by George Longenecker
Frances Mary Frost (1905-1959) was one of Vermont’s most talented and prolific authors, yet she is little-known today. Frost, who was not related to Robert Frost, authored six books of poetry, 17 children’s books and two novels. Born in Saint Albans, she graduated from Middlebury College and later taught at the University of Vermont, where she earned a Bachelor of Philosophy degree.
Biographical information about Frost is scant, compared to contemporaries such as Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, about whom there are several biographies and films. For Frances Frost we have only her writing, none of which is in print today.
In her lifetime and in the decades after, Frances Frost was lauded. Hemlock Wall (Yale University Press, 1929, reprint, 1971) received the Yale Younger Poets Award. She also received an O Henry award, the Golden Rose Award and the Shelley Memorial Award.
Frost married William Gordon Blackburn of St Albans. Though their marriage ended, they were the parents of the poet Paul Blackburn, an editor of The Black Mountain Review, of whom The Poetry foundation has a good bio. He was certainly inspired by his creative mother.
In 1973, 19 years after her death, Frances Frost was included in The Literature of Vermont, published for the University of Vermont by University Press of New England. An excerpt from her poem “Language” follows the title page. She has seven poems in this collection, while Robert Frost has five.
Language
Stone walls, fences, rivers, apple trees—
These speak of a slow country,
Of white-spired villages between two hills
And the loves and hates and passions between two hills.
These talk of abandoned farms and abandoned lives
And of men who ask no questions of the earth,
Knowing earth will not answer.
Stone walls, rivers, fences, apple trees—
These are the language of a slow country,
The curious speech of rock-bitten,
Inarticulate heart.
Frost’s early poems are pastoral, as might be expected of a Vermont poet. She writes in free verse, as in this excerpt from an untitled poem in Woman of This Earth, published by Houghton Mifflin’s Riverside Press in 1934. She was 29 and had already published four books of poetry, three of them with Houghton Mifflin.
Before sheep came, before my fathers drove
the first grey flock into this pasture high
against the wide blue morning of their time,
the hollows were sweet with emptiness, the grass
bent down at summer’s end and fed the earth.
In 1946 She published her sixth book of poetry, Mid-Century with Creative Age Press. These poems, written at the close of World War II, are much darker than her earlier work. She uses rhyme and iambic pentameter in the title poem, “Mid-Century.” “Rifle is a caustic poem in iambic pentameter with irregular rhyme. These poems put her in the ranks of the great anti-war poets like Wilfred Owen. Yet while his poems still appear in student anthologies, hers are little-known.
Mid-Century
O chemic age, O century of sorrow,
what shall the heart compel, the brain contrive
that will outwit the treacherous tomorrow;
by what quicksilver strategy survive
the child, the dog, the red mercurial fox,
the tottering big-eyed calf, the silver running
of the frightened mouse; what chipmunk in the rocks
will nibble dawn with cobwebs and with cunning?
What will we save in cities ruinous
of precious crucibles, of fiddles crying,
when mortal meteors made luminous
scream down the fiery plummet of their dying?
Rifle
I am apprenticed to this constant rifle,
my shoulder to the stock, my eyes to sight,
my hands to metal of the steady muzzle,
forefinger gentle on a soldier’s night.
I am the backward scholar of this rifle.
May he who receives my bullet’s mortal kiss
know that my hate is quick and kind, that I
am apprenticed to this rifle, as he is to me.
Frost’s Mid-Century was her last book of adult poetry. However, she continued to publish children’s books until 1959, the year she died, when The Little Naturalist, poems for children, was published by Whittlesey Press.In the introduction to The Literature of Vermont, editors Arthur Biddle and Paul Eschhloz said in 1973 that Frances Frost was one of several writers, including Robert Frost and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who “…seek out those aspects of the human condition that seem applicable…in all ages and places.…The best of this writing rises above the limits of regionalism in its universality.” Her brilliantly-crafted poems are significant to Vermont and American literature; she should be read and remembered.