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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Chicken-farmer, shoe-worker, bobbin-boy, messenger, teacher, journalist, leather-worker, poet, student, cultural ambassador, berry-picker, lecturer. Such a list does not even exhaust Robert Frost's occupations, let alone his ambitions. In fact, when he writes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” that
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight
it is tempting to see here a sly joke at his own expense. For Frost had so many vocations and avocations that they are well-nigh impossible to combine in any clear-sighted unity. “No poet in this century has written more poems involving more different kinds of work than Frost,” writes William H. Pritchard, before going on to list some of the jobs which Frost found and abandoned between 1885 and 1892. Even the many jobs he did do were insufficient to content him. “I should have been an archaeologist,” he wrote to A. J. Armstrong in 1943 and though Frost as an extremely successful poet might allow himself that ironic wistfulness, he was not being merely whimsical. If some of his family were drawn into the darker sides of his poetry, then they also enacted a few of his brighter dreams. Welcoming Willard E. Fraser as a new son-in-law in 1932, Frost proposes not one but four desired careers.
1 Pritchard, William H., Frost, A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 36Google Scholar.
2 Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Thompson, Lawrance (London: Jonathan Cape, 1965), p. 514Google Scholar. Further references to this book will be found in the text under the abbreviation, SL.
3 Evans, William R., Robert Frost and Sidney Cox, Forty Years of Friendship (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1981), p. 258Google Scholar. Further references to this book will be found in the text under the abbreviation, Cox.
4 Kemp, John C., Robert Frost and New Enland, The Poet as Regionalist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 97Google Scholar. Further references to this book in the text will be found under the abbreviation, Kemp.
5 Thompson, Lawrance, Robert Frost, The Early Years 1874–1915 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 37–38Google Scholar. Further references to this book will be found in the text under the abbreviation, EY.
6 Newdick's Season of Frost: An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost, ed. Sutton, William A. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976), p. 23Google Scholar. Further references to this book will be found in the text under the abbreviation, Newdick.
7 Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. Lathem, Edward Connery (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), p. 165Google Scholar. Further references to this book will be found in the text under the abbreviation, Interviews.
8 See Crane, Joan St. C., Robert Frost, A Descriptive Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia (London: Dawson, 1974), p. 61Google Scholar.
9 Frost, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” reprinted (from U.S. editions of the Complete Poems) in Scully, James, ed., Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (London: Collins, 1966), p. 57Google Scholar; cp. EY, p. 55.
10 Though the two men disagreed on many points, it is interesting to compare this with Eliot's stress on “auditory imagination,” The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (1933; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 118Google Scholar.
11 A good idea of the nature of Mrs. Frost's story can be got from extracts reprinted in EY, pp. 493–96.
12 Interestingly, the narrator of the poem perceives what the neighbour says to be “his father's saying.” The neighbour never tells us this.
13 MacDonald, George, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1858), p. 13Google Scholar.
14 MacDonald, George, At The Back of the North Wind (London: Strahan and Co., 1871), p. 345Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., pp. 349–50.
16 Phantastes, ed. Cit., p. 275.
17 Poirier, Richard, Robert Frost, The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 303–13Google Scholar.
18 At The Back of The North Wind, ed. cit., p. 373.
19 Ibid., p. 237.
20 “He [Frost] cut a strip about two inches wide down to the scalp from Richardson's forehead over the top of his head and down the back to the nape of the neck. He then cut a corresponding strip from one ear up over the head and down to the other ear. About this time Richardson [a fellow student] realized that something was wrong…” (Newdick, p. 35).