The Poet and the Bad Poem: Robert Frost’s Journey to Immortality
Introduction: The Immortality of Bad Poetry and the Making of a Legend
Bad poems, as they say, never truly die. Instead, they linger in a kind of limbo, their questionable lines coiling and tangling together in an eternal dance of mediocrity. Robert Frost, one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century, began his career with just such a poem. Titled “My Butterfly,” it is a piece that few would call good—lyrical in a way that feels forced, its words spilling out like something produced by a poetry generator. Yet, for “My Butterfly,” Frost received his first payment for poetry: $15 from the editor of The Independent. It was a small sum, but it marked the beginning of a career that would eventually earn him four Pulitzer Prizes and a permanent place in the American literary canon. Adam Plunkett, in his biography Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, sees even this early effort as a kind of “spell that conjures the experience of grace.” Some might disagree, but the fact remains: Frost’s journey as a poet began with this bad poem, and it is worth remembering if only to see how far he came.
The Early Struggles: Frost’s Quest for Recognition and Artistic Identity
Frost’s early life was marked by uncertainty. Born in 1874, he grew up in Lawrence, Massachusetts, bouncing between odd jobs—acting as a stage manager, repairing lights at a wool mill—and attempting to make a name for himself as a poet. His early work was erratic, full of the kind of pretentious lyricism that often plagues young writers. Poems like “To the Thawing Wind” open with lines that feel like they were ripped straight from a Romantic-era playbook: “Come with rain, O loud Southwester! / Bring the singer, bring the nester; / Give the buried flower a dream…” Such lines are the kind of thing that might have made even Frost’s contemporaries roll their eyes. Yet, in the same poem, there are moments of pure Frost: “Make the settled snow-bank steam” and “Find the brown beneath the white.” These lines are crisp, vivid, and uniquely his. They are the kind of lines that make you see and feel the world in a new way.
Frost’s personal life was equally erratic during this period. He had just dropped out of Dartmouth and was dealing with the fallout of a rocky relationship. His girlfriend, Elinor White, was still enrolled at St. Lawrence, and he was so consumed by jealousy and young-man angst that he packed his bags and left Lawrence without even a note to his mother. His destination was the Great Dismal Swamp, a forbidding stretch of wetland on the Virginia-North Carolina border. It’s the kind of place that feels like a metaphor for despair, and it’s likely that Frost chose it for exactly that reason. He wanted to disappear into the wilderness, to lose himself in the kind of existential funk that often befalls young poets. But as it turned out, his time in the Great Dismal Swamp was more farce than tragedy. He wandered around, got lost, and eventually hitched a ride with a group of drunken duck hunters. It’s a surreal and almost comical episode in his life, but it also marked a turning point. What Frost found in the swamp was a sense of self, and with that, he began to find his voice as a poet.
The Breakthrough: Frost’s Unique Style and the Emergence of a Master
Frost’s breakthrough came with his first collection, A Boy’s Will, published in 1913. The book was uneven, but it contained moments of brilliance. Poems like “After Apple-Picking” showcase the kind of confessional, deeply personal style that would become Frost’s hallmark. The line “I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight” is the kind of thing that feels both deeply introspective and universally relatable. It’s a line that could have been written by Frost’s contemporary, Robert Lowell, or for that matter, by a modern poet like Sharon Olds. But what truly sets Frost apart is his ability to ground his reflections in the physical world. He writes about nature, but not in the way the Romantics did. His nature is not a backdrop for grand philosophical musings; it’s a lived-in, often messy, and deeply symbolic world. Take, for example, the opening lines of “Mowing”: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” It’s the kind of line that feels both a Creed and a riddle. What does it mean to say that the “fact” is the “sweetest dream”? Is Frost celebrating the brute reality of the physical world, or is he suggesting that even the everyday is imbued with a kind of hidden beauty? It’s impossible to say for sure, and that’s part of the poem’s enduring power.
Frost’s time in England from 1912 to 1915 was a critical period in his development as a poet. He met some of the most important figures of the day, including W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and T.E. Hulme. He also formed a close bond with the English poet Edward Thomas, who became a kind of mentor to him. It was during this time that Frost began to shed his early Romantic influences and develop the unique, earthy style that would make him famous. The working title for his second collection, North of Boston, was Farm Servants and Other People, and the poems in it are as much about the people who work the land as they are about the land itself. The collection contains some of Frost’s most iconic poems, among them “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial.” These poems are rooted in the rural New England landscape, but they also feel strangely modern. They are about the kind of things that have always mattered to people: work, family, love, and the often-unbridgeable gaps between us.
Fame and the Unbearable Weight of Being Frost
By the mid-1910s, Frost had arrived. His second collection, North of Boston, was a critical and commercial success, and he quickly became one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. He was showered with awards, including four Pulitzer Prizes, and he became one of the first poets to achieve a kind of mainstream fame. He was the kind of figure who could read at a presidential inauguration (he famously botched his reading at JFK’s inauguration due to the sunlight reflecting off the pages of his script) and be lionized by the public while also earning the respect of his peers. But with fame came its own set of challenges. Frost was a complicated man, and his later years were marked by personal and professional struggles. He became increasingly reclusive and difficult, and his poetry often reflected his darker moods. There’s a coldness to some of his later work, a sense of existential despair that feels both deeply personal and universally relatable.
The Legacy of Frost: A Complicated Poet for a Complicated World
Frost’s legacy is a complicated one. He is one of those rare poets who is both deeply beloved and deeply misunderstood. His most famous poems—“The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—have become so familiar that they’ve almost lost their power. They’ve been overanalyzed and overquotated, reduced to their most banal meanings. But the truth is that Frost’s poetry is far more complex and challenging than most people realize. His best poems are not the ones that feel like Hallmark cards. They’re the ones that feel spiky and strange, like the sonnet “The Silken Tent,” which Plunkett sees as a masterpiece but which feels to others like a bad poem, its conceits too strained, its language too awkward. And yet, even in his bad poems, there’s something undeniably compelling. They feel like the work of a man who’s trying to say something that he can’t quite articulate, something that’s just out of reach.
In the end, Frost’s legacy is not just about the poems themselves, but about what they do. His poetry is not about answers; it’s about questions. It’s about the way we try to make sense of a world that often seems to make no sense. In “The Most of It,” one of his greatest poems, he writes about a man who stands alone on a cliff, crying out to the universe and getting only silence in return. Or so it seems. But then, something stirs in the water, and suddenly the universe itself seems to be answering, though in a way that’s as incomprehensible as it is profound. It’s a moment that feels both deeply modern and deeply timeless, a reminder that the best poetry is not about what it means, but about what it does to you. Frost’s poetry does many things. It reassures. It unsettles. It makes us see the world in a new way. But above all, it reminds us that even in the darkest moments, there’s always something to be found, even if it’s just the “brown beneath the white.”
Conclusion: The Enduring Power of Frost’s Poetry
Robert Frost’s journey as a poet is a kind of metastory of American literature in the 20th century. He started with bad poems, but he ended up producing some of the greatest poetry of his time. His work is not without its flaws, but it’s precisely those flaws that make it so compelling. Frost’s poetry is not about easy answers or neat resolutions. It’s about the messiness of life, the uncertainty of existence, and the ways in which we try to make sense of it all. In the end, it’s not about what his poems mean, but what they do. They make us think. They make us feel. And they remind us that even in the darkest moments, there’s always something to be found, even if it’s just the “brown beneath the white.” Frost may have started with “My Butterfly,” but he ended up creating a body of work that’s as enduring as it is enigmatic. And that’s a legacy worth celebrating.