“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
-Robert Frost
Have you ever wondered exactly when and where Robert Frost was when he penned your favorite poems? The answers may be revealed below! While this information does not necessarily speak to the inspiration behind the lines, it is a fascinating bit of information for Frost fans.
Many thanks to our docent, Mark Roberts, who found a reference to this document being archived at Yale University. Mark contacted Yale to locate it, and we are thankful to him and those at Beinecke Library for sharing it with us.
This timeline was composed by Elinor Frost, Robert Frost’s wife, who he described as “the unspoken half of everything I ever wrote.”
Mountain Interval is the title of Robert Frost’s 1916 collection of poetry, published while he was living on Ridge Road in Franconia, NH. The title refers to the time the Frost family lived in a rural New Hampshire valley with breathtaking views of the Franconia Range. “Interval” is also an old-fashioned, New England term for a valley.
The book is dedicated to Elinor:
“TO YOU, who least need reminding that before this interval of the South Branch under black mountains, there was another interval, the Upper at Plymouth, where we walked in spring beyond the covered bridge; but that the first interval of all was the old farm, our brook interval, so called by the man we had it from in sale.”
We know that Frost’s “mountain interval” was 1915-1920, and thanks in part to Elinor’s notes, we know that Frost also wrote some of the poems in his 1923 collection, New Hampshire, and at least one from his 1928 collection, West Running Brook, in Franconia as well. Surely, his time in Franconia inspired an untold number of poems not described here.
If you would like your own copy of Mountain Interval, we recommend A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost. This leather-bound hardcopy contains all poems from his first four published collections: A Boy’s Will (1913), North of Boston (1914), Mountain Interval (1916), and New Hampshire (1923).
This beautiful book is the #1 bestseller in our museum’s gift shop for a reason!
Purchases from our bookshop.org affiliate links help to support The Frost Place and independent bookstores.
Many institutions house collections of Robert Frost’s works, letters, photographs, and other effects. Here’s an incomplete list:
University of Virginia Libraries
USDA National Agriculture Library – Frost on Chickens