Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938

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Robert Frost's arrival in the United States from England in February 1915 was not a triumphant homecoming. The small but important recognition he had achieved through the English publication of A Boy's Will and North of Boston had attracted little attention in America. Yet within a few months after his arrival, North of Boston became a best-seller, and within a few years he became celebrated as a major American poet.

The Years of Triumph tells the story of Robert Frost during the phase of his life when he was rising "from Nowhere up to Somewhere,/ From being No one up to being Someone." He was a failed poet when he went to England at the age of thirty-eight, and old enough to become inured to failure. Still, he was ambitious to win recognition, partly for the purpose of triumphing over those who had mocked and humiliated him throughout his youth.

As was shown in Volume I, Frost was seriously hurt by the disappointments of his youth, and he suffered from an understandable lack of confidence. Although he never seemed to understand the analogies between his desire to triumph as a poet and his determination to retaliate vindictively over those literary competitors whom he considered his enemies, these analogies are here revealed in his jealous dealings with such other "new poets"" as Amy Lowell, Robinson, Masters, Sandburg, and Millay.

A deeper problem was his need to triumph over the inner confusions which threatened to overwhelm him. He was frightened by the similarities between his temperament and that of his younger sister Jeanie, who underwent a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered. Aware that he frequently walked too close to he edge of sanity, Frost tried to reconcile the opposing inner drives which threatened to overwhelm him, and he found that his abilities as a poet provided his most cherished ways of coping with the danger.

Although The Years of Triumph ends with the death of Robert Frost's wife, in 1938, and although her death nearly caused his own, he subsequently went on to gain higher recognition as a world-famous literary figure. He went to England to accept honorary degrees awarded him by Oxford and Cambridge universities, he performed memorably at the inauguration of President Kennedy, and he was sent as a messenger of good will to Russia, where he was personally welcomed by Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The later years will be described in the third and final volume, The Years of Glory.