From around 1913 until Robert Frost's death in January 1963, almost everyone who knew him personally agreed that he was among the most brilliant, provocative, learned, and original conversationalists of the twentieth century.

During the 1920s Louis Untermeyer, Raymond Holden, Wilfred E. Davison, and Julius John Lankes, among others, recorded visits with Frost in which his unique greatness as a talker impressed them most forcefully. Reginald L. Cook, a close friend of Frost for thirty-seven years, called him "the master of the riposte, humanly exulting in superior feats of wit," and pronounced him "one of the greatest talkers of his time." Similarly, Louis Mertins, who had many long talks with the poet during the 1930s and 1940s, concluded that "Frost was one of the greatest conversationalists of the twentieth century, as Aristotle was of the Golden Age of Greek culture." he was a man of great imagination, wit, and humor that his intellectual brilliance was beyond dispute, that he possessed immense learning in many subjects, and that he was without peer as a raconteur. After several conversations with Frost at Bread Loaf in August 1941, William Carlos Williams confirmed my view of Frost as a conversationalist: "He's a good talker, witty, loaded with information and well able to take care of himself anywhere, anytime."

He became fascinated by Hall's witty, picturesque, back-country way of implying meaning through sly inflections and modulations of voice. They gave color and bite to the sound of sense. As a flattering tribute to Hall and other north-of-Boston farmers, Frost had gradually modified his way of talking. He deliberately imitated the manner in which his neighbors unconsciously slurred words, dropped endings and clipped sentences.

For about a decade Frost continued to perfect his conscious art of talking like a New Hampshire farmer, so that both in his conversation and in his poetry written in Derry he was exploring the various ways of converting colloquial speech into a new art form.

In 1907, after Frost had begun teaching at Pinkerton Academy, he revised the curriculum in English studies, recommending for the improvement of the students "to teach them the satisfaction of superior speech."

Since superior speech came close to the essence of drama in poetry, Frost advocated that "expression in oral reading ... is made the test of appreciation." During the school year 1909-1910, Frost directed his prize students who published the Pinkerton Critic to present five plays: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Milton's Comus, Sheridan's The Rivals, and Yeats's The Land of Heart's Desire and Cathleen ni Houlihan. Frost adapted and compressed these plays, deleted what he called "rhetorical passages" and replaced them with "speaking passages," thus stripping them down to their essential form for colloquial presentation on the stage. All of this editing and re-writing strengthened his growing conviction that all writing was good only to the extent that it was dramatic, and that "all the fun's in how you say a thing." To Frost, closet drama, meant only for silent reading with the eye, was totally displaced by drama for speakers on the stage.

More and more during his years in Derry and at Pinkerton Academy, Frost came to harmonize the concept of the poet as conversationalist and the conversationalist as poet. Indeed, he came to believe that good conversation was almost as much an art as poetry itself. If good poetry is practically synonymous with good dramatic talk, so too does good talk acquire the essential character of poetry. Frost once told Louis Mertins that "he had his first experience in listening to genuine conversation when he heard A E [George Russell] and Yeats talk together in Ireland." Mertins summarized the close reciprocal relationship Frost had come to perceive between poetry and good conversation:

Whenever Frost in after years had occasion to refer to that visit to Eire [in 1928], it was not of the Irish landscape, or of Irish farming, or of the Irish peasantry, or of the Sinn Feiners, or of the Eire Republic, or of de Valera that he talked. These things scarcely formed a backdrop. It was always of the other-worldly conversation he held with the two Irish mystics-men of the older Ireland--such talk, he said, "as nowhere else on earth have I ever heard the like of. These men took ordinary conversation and lifted it into the realm of pure literature.

Like these Irish poets, Frost himself, during a lifetime of talks with friends, often lifted ordinary conversation into the realm of pure literature. The main difference between dramatic poetry in monologues or dialogues and his conversations with friends was that his poetry was cast in traditional literary structured forms, such as sonnets, odes, lyric stanzas, and blank verse narratives, and in the techniques of meter, rhythm, and rhyme, whereas good conversation was much more loose, whimsical, discursive, and delivered intuitively by speaking spontaneously to the present moment.

