Five by Frost
Written by Todd Giles, Ph.D.
My goal with this new essay series I am writing in support of Moffett’s Special Collections is to share some impressions as an amateur book hound by bringing various texts together into conversation. In short, Editions & Impressions is about whatever piques my interest while perusing the shelves of Special Collections. Hopefully, your interests will be piqued as well, inviting us to both take a deeper dive into what Moffett has to offer. Collections aren’t just about amassing things, after all. They’re about preservation, sure; but more importantly, they’re also about providing us with food for thought.
Among the thousands of rare books, manuscripts, newspapers, photographs, recordings, and other archival materials housed in Moffett Library’s Special Collections are five slim volumes of poetry by Robert Frost dating from between 1915 and 1945. While these certainly are not the rarest nor most valuable works in the collection, it is likely that for many folks Robert Frost’s name is synonymous with poetry. In many ways, Frost is America’s poet. You’d be hard-pressed, for example, to find anyone unfamiliar with “The Road Not Taken” or “Fire and Ice” from their high school days. Perhaps you even had to begrudgingly memorize and recite one of Frost’s poems as a student.
I. A Boy's Will (1913/1915)
A Boy’s Will, Frost’s first commercially published book, was originally produced in London by David Nutt in 1913. The first American edition, which we see here, was published by Henry Holt and Company in New York in 1915 on the heels of the first book published by Frost in America (that is, his second book), North of Boston in 1914. The first American edition of A Boy’s Will was printed in an edition of 750 copies. Though this particular volume lacks its original dust jacket, it is a first printing, which is indicated by a misprint on page 14 of the word “And” as “Aind.” The error was corrected in subsequent editions. The first American edition was published in a blue linen cloth binding with the title gilt-stamped on the front cover, accompanied by a small acorn ornament.
The book is dedicated to Frost’s wife, Elinor, who helped him cull through and organize the poems for publication. The couple moved to London in 1912 to help jumpstart Frost’s career as an aspiring poet. London wasn’t so much about finding new material for poetic inspiration as it was about finding a publisher and trying to live the life of a poet, something Frost had been unable to do in his rural New England. After all, American poet Ezra Pound had moved to England in 1908. T. S. Eliot followed suit in 1912. America could certainly produce poets, but getting published by and read in their own backyard was a different ballgame.
The book, which is divided into three numbered sections, takes its title from a line in Longfellow’s 1855 poem, “My Lost Youth”: “A boy’s will is the wind’s will / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” It is a fitting title considering the slim collection of thirty-two poems was written over the preceding two decades of the poet’s life. “My Lost Youth” indeed; Frost was already thirty-nine when his first book was published. The poems were arranged in what Frost conceived of as the narrative progression of a youth moving from solitude toward fellowship with others. That is, the poems were not organized chronologically as written but were rather sewn together thematically. In an attempt to make the narrative structure more obvious to readers, Frost wrote brief glosses following the titles of all but two of the poems in the table of contents. These glosses were removed in subsequent printings.
The poems in A Boy’s Will shed light on what would become some of Frost’s standard themes throughout his career—nature, individuality, rural life, solitude, work, and so forth. Unlike his Modernist contemporaries such as William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein who embraced the radical experimentation of their age, Frost’s work casts a backward glance at traditional poetic forms, including the use of rhyme and meter, two things the Modernists eschewed with a vengeance. Two stand-out poems in the collection include “Mowing” and “The Tuft of Flowers.” The former is a sonnet; you couldn’t get any more traditional than that, especially in the early part of the 20th century. That said, E. E. Cummings wrote some sonnets too, but he was stretching them out, playing with the form, whereas the language in Frost’s first volume was still largely stuck in the 19th century.
II. New Hampshire (1923)
The next Frost volume in Special Collections is his fourth book of poems, 1923’s New Hampshire. With this volume, and the preceding North of Boston (1914) and Mountain Interval (1916), Frost had already established his place in the literary canon ten times over. North of Boston included such classics as “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Death of the Hired Man.” Mountain Interval added these great poems to the canon: “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” and “The Oven Bird.” New Hampshire brought us “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “Two Witches,” and “The Ax-Helve,” to name but a few.
