He goes to Dartmouth College, but gives up after a few weeks and enters Harvard, but only there for two years, marries his childhood sweetheart. SP: He's a very unsettled young man, isn't he. His mother worked as a school teacher and he worked at a variety of jobs in his teens, so they weren't at all settled or part of the gentry. And the family moved from San Francisco to New England where Frost senior’s parents lived, and after that they had a very hand to mouth existence. She was very religious and he wasn't.Īnd I think a lot of the disruptions and the voids and the uncertainties and the anxieties played out in Frost’s poetry can be traced back to this rather rackety childhood, which ended when his father died, when he was only 11 or 12. And it wasn't a marriage that was particularly of similar temperaments.
And his wife was Scottish, in fact, so not American at all. He lost all his elections, and he was also an alcoholic. He was born in San Francisco to a rather feckless father who had grand ambitions and had been to Harvard, but who worked in newspapers and also tried to get into politics, but rather failed, particularly in the latter. So the notion of Frost as this Yankee is contradicted by his very name. He was born in San Francisco and he was named after the Confederate general Robert E.
And yet, Mark, he was not anything to do with New England in terms of where he was born. And our topic today is the American poet Robert Frost, who I suppose is as famous for being a New Englander as Hardy was for being a man of Wessex. I teach English at the University of Oxford and I'm talking with MF, poet, critic and professor of English at University College, London. Seamus Perry: Welcome to Close Readings, a series of LRB podcasts about British and American poetry drawing on the rich archive of essays and reviews and memoirs of poets that have appeared over the years in the London Review of Books.
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