Robert Frost – Tom Fasano

Christmas Cards from Robert Frost with his poems printed on them

Tom FasanoPoetsDecember 19, 2012 13

A 1942 card that includes the poem “The Gift Outright.” (Image courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library)

Longing for some memorable holiday cards? How about a beautiful Christmas card from Robert Frost with one of his poems printed on it?

In 1926 a recently opened letterpress shop in New York City named Spiral Press printed a book of poems for Frost. One of the owners of the press, Joseph Blumenthal, printed one of the poems as a Christmas card for his wife. Robert Frost loved the card and thus began a working relationship between Blumenthal and Frost and several woodcut artists and engravers.

Frost sent the cards out annually from 1934 to 1962. The last year they were mailed, the print run was over 17,000. Some of the cards ran up to 20 pages and included such well-known Frost poems as “The Gift Outright” and “The Wood-Pile.”

Examples of the cards from the Rauner Special Collections can be viewed here.

Dartmouth College’s Officce of Alumni Relations recently posted the following notice about the cards on their blog:

Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library has an extensive collection of the cards, including copies of the first-ever example—“Christmas Trees”—which was produced without Frost’s knowledge in 1929. Later, Frost expressed admiration for the card and he agreed to help produce them on an annual basis in 1934.

Rauner’s collection also includes cards with handwritten notes from Frost to librarians at Baker Library and other friends in Hanover. In 1951, Frost accompanied the “A Cabin in the Clearing” card with this note to Dartmouth bookstore employee Ruby Dagget: “in hopes that you will carry it like a lesson to your schoolhouse in the wilds of Vershire.” Vershire is a nearby town in Vermont.

Mountain Interval by Robert Frost (1916)

Tom FasanoBooks, PoetsDecember 22, 2011 14

The first edition of Robert Frost’s third collection of poems, Mountain Interval, was published in 1916 by Henry Holt and Company and was dedicated “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.” The “you” Frost refers to is his wife, Elinore, to whom he dedicated most of his books. The “South Branch” is the Frosts’ farm in Franconia, New Hampshire. The “Upper at Plymouth” is a reference to their time spent together in Plymouth, New Hampshire. “The first interval” is another reference to time spent together, this time in Derry, New Hampshire. And the brook is Hyla Brook, by Frost’s farm in Derry, which provided the title of one of the poems in this volume. According to Jay Parini in his biography of Robert Frost, Robert Frost: A Life (1999), an interval is a “New England dialect term for land in a valley.” Therefore “mountain interval” provides a double meaning, suggesting a “pause in a journey as well as a dip in the landscape” (278). “The Road Not Taken” opens the volume and perhaps makes reference to this “mountain interval.”

Initially the collection did not sell as many copies as Frost’s previous collection, North of Boston, probably because his publisher rushed the book into print. Nevertheless, it contains some of Frost’s best-known and most celebrated poems, such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” and “Out, Out—.” Frost wrote the majority of the poems during his stay in England; whereas he wrote a few before leaving for Europe and reworked them for book publication, such as “Birches” and “Putting in the Seed.”

Naturally, Frost was disappointed by the book’s lack of sales, but it was to be expected of a third volume following so quickly on the heels of two previous collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. Despite the book’s abysmal sales figures, most scholars agree that it was a seminal book in the history of modern poetry, virtually on the basis of “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches.”