(3 of 6)
Frost got his grandfather to send him to Harvard. He wanted to read more Latin and Greek, but the irritations of academic "busy work" exasperated him beyond his limited patience—an exasperation which has made his relations with the academic world both stimulating and stormy. He quit after two years. His grandfather bought him a farm in Deny, N.H. and turned him loose. For twelve years, while Elinor bore children,-Frost raised chickens, taught school, battled the grudging soil, fought back encroaching witch grass and sheep laurel. Working long after the children were in bed and the chores done, he slowly wrung out a lean, spare and personal idiom.
The poets who helped form the idiom spoke with classical tongues. He read Theocritus and Vergil, Horace and Catullus. (In any possible hereafter, says Frost, he would like most to dine with Theocritus). Keats and Shelley were uncongenially flowery. He learned the dramatic lyric from Browning, decided that what he wanted was "the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words." He set himself such exercises as:
The cat is in the house.
I will put the cat out.
She will come back.
Then Frost would rewrite the sentences:
There's that cat got in.
Out you go, you cat.
She'll get right back.
The result was a deceptively artless poetry of common speech. But behind the apparent artlessness was a cracker-barrel Socrates with a sense of humor—a pawky humor that was partly serious when it seemed most irreverent, gently mocking when it seemed most grave.
Under Thatch. In 1912, Frost sold the farm and, partly because his wife confessed to a yen to "live under thatch," and partly because living was cheap there, they sailed for England. At 38, he had never talked to another poet.
One night, sitting before the fire in the house they had taken near London, Frost sorted through his poems and arranged some of them into a rough order. He called it A Boy's Will. To his astonishment, the first publisher he tried accepted the book. In literary London, dominated by William Butler Yeats's misty grand manner and Ezra Pound's staccato snatches, Frost's cool voice was a refreshing contrast.
Ezra Pound could recognize an original talent. He tried to take over the newcomer, wined & dined him, tossed him fraternally over his head in a restaurant to demonstrate his prowess at jujitsu, invited him to join the sessions where Pound and other poets like Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle rewrote each other's poetry. Pound tried rewriting a Frost verse, announced triumphantly, "Well, I've got you by four syllables. You did it in 53 and I got it down to 49." Frost never even looked. "I'll bet you've spoiled all my nice little rhymes," he snorted, and fled London.