Modernist Versions of Pastoral: Poetic Inspiration, Scientific Expertise, and the "Degenerate" Farmer

Abstract

The well-known opening poem of Robert Frost's North of Boston, “Mending Wall” (1915), centers on a confrontation between the poet and a local farmer from “beyond the hill,” a description that marks its specific place in the hill towns of late nineteenth-century New England (11). “Good fences make good neighbors,” the farmer intones, his sole utterance punctuating the poem with emphatic and redundant assertions of individual separateness (12–13). The farmer's independence has been understood to signal Frost's concern with self-reliance, and such accounts capture a crucial element in his poetry. But the poem also bears the mark of a conflict that I will argue is central to the ongoing work Frost provisionally titled “Fairy Tales of Farming” (Frost, Notebooks 17). In the image of the farmer's resemblance to an “old-stone savage” (North 12), we see echoes of such writings as Henry Osborn's Men of the Old Stone Age: Their Environment, Life, and Art (1915), in which rural, agrarian “types” are seen as “pagan” and “heathen” (Weber 3). The poet's depiction of his farmer neighbor—“he moves in darkness”—mirrors the belief, widespread among Frost's contemporaries, that there was something “savage” (12) in what were termed “rural habits of mind.”1 In the evocation of the farmer's resolute separateness, as well as the intimation of agrarian devolution, we see the poem's direct engagement with contemporary scientific conceptions of rural inferiority and backwardness.