reviewed the first book inPoetry Magazinein the
fall 1913. Frost was glad for the attention a
review by the celebrated author brought to the
collection, despite its cool praise. The second
volume was much more popular, and by the
time Frost returned to the United States in
1915, the poet’s reputation was quite well estab-
lished. In these early years, however, no one
envisioned the success that Frost would have
over the coming decades, as he continued to
publish collections of poetry and held visiting
lectureships at various colleges and universities.
When Henry Holt publishedComplete Poems
of Robert Frostin 1949, David Daiches wrote a
review for theNew York Times, tracing the trajec-
tory of Frost’s impressive career. Daiches
remarked that the second volume of poems,
North of Boston, won Frost respect in the United
States and that upon his return from England,
Frost became, in a sense, the ‘‘Poet Laureate of
New England.’’ By 1939, Frost had won three
Pulitzer Prizes and had published his collected
poems. Then, in 1949, this new collection
appeared, replete with what Daiches termed
‘‘enduring wisdom.’’ Daiches praised Frost as hav-
ing ‘‘broadened and deepened the tradition of
Georgian poetry’’ (that is, English poetry written
during the reign of George V, 1910–1936). Frost
avoids ‘‘radical innovations in technique,’’ Daiches
pointed out, while employing the idiom of ‘‘con-
versational speech.’’ The effect of Frost’s poetry,
according to Daiches, is ‘‘a remarkable feeling of
directness...so that the reader is stopped in his
tracks as the wedding guest was stopped by the
Ancient Mariner,’’ a reference to Coleridge’s
poem, ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’’ In all
of the poet’s work, Daiches remarked Frost ‘‘has
gone his solitary way without bothering to pose
before anything except his own mirror.’’
A measure of the national respect for Robert
Frost was given by the invitation he received to
recite a poem at the 1961 inauguration of John F.
Kennedy. Later that same year, Frost accompa-
nied Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall to
Moscow. The poet read ‘‘Mending Wall,’’ to the
Soviets, a choice that was taken to imply a com-
ment on the Berlin Wall, and he visited with
Premier Khrushchev. Two years later, when the
poet died, many tributes were paid to him and his
work. In aNew York Timesobituary, Robert
Frost was remembered for symbolizing ‘‘the
rough-hewn individuality of the American crea-
tive spirit.’’ He was praised in the same article for
his ‘‘breath-taking sense of exactitude in the use of
metaphors based on direct observation.’’ Also
that year, Lawrance Thompson, who at the time
was writing a biography of the poet, pointed out
that the poetry could now be assessed without the
‘‘dramatic presence’’ of the poet himself ‘‘and his
persuasive voice.’’ Thompson predicted that in
the years to come, the vigor of Frost’s work
would ‘‘establish a permanent position for him
among our best American poets.’’
Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, Frost did not
receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, though
many thought he should have. Short of receiving
that honor, nearly thirty years after his death, the
poet received a bow from three men who did. In
Homage to Robert Frost, Nobel laureates Joseph
Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott var-
iously analyze selected Frost poems and describe
the achievement of Robert Frost and how his work
affected their own development as poets. Brodsky
described Frost as ‘‘a quintessential American
poet,’’ a poet who communicated ‘‘man’s recogni-
tion of his own negative potential—with his sense
of what he is capable of.’’ This, Brodsky main-
tained, is ‘‘Frost’s forte.’’ Heaney praised the
‘‘bracing lyric power’’ of Frost’s poetry, which is
dependent in part on the poet’s ‘‘faultless ear.’’
Walcott traced ‘‘Wordworthian vocabulary’’ in
some of the early poems, but he pointed out that
eventually Frost came into his own by writing the
‘‘American’’ language, heightened by his masterful
poetic technique. Alluding to Frost’s comment
that form is as essential to poetry as a net is to
playing tennis, Walcott explained: ‘‘He played ten-
nis, to use his famous description, but you couldn’t
see the net; his caesuras slid with a wry snarl over
the surface, over the apparently conventional scan-
sion.’’ Admittedly folksy,regional, sweet in certain
of his famous poems, Robert Frost was in other
instances fully able to expose the dark side of the
human condition and to find the universal by close
observation of natural elements and exact descrip-
tion of ordinary activity. He did all of this with a
keen understanding of classical forms and the abil-
ity to match form with sense.Criticism.
Melodie Monahan
Monahan has a Ph.D. in English and operates an
editing service, The Inkwell Works. In the follow-
ing essay, she explores the literary tradition FrostAcquainted with the Night