remain in England, he transferred to Merton
College, Oxford University, where he took his
degree. Frost returned to the New England he
loved, to farming and teaching to make a living
for his family, whereas Eliot pursued editing the
Criterionand then theEgoistliterary magazines
and, in addition to becoming one of the century’s
most important poets, became the leading
arbiter of literary taste in the modern period.
Bread Loaf Mountain School,
Ripton, Vermont
Established in 1920, the Bread Loaf School of
English was made possible by Joseph Battell, a
newspaper proprietor and breeder of Morgan
horses. In 1915, Battell gave 30,000 acres near
Middlebury, Vermont, and in view of Bread
Loaf Mountain, to Middlebury College. The
Bread Loaf School of English was established
on this land in Ripton, Vermont, and students
used some buildings Battell had constructed
there. Through the remaining decades of the
twentieth century, many famous authors served
as faculty at the school, but none more consis-
tently than Robert Frost, who participated
every summer over the span of forty-two
years, missing only three years. It was Frost
who had the idea of a writers’ summer confer-
ence, launched in 1926. Frost spent summers
from the late 1930s to 1962 at the Homer
Noble Farm, consisting of several hundred
acres. He purchased the farm in 1940. It was
later entrusted to Middlebury College, which
maintains it as the Robert Frost Farm, a
National Historic Site.Critical Overview.
After a slow start with poems individually pub-
lished in various U.S. periodicals, Robert Frost
published his first two books of poetry in Eng-
land,A Boy’s Willin 1913 andNorth of Boston
in 1914, to considerable success. Ezra PoundA lonely, rainy night in the city(Image copyright Clara, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)
Acquainted with the Night