3 - Robert Frost, Charles Sanders Peirce, and the Necessity of Form

Summary

Ruins

If you believe his own account (which some biographers do more than others), by the time Robert Frost sold the farm bequeathed to him by his grandfather and left Derry, New Hampshire, with his family, he had run the place almost into the ground. His official biographer, Lawrence Thompson, writes that the farm was so “badly neglected” that Frost was “unable to find a buyer who would pay anything like the original price” (148). I imagine it as a ruin: the hen cages broken and abandoned, the barn roof collapsing, pastures overgrown with young trees. It is an often-noted irony that Frost, whose poems frequently celebrate the arduousness and discipline of rural life, was a near-total failure as a farmer, mocked by his neighbors for his laziness and carelessness with money. While it's true that, as Jay Parini points out, this image of Frost as a failed farmer comes largely from Frost's own exaggerated stories about himself, it is also the case that until Frost began teaching at Pinkerton Academy, the family lived entirely on an annuity left by his grandfather, and that as the years passed, the farm was less and less plausible as an economic enterprise (74–75). It is the farm as Frost left it I like to imagine — half-wild, the old stone walls crumbling — and not as it appears on the Robert Frost Farm website: pristine clapboard on a well-kept lawn. Many of Frost's best-known poems, written later, were set on the Derry farm. He abandoned it (first by neglect and later by leaving) only to return again and again in poems, in accordance with his Thoreauvian sense of economy: “strongly spent is synonymous with kept” (Poetry, 401). The abandoned farm was the ground on which he built his poetic, like the phoebes nesting in the barn of the burned house in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” And if domestic order and the discipline of labor is part of this poetic, so too is wildness and disrepair, that which is “burned, dissolved, and broken off” (Complete Poems, 520).

No website invites one to visit Charles Peirce's ruined house, Arisbe, although the Pike County Historical Society notes that the house still stands on route 209 in Milford, Pennsylvania, housing the administrative offices of the National Parks Service.