Robert Frosts

Chicken-farmer, shoe-worker, bobbin-boy, messenger, teacher, journalist, leather-worker, poet, student, cultural ambassador, berry-picker, lecturer. Such a list does not even exhaust Robert Frost's occupations, let alone his ambitions. In fact, when he writes in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” thatMy object in living is to uniteMy avocation and my vocationAs my two eyes make one in sightit is tempting to see here a sly joke at his own expense. For Frost had so many vocations and avocations that they are well-nigh impossible to combine in any clear-sighted unity. “No poet in this century has written more poems involving more different kinds of work than Frost,” writes William H. Pritchard, before going on to list some of the jobs which Frost found and abandoned between 1885 and 1892. Even the many jobs he did do were insufficient to content him. “I should have been an archaeologist,” he wrote to A. J. Armstrong in 1943 and though Frost as an extremely successful poet might allow himself that ironic wistfulness, he was not being merely whimsical. If some of his family were drawn into the darker sides of his poetry, then they also enacted a few of his brighter dreams. Welcoming Willard E. Fraser as a new son-in-law in 1932, Frost proposes not one but four desired careers.