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Literature is news that stays news.
-Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934)
AT first the disproportion between Frost and Eliot seems immense. In relation to Eliot, Frosts reputation suffered from the fact of his popularity among readers of the middle range of discernment, a popularity he cultivated through his public persona. Eliot, first famous with The Waste Land, conceded nothing to readers of that middle range, but he was hailed as a champion of modernism and possessed enormous authority among the most discerning. But such differences in reputation are extraneous to the merits of the poetry itself. Together Frost and Eliot constitute polarities of energy that have been intrinsic to American culture; their success in doing so would not have been possible had they been other than powerful writers.
During the summer of 1912 Robert Frost took a big gamble. If he failed, he would quit. He had taught successfully in New Hampshire, published poetry in obscure journals, and now had some assets in the form of his Deny farm, purchased for him by his grandfather, as well as an annuity of $500 from that grandfathers estate. On August 23, 1912, he sold the farm and sailed from Boston Harbor with his wife, Elinor, and their three young children to England. It would be recognition or defeat.
They rented a cottage in Beaconsfield. Frost spread out his poems on the floor and arranged them in a sequence reflecting the shifting moments of a young man s mind. Completely unknown in England, he submitted these poems over the transom to the publisher David Nutt in London. The manuscript was accepted and appeared as A Boy's Will on April 23, 1913. The American poet, who had been born in San Francisco, who had spent his childhood there, but who was thought accurately to be a quintessentially New England poet, first achieved recognition in London. A year later, on May 14, Nutt published North of Boston with the publisher Henry Holt in Boston contracting for American rights and henceforth serving as Frost's publisher. Meanwhile Frost circulated among the London literary figures, including Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, and, most important for Frost, Edward Thomas, a literary journalist, known both for his accurate perceptions about literature, and for being...