Although, as Frost himself said, no poet ever wrote in order to fulfill a theory of writing, it is evident that in the decade or more before he went to England, he was consciously developing his theory of language as a vehicle for "correspondence" between a writer or speaker and his audience. His revolutionary conception of language applied not only to his poetry, but to all spoken and written prose sentences. In a letter to John Bartlett, February 22, 1914, he provided a definition of a sentence based not upon conventional rules of grammar and logic, but upon the meaning in sounds: "A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung." On May 18, 1914, Frost wrote to Sidney Cox that "the science of verse" as he perceived it in sentence structure applied to teaching: "The novelty if you didn't miss it was the definition of a sentence which is calculated to revolutionize the teaching of literary composition in the next twenty years." As both a poet and a classroom teacher of composition, Frost believed that "oral reading" through a close attention to the "voice posturing" of speakers and their changes in "voice tones," so natural without inflated literary rhetoric in actual conversation, was the most valid and effective method of conveying meaning in both writing and reading, whether poetry or prose.

Frost's theory of language clearly included the principle that certain spoken cadences are inherent in English words and phrases, and is practically innate to those who speak it as their mother tongue. Implicit in his theory is that particular sentence sounds and voice tones are metaphors--ways of conveying subtle shades of thinking or feeling that capture meanings.

During Frost's entire period in England, until World War One forced him to sail for home from Liverpool on February 13, 1915, he spent much of his time refining upon his theory of language, in letters to friends and editors in America, and in lively conversations with his English literary friends. In his letters to Thomas B. Mosher (July 17, 1913), to John Bartlett (August 6 and December 8, 1913 and especially February 22, 1914), to Sidney Cox (September 15, 1913, May 18, September 17, and December, 1914, and February 2, 1915), and to John Cournos (July 8 and July 27, 1914), Frost elaborated upon his theory, and provided specific examples of how it worked in practice through tones, stresses, moods, and what he called "gossip," and of sounds as metaphors.

It is highly significant that the most favorable English reviews of North of Boston, by Lascelles Abercrombie, James Cruikshank Smith, and Edward Thomas, were written after Frost had talked with each reviewer about "the sound of sense" in his "poetry that talked." Abercrombie's review in the Nation (London, June 13, 1914), was titled "A New Voice." Two weeks before it appeared, Frost wrote to his friend John W. Haines that "the discussions of my technique wouldn't have been what it was if Abercrombie had nothing to go on but the book. He took advantage of certain conversations in which I gave him the key to my method." Frost was quick to add that "'method' is the wrong way to call it," because "certain principles of art" and, he might have added, his philosophical convictions regarding spirit and matter, dictated his method and content in his poetry?

In talks with Smith and Edward Thomas he made these reviewers well aware that the poems in his second volume deliberately performed "in a language absolutely unliterary," and in accordance with "the voice within his mind," within the traditional meter and original rhythms of his flexible and distinctive blank verse. After Frost visited Smith in Scotland, where he had observed with pleasure the stone walls separating meadows and farm land, he sent him some manuscript poems, and his friend responded: "Of course I recognized 'Mending Wall' at once as the poem which had been suggested by our walk at Kingsbarn." When North of Boston appeared in print Smith commented on several poems in a letter to Frost in a manner that showed he was very familiar with Frost's aesthetic theory. But perhaps nowhere is the poet as conversationalist and the conversationalist as poet more evident than in Edward Thomas's three reviews of North of Boston, in the London Daily News, the New Weekly, and the English Review.

Thomas emphasized the revolutionary nature of Frost's colloquial dramatic poems, noted his "conviction that a man will not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him deeply," and put his finger unerringly on four of the best poems in Frost's volume: "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," "The Black Cottage," and "The Woodpile." There can be no doubt that his excellent reviews were the direct result of his long conversations with Frost. Neither these original English literary critics nor subsequent American critics have come close to a full awareness of how completely and brilliantly Frost's theory of language and passion for good talk were fulfilled in practice in North of Boston.

Although the austerities and the uncertainties created by the war with Germany and the Frost family's strained financial resources prevented their months in the West country from being an unbroken pastoral idyll, nevertheless this brief period was one of the happiest Frost was ever to know. His two published books in England, and his knowledge that a long-established American publisher had agreed to issue new editions of his books, gave Frost great satisfaction and the needed confidence that his sojourn in England had enabled him to come truly into his own as a poet.

In 1926 Wilfred Gibson wrote a retrospective and nostalgic poem, "The Golden Room," commemorating the literary gathering of Frost and his friends in July 1914, in a rose-latticed cottage called the Old Nailshop. Three days after this memorable evening the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, and within a month Europe was plunged into World War One, and soon Frost and his friends were scattered forever, Brooke to die of fever and Thomas from enemy gunfire in the war, and Frost and his family to return to America. Yet Frost knew upon his arrival home that his fulfillment as a poet was all but assured if he had the courage to persist in the course he had set for himself. Between 1915 and his death in 1963 Frost added many fresh dimensions to his brilliant achievements both as a poet and conversationalist.