Death Of The Hired Man

Robert Frost (1874–1963)
From Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays

Interesting Links
Audio: "The Decease of the Hired Man," read by Robert Frost at his home in 1956, from the Decca album Robert Frost Reads the Poems of Robert Frost (YouTube)

"The Art of Poetry": Interview with Robert Frost by Richard Poirier (The Paris Review)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• "The Question of a Plumage," Robert Frost
• "The Original and Only," Robert Frost
• "The Birds of Killingworth," Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Buy the volume
Robert Frost: Nerveless Poems, Prose, & Plays
Complete Poems (1949 edition) • In the Immigration • uncollected poems • three plays • essays, stories, letters • 1,036 pages
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Haymaking, undated, oil on canvas by American artist Dwight William Tryon (1849–1925). Image courtesy of The Athenaeum.

During the earliest years of the twentieth century, long before he became a household proper noun, Robert Frost wrote short stories and articles for such periodicals equally Eastern Poultryman and Farm Poultry. (Two of these tales, "The Original and Only" and "The Question of a Feather," were presented previously as Story of the Week selections.) While writing these amusing sketches about imperfect pullets and over-productive poultry, he began planning several narrative poems based on farm-life in New Hampshire. He dreamed of a futurity career equally a fiction writer and, according to Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson, the poems "were very closely related to his hopes that anytime he might besides write psychological studies in the form of novels, stories, and plays." His early on poems combined homespun narrative with colloquial-filled dialogue; Frost claimed that "he dropped to an everyday level of diction that even Wordsworth kept above."

Frost finished "The Expiry of the Hired Homo"—or at least an early version of information technology—around 1905, just information technology wouldn't appear in print until a decade later, when information technology was included in his 2d book, North of Boston. By this fourth dimension, Frost was living in Beaconsfield, England, and had given up his original goal of writing fiction and planned instead to become a poet—merely i who bucked the current modernist trends. He wrote to his friend John Bartlett, "I must get exterior that circumvolve to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. . . . I want be a poet for all sorts and kinds."

To promote his work, he enlisted the aid of a new acquaintance, Poesy magazine'due south London-based editor Ezra Pound, who had favorably reviewed Frost's first book, A Boy's Volition, upon its publication in England in Apr 1913. Frost gave a copy of "The Death of the Hired Hand" to Pound, who wrote to his own male parent that it "was improve than anything" in A Male child'southward Will and boasted that he would have no problem placing it somewhere. Frost both hoped and causeless that Pound would convince Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Verse, to accept information technology. Instead, as Frost related to his friend Sidney Cox, Pound "failed to sell information technology. It was fifty-fifty worse than that. I had demanded the poem back when I learned the proper noun of the magazine he was offer it to but he went ahead in spite of me. And there began our quarrel." The magazine in question was The Smart Ready—a commercial "high social club" monthly that was in a period of abysmal decline. (Its famous years under the editorship of H. Fifty. Mencken and George Jean Nathan were yet to come.)

As it happened, The Smart Set decided not to publish Frost's poem after all, but tensions remained betwixt Frost and Pound for years to come. "I could never make a merit of beingness caviare [sic] to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does," he wrote, and he bristled at Pound'south demands that he "write something much more than like vers libre or he volition let me perish past neglect." Frost particularly resented being treated equally Pound's pet discovery, and the disability to predict what Pound might do made him nervous. In late 1913, Frost complained to his friend Thomas Mosher, "Pound is an incredible donkey and he hurts more than than helps the person he praises."

Before long afterward N of Boston appeared in England in May 1914, Pound published a favorable review of it, yet (as he did in his review of Frost'south first book) he trashed American editors for "refusing" to publish Frost and he even mocked the editor who had turned down "The Decease of the Hired Human being." Frost wrote to friends that Pound's insistence on adding him to "his party of American refugees in London" didn't resemble the truth of the situation; many poems had in fact appeared first in U.Due south. magazines and Frost was currently shopping his first two books to receptive American publishers. Every bit he quipped to Cox, "Another such review as the one in Poetry and I shan't be admitted at Ellis Isle." Fortunately for both Frost and readers, he returned to New York without incident in Feb 1915, merely three days after Henry Holt & Company published the American edition of North of Boston. It sold xx,000 copies within a year—phenomenal for a book of poesy—and ii months later on, in April 1915, Holt too published A Male child's Will.

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