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Among the thatched cottages of Dymock, Gloucestershire, Frost found himself more congenial company in a group of poets which included Lascelles Abercrombie, Wilfrid Gibson and Edward Thomas. Thomas, who was soon to be killed in World War I, became his closest friend. In that country of slow streams, red marl and ancient orchards, Frost took his children picnicking, spent days tramping the country looking for flowers. Wilfrid Gibson records long evenings in his cottage, while Frost "kept on and on and on in his slow New England fashion . . . holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips."
There Frost put together North of Boston. In its blank verse, the people of New England spoke and laughed and suffered. There was The Death of the Hired Man, as moving and compassionately humorous a story as there is in the English language ; the agonized Home Burial; the haunting pastoral The Mountain ("I ain't braggin' too hard, but it's as good as I ever do," says Frost); the local big man ("Though a great scholar, he's a democrat,/ If not at heart, at least on principle").
Lover's Quarrel. In 1915, Frost returned to the U.S. broke, to find a U.S. edition of North of Boston just out and himself famous. He celebrated in characteristic fashion: he went to New Hampshire and bought a farm.
Amherst made him a full professor, and Frost began a long lover's quarrel with education. Some consider him the greatest teacher they have ever known. He goaded students to "keep from knowing more than they knew how to think with," tore into such sacred cows as science (". . . we are sick with space./ Its contemplation makes us out as small/ As a brief epidemic of microbes") and Platonism ("The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else's bed").
To the young, who want answers, he posed only questions. There was almost no theory that could not stand revision, he told them. "All truth is dialogue," he insisted. "We were not given eyes or intellect . . . for wisdom that can have no counterwisdom." He has mocked theorizing man as a caged bear who
. . . sits back on his fundamental butt
With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,
(He almost looks religious but he's not), And back and forth he sways from cheek
to cheek,
At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,
At the other agreeing with another
Greek . . .
Laurels & Asteroids. If Robert Frost were just a poet of bucolic New England, he would be neither much noted nor long remembered. Frost is a humanist who has simply used New England for his materials. Like a woodsman, a good mechanic, a stonemason, who learn through their hands, Frost turns & turns his images lovingly. He explores and studies the implications of simple things. His apple-gulping cow becomes a homely image of all rebels. A snowstorm becomes a symbol of all the world's perils, an oven bird a philosopher in a diminished world, a fallen tree the obstacles that all men face.