JOAN Didion once observed that “certain places seem to exist because someone has written about them. … A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image.” By this standard Robert Frost can clearly lay claim to rural New England. The locale “north of Boston” lives in our collective imagination largely because he wrote about it. For that reason it may seem strange to argue that Frost’s sensibility was also shaped by other locations. We know that he was born in San Francisco and spent his first eleven years in California. As a young man he lived in England and published his first book as an expatriate. Above even these places, however, Frost felt a deep affinity for the American South. Not only was he a small a agrarian, but he also maintained important personal and professional ties with two members of the Nashville Agrarian movement - John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson. Moreover his view of the world (particularly the part of it that pertained to politics) put him closer to William Gilmore Simms than to Harriet Beecher Stowe.
