4 - New Hampshire

Summary

New Hampshire was published in November of 1923, seven years after Frost's previous collection, Mountain Interval. While reaping the benefits of his artistic success in the form of college-level teaching appointments, honorary degrees, and monetary prizes and awards, Frost is also grieving the death of his close friend Edward Thomas in combat during World War I, coping with the mental illness of his sister Jeannie, suffering through his own bouts of poor health, including influenza, and helping his children make the transition to adulthood as they leave for college and choose mates. Yet, somehow, amidst the turmoil of World War I and the complexities of his personal life, Frost absorbs the discoveries and technological advances of an unusually fertile time in science and expresses them artistically almost as quickly as they are happening.

The year 1916 was marked by one of the crowning scientific achievements of the twentieth century—the publication of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which proposed that the property we call gravity is, in fact, the curvature of space by mass. Frost was intrigued by this notion and referred to the curvature of space directly at least once in later writing. Just three years later, experimental evidence for the curvature of space was obtained by the British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, who famously traveled to the island of Principe, off the coast of Africa, to observe light from the Hyades star cluster being bent by the gravitational field of the sun during a total solar eclipse. And, in 1920, Eddington went on to propose that the conversion of hydrogen into helium by the process of nuclear fusion was the source of the sun's energy, a concept that would later appear in Frost's poem “A Never Naught Song.” Frost owned a copy of Eddington's 1928 popular science book, The Nature of the Physical World, which provides a clear and engaging description of the astronomical and physical discoveries of the time.

This collection includes many references to geology, astronomy, and exploration, as well as traditional nature themes relating to plants and animals. The astronomical poems are becoming more theoretical and less observational, incorporating technical references and cosmological musings. In his poem “Fire and Ice,” Frost ponders the fate of the universe, weighing the relative merits of destruction by combustion or freezing; this short poem was reportedly inspired by an encounter between Frost and Harlow Shapley, a preeminent Harvard astronomer.