As with A Boy’s Will, Moffett’s copy New Hampshire is one of the 5300 first American edition copies published by Henry Holt and Company in 1923. There was also a signed limited edition of 350 copies. New Hampshire was printed again three months later. It is the largest single volume of Frost’s poetry, aside from his collected and selected editions. The book, which includes four woodcuts by J.J. Lankes produced specifically for the volume, is bound in a dark green-grey linen cloth, has tan-mottled endpapers, and is printed on rough white paper. Moffett’s copy lacks the original dustjacket. The collection’s full title is New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes.
This is an odd collection of poems—odd especially for Frost the traditionalist. Even so, it earned him his first Pulitzer Prize for poetry. To put the book in context (and conversation with) some of the other American poetry published at the same time, the highly experimental Spring and All by Williams and Tulips and Chimneys by Cummings came out the same year. And the previous year saw the publication of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Stein’s Geography and Plays. The early 1920s were an incredibly fertile time for literature and the visual arts. Williams’ Spring and All was largely a reaction against The Waste Land; indeed, Willaims claimed that Eliot set modern poetry back fifty years due to the poem’s stuffy content and style. It seems that the grandaddy of 20th-century American verse had a go at The Waste Land as well with his own version of experimentation in New Hampshire. Well, it was less about experimentation for experimentation’s sake than it was a matter of calling out Eliot’s (and his new friend Ezra Pound’s) academic pretense.
So, what’s unusual about New Hampshire? A couple of things. To begin with, there’s that odd, lengthy title: New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes. The “Poem,” the book’s namesake (“New Hampshire”), is by far the longest poem penned by Frost at 413 lines. The “Notes” section of the book, according to William Pritchard, “contains more fanciful, indeed fantastic, poems than Frost had hitherto written” (159). These blank verse narrative poems include the classics “Maple,” “The Ax-helve,” and “Two Witches.” Many of these poems are designed to tease out ideas alluded to in “New Hampshire,” thus the “Notes” section acts similarly to The Waste Land’s footnotes at the end of Eliot’s poem; only Eliot’s annoyingly cryptic notes point outward to other sources, whereas Frost’s book acts as a closed system in that his “Notes” are actually his own poems.
Grace notes are ornamental musical notes in a composition that don’t develop the exposition of the theme. Thus the “Grace Notes” section of the book features thirty short, rhymed lyrical poems—the shortest written by Frost—which don’t have direct connections to the contents of the title poem, “New Hampshire.” They do fill out the volume with a diversity of forms and themes, including some showstoppers like “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
New Hampshire got positive reviews when it came out, especially concerning the poems’ depictions of rural New England life, which was Frost’s hallmark. John Farrar, who would shortly thereafter establish the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in 1926, and Farrar & Rinehart publishers in 1929, wrote a laudatory review of New Hampshire in the Literary Digest International Book Review in 1923. Here’s a brief quote: “This volume marks so great an advance over his previous work that it should be hailed with any amount of hand-shaking and cheers. Perhaps this is the perfection of Frost’s singing. Perhaps this is the fruit of his ripest powers. It is a book of which America should be proud. . .” (qtd. in Thompson, The Years of Triumph 247).
III. A Witness Tree (1942)
Special Collection’s copy of Henry Holt and Company’s American trade edition of A Witness Tree has its original dustjacket intact, with its drawing of a beech tree in black, gray, and red-brown by Alan Haemer. Tipped in before the title page is an illustration of Frost by Enit Kaufmann. The binding of Frost’s seventh book, published when he was sixty-eight, is in greenish-blue linen cloth and has the title gilt-stamped on the front cover and the spine. The book was initially published on April 6, 1942, in an edition of 8500 copies, with 10,000 copies selling during the first six weeks of its release. Its publication was so successful that the publisher decided to let Louis Untermeyer, one of Frost’s biggest supporters, move forward with Come In, and Other Poems, an edited collection designed especially for young and new readers of Frost.
