Robert Frost

He Digs His Songs from the

Soil of Vermont A poet of New England; but a poet first of all of the American character, Robert Frost is best known for his second volume of verse, North of Boston. Frost is a farmer by nature, that curious combination of dreamer and hardheaded Yankee, more characteristic of tillers of the soil than of poets. I like best to think of him sitting in the grass at the edge of a field back of his farmhouse in the Vermont hills. His large, nobly-formed head, with its loosely falling iron gray hair, bends slightly forward. He talks deliberately, softly, his somewhat piercing and remarkably blue eyes lighting now and then with mischievous humor. Frost was born in San Francisco. His father, a transplanted New Englander, was a newspaper man. His mother was Scotch. At the age of ten, however, Robert Frost was living in Massachusetts, and it is with the New England states that he is firmly associated. He left Dartmouth after a short try as an undergraduate. He studied only fitfully at Harvard. Occasionally he has attempted to teach; but academic restrictions do not suit this lover of hard truths and of open fields. If he could do exactly as he chose, I imagine that one would find him at any time of year on that rise in the road near South Shaftsbury, sitting on the back porch by the fountain, surrounded by his wife and his four children, thinking, only occasionally selecting a thought which he considers worth putting on paper. That is why his volumes of poetry appear so rarely. The Selected Poems this spring will be the first since Mountain Interval in 1916. Robert Frost's poetry is essentially dramatic. It is inevitable for him some day to write a full length play. He has already done short ones. He knows that he is a dramatist, but it is characteristic of him that he will write four or five plays in his mind before a word of one reaches paper. " I like to entertain ideas," he said to me not long ago. " I like that word entertain." Life is to him a thing as bitter as the starkest moments of his tragic poems, as gentle as the sweetest of lyrics. And yet, as he writes in Birches-- " Earth's the right place for love: I don't know where it's likely to go better." J. F.