The Southernness of Robert Frost

Joan Didion once observed that "certain places seem to exist because someone has written about them.… A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." By this standard Robert Frost can clearly lay claim to rural New England. The locale "north of Boston" lives in our collective imagination largely because he wrote about it. For that reason it may seem strange to argue that Frost's sensibility was also shaped by other locations. We know that he was born in San Francisco and spent his first eleven years in California. As a young man he lived in England and published his first book as an expatriate. Above even these places, however, Frost felt a deep affinity for the American South. Not only was he a small a agrarian, but he also maintained important personal and professional ties with two members of the Nashville Agrarian movement—John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson. Moreover his view of the world (particularly the part of it that pertained to politics) put him closer to William Gilmore Simms than to Harriet Beecher Stowe.

When Robert Lee Frost was born on March 26, 1874, his copperhead father named him for the sainted general of the Confederacy. In fact, during the War Between the States, the young Will Frost ran away from his home in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in an effort to enlist with General Lee. Unfortunately for him he made it only as far as Philadelphia before he was apprehended by the police and returned to his angry parents. Robert Frost got his introduction to politics from his father, an ardent Democrat who was chairman of the party committee in San Francisco during Grover Cleveland's successful run for the presidency in 1884. (Young Robbie "recalled 'being carried through the streets … atop a fire engine, by torchlight.'") Although he remained a states'-rights Democrat the balance of his life, the poet would always add that Cleveland was the last president he fully approved of.

In 1918, only three years after the publication of his own first book, A Boy's Will, the publishing firm of Henry Holt asked for Frost's opinion on a collection of poems submitted by a young Tennessean named John Crowe Ransom. (At the time Ransom was in France fighting in World War i.) Frost was immediately taken with "the art … and the tune" of Ransom's verse and recommended that Holt publish his manuscript, "Poems About God." Four years later Frost came to Nashville to lecture at Vanderbilt. By that time, 1922, the Fugitive group had re-formed after the hiatus created by the war. One of the newest members of this group (which would soon be publishing its own magazine) was a sixteen-yearold sophomore named Robert Penn Warren. Years later Warren recalled that "Frost and Ransom admired each other—they were both traditionalists at heart. Frost's poetics—his unconventional use of conventional meters and forms—appealed to us." At a time when modernism was virtually being defined by free verse (what Frost considered the poetic equivalent of "playing tennis without a net"), Frost and the major Fugitives were all writing poetry that was both modern and formal.

Donald Davidson recalls first reading the poetry of Robert Frost "by candlelight in the rather cold, upstairs room of a peasant's house in the Cote d'Or" as he waited to be sent home from France and World War i in the winter of 1918–19. He almost certainly met Frost when the poet read in Nashville in 1922. Then, in the autumn of 1928, when he was in his mid-fifties, Frost gave a reading at a luncheon meeting of the Centennial Club of Nashville. Later that afternoon Davidson attended a tea given in Frost's honor in the wealthy Belle Meade part of Nashville. He remembered the hostess's fixing herself on the floor in front of Frost so that no one else could come near or speak to him across the barrier.

Then...