Frost's "Sensible Conversation" with Hazlitt (Robert Frost and William Hazlitt) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Although William Hazlitt's Table-Talk (1821) and Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819) were staples of the teacher Robert Frost's assignments at Amherst College (Lawrence Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph 1915-1938 [NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970], p. 603), the idea that Hazlitt's writing was an influence on Frost's writing has not attracted the attention of scholars. Even Robert S. Newdick, who hinted that Frost's prose style had "the tone and manner, to borrow Hazlitt's phrasing of his own ideal style, 'of lively, sensible conversation,'" failed to follow through on his insight ("Robert Frost's Other Harmony." Sewanee Review [Summer 1940]: 48: 411). Instances of affinity and influence are not lacking, however. In A Boy's Will (1913), for example, the poem "The Tuft of Flowers" tells a story of the poet's coming upon some blossoms spared by an early morning reaper who has worked the field by himself: "The mower in the dew had loved them thus, / By leaving them to flourish, not for us, / Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him, / But from sheer morning gladness at the brim" (Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson [NY: Library of America, 1995]: 31). The metaphors in these lines--the explicit "mower" and the submerged "quaffing"--recall Hazlitt's essay "On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth": "we quaff the cup of life with eager thirst without draining it, and joy and hope seem ever mantling to the brim," for "objects press around us," Hazlitt explains, "filling the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them, so that there is no room for the thoughts of death" (Selected Essays of William Hazlitt 1778-1830, ed. Geoffrey Keynes [London: Nonesuch, 1934]: 312-13). While Frost does not bring his thoughts of death to the surface of this poem, it is natural to think that the very act of mowing and harvesting might call them forth in anyone mindful of the employment of scythes and sickles in Western art and poetry, especially, perhaps, in the case--as in Frost--of one harvesting in a field by himself, not to mention the familiar figure for death. A different way in which Hazlitt may have influenced Frost occurs in an anecdote Hazlitt repeats in "On Thought and Action":