“I kept farm, so to speak for nearly ten years,” Robert Frost wrote to a friend. “I can see now that I went away to save myself and fix myself before I measured my strength against all creation.” The poet was born on this day in 1874.
When Robert Frost, in his 1930 address “Education by Poetry,” spoke about the importance of being “at home in the metaphor,” he seemed to suggest how infrequently he had felt at home anywhere else.
Because Frost is so mercurial, many people feel they have a claim upon him. Heads of Frost, in bronze or stone, are standard clutter for town libraries and English-department common rooms . A man named Mitchel Potter was arrested in 2012 for stealing a bust of Frost from Wichita State twenty-five years earlier, after, he said, he’d done “a lot of beer bongs.” Some local teen-agers in Middlebury, Vermont, broke into the Ripton farm a few winters ago, and partied and urinated on the floors.
There was an element of conscious metaphorical shaping to everything Frost did. He couldn’t choose just any swamp as his slough of despond: “dismal,” a word he might have encountered in “Paradise Lost,” had the right to-hell-and-back feel about it. Frost would “always go to farming” knowing, he said, that he would “always make a failure of it.” So he would have to teach; but teaching kept him from writing. Then it was back to farming, which pleased him, likely because he neglected so much of it.
Stealing pigs from the stockyards in San Francisco. Learn to whistle at five. Abandon senatorial ambitions to come to New York but settle in New Hampshire by mistake on account of the high rents in both places. Invention of cotton gin. Supersedes potato whiskey on the market. A bobbin boy in the mills of Lawrence. Nailing shanks. Preadamite honors. Rose Marie. La Gioconda. Astrolabe. Novum Organum. David Harum. Cosmogony versus Cosmography. Visit General Electric Company, Synecdoche, N.Y.
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