Word: frosts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ROBERT FROST: THE EARLY YEARS, by Lawrance Thompson. A surprising portrait of the poet as a precious, mixed-up young man who had to work hard to become a serene country sage...
Torn with self-doubts, self-hatred and continual impulses to suicide, Frost set himself adrift before he was 20. He fled Dartmouth before the end of his first semester, spent three years moving from job to job, finding only in poetry "the momentary stay of confusion." He tormented Elinor White, his shy high school sweetheart, with accusations of disloyalty because she wanted to finish college. Eventually she married him, but by that time, as he liked to say, he had "bent her to his will." He put in two years at Harvard, paid for by his grandfather, who then bought...
...Sound of Sense. Incredibly, Frost complained for years afterward that his grandfather had sent him into farming "to die," and then cheated him out of a larger fortune. Thompson suggests that this notion was typical of Frost's self-indulgent "mythmaking," a compulsion to see himself as a hero battling against insuperable odds. This particular fancy gained a wide audience when Frost went to England in 1912 and published two collections of poems. It was Ezra Pound who, in his review of A Boy's Will, launched the poet and the myth by singling out In Neglect...
...Happily, Frost's poetry was finer than his pretenses. Discarding an earlier, florid, neo-Victorian style, he developed a naturalistic technique that he called "the sound of sense," linking the counterpoint of metrical lines with the natural spoken sentences of his friends on the farms of New Hampshire. Because he admired their stoic cheerfulness, he adopted this form of speech himself, dropping the careful diction that his educated parents taught...
...took to wearing unpressed suits and a soft grey shirt and, writes Thompson, "brought his arrogance and grouchiness under at least temporary control. His remarks were usually cheerful, witty, mischievously playful." Thompson concludes this phase of Frost's life with the newly successful poet preparing at 40 to return to America. Frost's ambition now was to find a farm in New England where he could "live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier." He did, and so did his work...