chose” (xi). His values were influenced by Thoreau’s Walden, which Francis read so often that, as...
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