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Publication Date

10-1-2021

Document Type

Article

First Page

24

Last Page

36

Abstract

The influence and allure of Maine are largely unexamined elements in Robert Frost’s rise to prominence as a poet and in his developing sensibilities as America’s bard. That influence came largely in the persons of Susan Hayes Ward of the Kittery area and Thomas Mosher, a Portland book-maker, both of whom were prescient readers and important publishers of Frost’s early lyrics. The allure came from Maine’s inland lake and farm country, and its promise of a retreat from the public pressure of notoriety that Frost entered into with the American publication of North of Boston. That a lure also arose from the bravery and independence that Frost recognized in Maine’s Indigenous people who had resisted the expansionist settlers in the Kittery area. In the end, however, Maine offered Frost as much in the way of troubling family experiences as it did a return to an agricultural and social simplicity, and so the material a lure of the cities, the manifest destiny of his white, ancestor settlers, and the comfort of notoriety won out over the Camelot he envisioned in Maine for himself and his family.

A past President of the Robert Frost Society, Timothy O’Brien taught for thirty-two years in the English Department at the U.S. Naval Academy, retiring in 2016. He has published broadly on such authors as Chaucer, Malory, Henry Fielding, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Bobbie Ann Mason. His work on Frost includes articles in The Robert Frost Review and The New England Quarterly, as well as the book Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, issued by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2010.

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