9TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 22 :: Olivia Dodd on Robert Frost
I’m on my morning commute on the tube in London. Thirty-eight minutes of jostling and screeching, mildly numbed by the music throbbing between my ears. To avoid eye contact with the guy across from me, a zombified suit and tie clutching a Red-Bull kinda guy, my eyes drift to the tube map above his head. The tube map is boring.
I flick over to the next panel — voila, poetry! I’m interested now. I absorb the alluring line:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep”
from Robert Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”. I smirk at the thought of Frost’s poetry plastered on the London tube. Here he is, still wooing the Londoners with his good ol’ American charm.
It was the cliche “the grass is always greener on the other side” that spurned the great poet Robert Frost to leave American soil in search of the hearty English countryside.
For Frost, England was “grassy and wanted wear” for there he found the infamous “yellow wood” where “two roads diverged” which inspired “The Road Not Taken” poem. I’m sure we can all agree, we’re fascinated by taking the road less traveled; the allure of the unknown and undiscovered promises is tantalizing. Frost was just as intrigued.
In 1912, unpublished and creatively dispirited, he packed up his family and joined a writer’s colony in Dymock, England, a short drive outside London. He was here to establish himself as a prominent poet. With no contacts, he merely had a handful of poems and the will to write. The delightful dandies of the English writer’s scene took to Frost’s quaint charm and American steadfastness. This encouraged him to compile his first work, A Boy’s Will.
He finally found his first publisher in the form of a Frenchwoman whom Frost described as “the most erratic, erotic, exotic type imaginable”. The book garnered a small amount of praise, and Frost plowed on. He dug back into his New England roots; writing of the seasons, capturing how in autumn the “essence of winter sleep is on the night, / The scent of apples: I am drowsing off” and the “mischief in me” springtime unleashes. These two poems, “After Apple Picking” and “Mending the Wall” featured in his next publication North of Boston.
The words always hit home for me because I also have New England roots. Born and bred in New Hampshire, raised on apple-picking, chicken-farming, and toughened by cold snowy winters I too desired to take the road less traveled. Like Frost, I packed up for London in pursuit of my artistic career. Living with the distance from everything familiar is tough, but upon reflection, gives clarity to the uniqueness of who I am as an artist. The surge of pride in my chest when I see the American flag gifts the awareness of being patriotic. I’ve realized even the smallest things like hot apple pie, fall foliage glowing across a mountain range, or the deafening quiet of freshly fallen snow is in my DNA, my heartbeat. I took all of this for granted growing up. Likewise, I think Frost needed distance to fully realize his ability as a writer and the deep well of creativity within him. I’m sure the broken wall, the star of his “Mending the Wall” poem, was once monotonous and became extraordinary once he left it behind.
When Frost returned to America in 1915, he was leafing through a newspaper and stumbled across poet Amy Lowell’s article hailing the North of Boston ‘‘the most American volume of poetry which has appeared for some time”. Six months later the Atlantic published three of his poems and declared Frost “destined to take a permanent place in American literature”. Prior to his trip to England, the Atlantic rejected his work multiple times. American publisher Henry Holt, with some trepidation, had bought 150 copies of North of Boston when it was first published. Following Frost’s newfound acclaim, Holt quickly printed 1,300 copies under his own publishing house. A year later, almost 20,000 copies had been sold.
Frost is now a cornerstone of the great American poets. I can’t help but wonder if it was his brief English adventure that helped his writing reach its pinnacle point. Will my journey away from America also help my talent reach its fullest potential?
The train screeches to a halt and I get off at my final stop, Waterloo station. I remind myself never to doubt taking the road less traveled. I persevere, promise to stay true to my roots “and that has made all the difference.”
Olivia Dodd is an actor, poet, and artist residing in London, UK. Find more of her work here, or follow her on Instagram @olivia__dd.
