“Stop me if I am too cheerful; but at the same time, if I can instil the fertile essence of Hope into this happy household, for God’s sake, let me do it.... You had far better—all of you—begin to get yourselves out of your own light, and cease to torment your long-bedevilled heads with the dark doings of bogies that have no real existence.”
As a craftsman Mr. Robinson has won distinction by his simple, direct realism. He employs for the most part the old iambic measures, a sentence structure which is often conversational, and a diction which is severe in its restraint. There are few “purple patches” in his poetry, but there are many clear flashes of incisive phrasing. His work is like a May day in his own seacoast town—not balmy, but bracing, with lots of sparkle on the blue, and the taste of the east wind through it all.
Robert Frost (1875- ) is known as the author of three books of verse: “A Boy’s Will,” 1913, “North of Boston,” 1914, and “Mountain Interval,” 1916. He is known also—and rightly—as the voice and embodiment of rural New England. Yet he was born in San Francisco, his mother was born in Edinburgh, he first came to New England at the age of ten, and he lived for the next eight schoolboy years in a mill town, Lawrence, Massachusetts. Nevertheless, in his capacity for receiving impressions, he seemed to have a selective memory which made him sensitive to the aspects of country life in the regions north of Boston—the regions trod by nine generations of forbears on his father’s side of the family. And so it was that though his first two volumes were published in London, there is no local trace of the old country in them, nothing in them that he had not known in farm or village between 1885 and 1912, when he set sail with his wife and children toward a residence of two and a half years in England. On his return to America he bought a farm in New Hampshire. Since 1916 he has taught in Amherst College.
The common statement that Mr. Frost is content solely to present the appearances of New England life should be given distinct qualifications in two respects: the first is that his earliest book, “A Boy’s Will,” is wholly subjective and analytical, completely falling outside the generalization. And the second is that while “North of Boston” and “Mountain Interval” are objective pictures of New England life, the truth in them is by no means limited to New England, but is pertinent to human kind, although deeply tinged with the hue of that particular district.
“A Boy’s Will,” a little volume, is made up of thirty-two lyrics, each of them complete and most of them lovely. They are not, however, detached, although it is an open question how many readers would see their relationship if this were not indicated in the table of contents. It is the record of a young artist’s experience who marries, withdraws to the country, revels in the isolation of winter, in the coming of spring, and in the farm beauties of summer. This isolation, however, cannot satisfy him long. Let the contents for Part Two show what happens: “‘Revelation’—He resolves to become intelligible, at least to himself, since there is no help else—‘The Trial by Existence’—and to know definitely what he thinks about the soul; ‘In Equal Sacrifice’—about love; ‘The Tuft of Flowers’—about fellowship; ‘Spoils of the Dead’—about death; ‘Pan with Us’—about art (his own); ‘The Demiurge’s Laugh’—about science.” With the five lyrics of Part Three, the youth and his bride return to the world with misgivings:
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,