Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

No less calculating than the posture Frost strikes is the account he related to biographer Lawrance Thompson concerning the poem's composition. As Thompson tells it, Frost had just completed a rough draft of "New Hampshire" at dawn in June 1922. After a short walk outside of his home in Vermont, Frost returned inside, "picked up his pen," began to write a poem, and "seemed to hear the words, as though they were spoken to him, and he wrote them down as best he could, in his fatigue, even though they came so indistinctly at times he was uncertain what he heard" (237). "In a short time," Thompson writes, "and without too much trouble," Frost composed the poem. However, Thompson acknowledges that the poet "was extremely inconsistent in his various accounts of how he wrote 'Stopping By Woods'" (596). Frost often "slipped into the posture of claiming he wrote the entire poem 'with one stroke of the pen,'" an account that friend and fellow poet John Ciardi reported Frost told him "time and again" (597). At other ti mes, Frost discussed "the difficulties confronted in the writing of it," as he had in 1946 when his comments were published in Preface to Poetry. But more often than not, as Thompson points out, "thereafter he repeated his idealized version of the event." Frost's preferred account of the poem's composition has a bearing on Poirier's reading of his poems, for, like the tenacious, willful stance that Frost takes up in them, it implies that he consciously cultivated an "idealized version" of himself, which goes beyond the poems to the fictions he created about how they came into being.

His personal ambition and private grief gave him reasons for cultivating an idealized persona. This image helped shape the public's perception of him as a tough-minded realist, one strikingly at odds with the poet who was insecure about his reputation, and with the troubled man who was emotionally devastated by the calamities that befell his children. Frost's competitive ambition compelled him to guard the reputation he had won for himself when his early books received critical acclaim. In one instance, as Thompson relates, Frost recruited influential publisher Alfred Harcourt to correct what he felt was Ezra Pound's misleading impression in a critique of North of Boston that he had gone to England because "he felt snubbed by American editors" (56). For a man so very conscious of the public eye, "there was," as Donald Hall writes, "room for only one at the top of the steeple" (Ancient 21). Frost's idealized self-image also served as a guise to protect him from falling into the abyss of despair and suicide. W hat with the death of his firstborn child from cholera at age three, the institutionalization of the second oldest of his four daughters, the suicide of his son, and the death of his youngest daughter after childbirth, he knew grief and despair. The darkness and the terror in his poems are real. In Hall's words, Robert Frost lived in terror of madness and suicide....When he wrote the poems that told the terror, and that summoned the intelligence to control the terror, he suffered in the writing. (25)