A note on the book’s title: a witness tree is a tree that was present and witness to a major historical and/or cultural moment in American history. An example of one close to home is the Oklahoma City Survivor Tree, an American Elm located in downtown Oklahoma City at the site of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The tree still stands, embedded with glass from the explosion, as the focal point of the Oklahoma City National Memorial.
Frost himself was beset with personal tragedy in the years leading up to the publication of A Witness Tree. Along with the loss of his wife in 1938, several other personal tragedies, including the death of his daughter, Marjorie, in 1934, and the suicide of his son Carol in 1940, had deeply affected him. The book, which won Frost his fourth Pulitzer Prize with a little nudging by prize committee member Louis Untermeyer, is dedicated not to Frost’s wife, but “To K. M. for her part in it.” Kay Morrison was Frost’s secretary for the last 25 years of his career, and the primary inspiration for the love poems in the volume.
A Witness Tree is comprised of forty-two poems grouped into five sections, with two short introductory poems, “Beech” and “Sycamore,” which work as a kind of abstract to explain the book’s title and allude to the fact that the book—and each of the individual poems to follow—are themselves, according to Frost biographer Lawrence Thompson, “a kind of witness tree, demarcating the secular and spiritual boundaries of the poet’s life and times” (93). The most famous poem in the collection is the patriotic “The Gift Outright,” which was recited by Frost at JFK’s inauguration in 1961.
IV. Come In, and Other Poems (1943)
Louis Untermeyer (1855–1977) was a well-known editor, anthologist, literary critic, and poet in his own right. He was also one of Frost’s best friends and critical supporters. Their relationship began in 1915 when Untermeyer wrote a favorable review of North of Boston for the Chicago Evening Post. He tirelessly promoted Frost through reviews, and articles, placing his work with fellow editors, including him in many of the poetry anthologies he edited, and as mentioned above, helping him win his fourth Pulitzer Prize.
The first edition of Come in, and Other Poems in Moffett’s Special Collections retains its colorful dustjacket illustrated by John O’Hara Cosgrave II; there are also lovely pictorial printed endpapers and black-and-while woodcut vignettes throughout the book that relate to individual poems, including, “The Witch of Coös,” “Mending Wall” and “The Wood-Pile.” The binding is in cream-glazed linen cloth, with a vignette of a farmhouse stamped in red-brown on the front cover.
Untermeyer wrote the biographical introduction and several brief commentaries which accompany some of the individual poems. The book takes its title from the poem “Come In,” which was originally published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1941 and subsequently included in A Witness Tree the following year. According to The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, “At his public readings, Frost would use ‘Come In’ to declare his objections to the grimness of modernist wasteland verse, occasionally suggesting that this poem might express his rejection of invitations to gatherings of Modernist poets” (62). It seems that the Modernist/traditionalist divide even made its way into Frost’s public persona.
Like many of his best poems, “Come In” presents an indecisive yet intrigued narrator who has ventured out into nature in search of some kind of insight into the human condition. Similar to “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “The Wood-Pile,” the narrator here pauses at a transitional place and time—at the edge of a wood at dusk. He is tempted by the thrush’s song to enter the darkness, much like Whitman is tempted to enter the swamp to hear the warbling hermit thrush sing its death hymn following Lincoln’s assassination. Whitman, struggling to work through his grief at the beginning of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” eventually heeds the thrush’s invitation of spiritual cleansing and communion, but here, Frost’s narrator chooses not to enter the darkness, “even if asked,” which he “hadn’t been” anyway. For Frost, these liminal encounters set at the edge of a wood, where two roads diverge, or “[o]ut walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,” tend to grapple with the theme of death. We see this as well in another well-known poem included in Come In, and Other Poems: the “long sleep” and heavenward pointing ladder in “After Apple-Picking.”
