Robert Frost’s Tragic Personal Life Teaches Us That Life Goes On
Even when it doesn’t seem like it will.
We know Robert Frost as the famous New England poet of rural life, behind household poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Fire and Ice”.
But what few people know is that Frost’s life was marred by personal tragedy— outliving four of his children as well as having his parents die young. His father died when he was 11 of tuberculosis his mother died of cancer. In 1920, he had to commit his younger sister, Jeanie, into a mental hospital. Nine years later, she passed away.
Both Robert Frost and his mother suffered from depression, and depression would run in the family. In 1947, his daughter, Irma was committed to a mental hospital. Elinor, Robert Frost’s wife, suffered from depression as well.
Frost and his wife had six children. Their first son, Elliot died of cholera at four years old. Another son, Carol, died in 1940 after he died by suicide. Another daughter, Marjorie, died at 29 after childbirth. Another daughter, Elinor Bettina died as an infant. Only Irma and another daughter, Lesley Frost Ballatine, would outlive him.
I’m currently watching Manchester by the Sea, starring Casey Affleck and directed by Logan Lonergan. In the movie, a man forgets to put the screen door to a fireplace one night. His house burns down, killing his children. He attempts suicide and has to flee his hometown, becomes an alcoholic getting into regular bar fights, and is given legal guardianship of his nephew in the town once his brother dies.
“I can’t beat it,” he says near the end. “I’m sorry.”
Throughout the movie, he’s subject to stares and gossip about his personal tragedy, constantly has traumatic flashbacks to his kids’ death, and realizes that he can’t continue to stay in his hometown.
I’m rewatching the movie for about the third time, and the main character reminds me of Robert Frost. I wonder how people go on despite unspeakable tragedy and loss. I wonder how they find a reason to keep on living.
My English professor in my junior and senior years of college taught me to not look at Robert Frost’s work through the lens of his personal life. He urged me to look at his poetry and let his poetry speak for itself, and I developed the ability to inductively reason and just take a work at face value, but the work that I’m focusing on now is Frost’s personal life.
What can he teach us as we suffer from depression, loss, and seemingly insurmountable grief?
How many of Robert Forst’s poems can be interpreted as a death-wish? “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” one of his most popular poems, says the following in the final stanza:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
Wanting to stay in the woods that are “lovely, dark and deep” is often interpreted by scholars as contemplation of death, and the temptation for it. Some scholars, including Jeffrey Meyers, would even consider it to contemplate suicide.
“Acquainted with the Night” is an even more direct poem about death, and can be more explicitly linked to suicide. The narrator suggests that he is someone who has experienced the various vicissitudes of life, having “walked out in rain — and back in rain” and having “outwalked the furthest city light.”
He has “looked down the saddest city lane” and then later on in the poem, hears an “interrupted cry.” At this point, it’s still pretty ambiguous what the cry is, but the fourth stanza suggests that it’s “not to call me back or say good-bye,” and then the last two lines read the following:
“Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.”
The time for what? I think it’s pretty clear that the narrator suggests the time for death, and I find “Acquainted with the Night” one of the most chilling poems I have read because of its contemplation on death and suicide.
I said I wouldn’t actually get into Robert Frost’s poetry, but it’s probably impossible to not mention poetry when you mention Robert Frost. But still, it’s important to examine his personal life and how it may have affected his poetry.
In William Pritchard’s biography of Robert Frost, he focused in a section on Frost’s life surrounding the death of his son, Carol. Carol’s last words to his father were:
“You always win an argument, don’t you?”
In the years before Carol killed himself with a shotgun, Carol’s mother died, and he had grown more anxious. He started hearing voices in his head, and his wife was undergoing an operation in the hospital. Carol had a 15-year old son, Prescott, who was upstairs when Carol shot himself.
A few days earlier, Frost had visited Carol at his farm and tried to convince him to take more validation in his farming. He tried to tell his son that he was not a failure and that he must never take his own life. Carol then frustratingly taunted his father about always winning an argument.
Robert Frost was not an easy parent to please. After all, he was the most famous poet in America. Carol tried to be a poet, too, and found that he could never live up to his father’s fame and success by any stretch. Robert Frost tried to validate Carol’s attempts as a farmer, but also in his poetry. In fact, for years before, Robert Frost constantly wrote letters to his son about how good his poems were, but told him that he had to find success on his own path and not through the connection of his father.
“But none of it was good enough for Carol,” Pritchard wrote. In a letter to a friend, Frost said that “I took the wrong way with him. I tried many ways and every single one of them was wrong. Some thing in me is still asking for the chance to try one more. That’s where the great pain is located.”
He also lamented that he always saw himself as a bard who could tell people what to do to fix them, and then realized with the death of his son that he should have parented differently. Although he pushed his son to be like him as a farmer and a poet, both of those things caused Carol much anguish. Frost reminisced that Carol loved working with horses and children and that he should have chosen those things as a career, but he didn’t.
On his 80th birthday, Robert Frost was interviewed by self-help writer, Ray Josephs. Josephs asked the question to Frost:
“In all your years and all your travels, what do you think is the most important thing you’ve learned about life?”
Frost paused for a moment, and then raised an eyebrow. And then he said this, a quote that stays with me in times of great trial when I feel depressed or anxious:
“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on. In all the confusions of today, with all our troubles . . . with politicians and people slinging the word fear around, all of us become discouraged . . . tempted to say this is the end, the finish. But life — it goes on. It always has. It always will. Don’t forget that.”
A shortened version of the quote simply states the first two sentences of his quote to Josephs, but life goes on. It always does, and always will until it doesn’t. I’ve held those words true as a mantra of sorts when the world feels like it’s crashing down, only to wake up the next morning and realize it didn’t.
No matter the despair of life, and the seemingly insurmountable pain of mental illness like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, anxiety, and depression, life always goes on.
Robert Frost survived four of his six children, outlived his wife, had a son die to suicide and had to commit one of his daughters to a mental hospital. All of that that hardship is enough to break anyone, and yet Frost kept writing poetry. He kept living and being America’s most famous poet of the 20th century.
Life goes on, even when it doesn’t seem like it will. Robert Frost taught me that truth in a time when I felt like it wasn’t possible.