Along with “Come In,” Untermeyer chose eighty-one other poems from Frost’s first seven books, dividing the collection into five thematic sections: “The Code and Other Stories,” “The Hired Man and Other People,” “Stopping by Woods and Other Places,” “The Runaway and Other Animals,” “Country Things and Other Things.” As a selected volume targeted at introducing new readers to Frost, we see the inclusion of Frost’s most well-known poems, including “Home Burial,” “Birches,” Mending Wall,” “The Oven Bird,” “Design,” and “Mowing.”
V. A Masque of Reason (1945)
The most recent Frost volume held in Special Collections is also the most unusual for the poet. A Masque of Reason represents Frost’s interest in the theatre, which he experimented with in several earlier dramatic poems, such as “Home Burial,” “The Witch of Coös,” and “Housekeeping,” a type of poem Louis Untermeyer referred to as character studies.
The first trade edition of A Masque of Reason was published by Henry Holt and Company in a run of 15,000 copies in March 1945. It originally sold for $2.00. It is printed on rough cream wove paper with the foredges left rough-cut. There was also a limited edition of 800 numbered copies signed by the poet. From the inside flap of the dust jacket, we get a hint right away that something is different here: “The extent of its departure from the poet’s earlier work will startle many readers; they will find a challenging freshness of thought and theme but no loss of intensity of feeling or the technical skill they have rightly come to expect from America’s foremost poet.”
Originating in the courts of the 16th and 17th centuries, masques were short allegorical entertainments performed by masked actors. While Frost did write an actual play, A Way Out (1917), his two masques—A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy (1947)—can be better understood as dramatic works more suited for reading rather than for staging. To quote once again from the authors of The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, “[t]hough both pieces have been staged, they are best considered as closet drams in which distinctly human, American, and modern prototypes engage in theological/ideological debate via colloquial blank verse. Both pieces are ironic in tone and satirical in aim, but they also constitute Frost’s most serious examination of the individual’s relationship with God” (82). Frost saw his A Masque of Reason as a “forty-third chapter of Job,” a biblical story he felt a particular kinship to, as both he and Job were put through years of unmitigated personal suffering.
We will end this essay of Editions and Impressions with one final quote, from Untermeyer’s introduction to Come In, and Other Poems: “But a persistent search for truth does not mean that Frost is a grim philosopher. On the contrary, his touch is as light as it is certain. It is light even when—or especially when—his subject is tragic. When Frost is most serious, he is most casual.”
The books under discussion here, as well as a cornucopia of other rare books and manuscripts, are available for students, faculty, and visiting scholars to explore in person at Moffett Library’s Special Collections. For more information, see the department guide here.
Until next semester, read on!
VI. Works Consulted
Crane, Joan St. C. Robert Frost: A Descriptive Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia. U of Virginia P, 1974.
Frost, Robert. A Boy’s Will. Henry Holt and Co., 1915.
---. A Masque of Reason. Henry Holt and Co., 1945.
---. A Witness Tree. Henry Holt and Co., 1943.
---. Come in and Other Poems. Introduction and commentary by Louis Untermeyer. Illustrated by John O’Hara Cosgrave II, Henry Holt and Co., 1943.
---. New Hampshire. Woodcuts by J. J. Lanke. Henry Holt and Co., 1923.
Kendall, Tim. The Art of Robert Frost. Yale UP, 2002.
The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 1, 1886–1920. Edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. Harvard UP, 2014.
The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 2, 1920–1928. Edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Et. al. Harvard UP, 2016.
The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Edited by Robert Faggen. Harvard UP, 2006.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. Henry Holt and Co., 1999.
Pritchard, William H. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Oxford UP, 1984.
Thompson, Lawrence. Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874–1915. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.
---. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
--- and R. H. Winnick. Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976.
Tuten, Nancy Lewis and John Zubizarreta, editors. The Robert Frost Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, 2001.