22 pages • 44 minutes read
The Death of the Hired Man
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Background
Genre Context: The Closet Drama
In his 20s, Frost, certain that playwrights earned more than poets, contemplated a career in the theater. During the time he worked on “Hired Man,” Frost drafted dozens of plays although he published only one—1917’s A Way Out. Frost recognized that his kind of narrative poetry (and character-driven storytelling dominates the poems in North of Boston) was only as good as it was dramatic. Frost was intrigued by using language alone to create the immersive aesthetic environment of the theater.
“The Death of the Hired Man” is theatrical. The action uses a single setting (the front porch) and centers on an exchange of dialogue between two characters (the narrative high point, Silas’s death, happens off stage); as with a play, Warren and Mary grow increasingly complex psychologically the more they speak. The poem has no authorial commentary or even adverbs to direct the delivery and includes a scattering of staging directions. The poem moves to a dramatic climax: the curtain, as it were, ringing down after Warren delivers that dramatic final word—“Dead.”
Although “Hired Man” has been transcribed into a one-act play (adapted by Jay Reid Gould), the poem reflects Frost’s interest in closet dramas, a genre of long narrative poems intended not to be performed but read, usually by a single voice. As a genre of poetry, closet dramas date to antiquity, most notably the Roman poet Seneca, and thrived during the Restoration when closet dramas skirted the Cromwell government’s crackdown on theaters. Frost particularly studied the closet dramas of the High Romantics, most notably Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Frost admired how these poets used dialogue to reveal character and create action. More important for Frost, however, closet dramas demanded the reader’s imaginative investment to animate the action and characters.
Literary Context: Modernism
Despite being nearly a generation older than many of its most daring practitioners, notably Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats, and despite enjoying the market appeal that they found disdainful, Robert Frost is a Modernist. One of the more noted ironies of Frost’s career trajectory is that his poetry, set in the forbidding landscapes of New England, found an audience in England among the Modernists, maverick artists—writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, composers—who, excited by the raw energy of a new century and appalled by the corrupt realities of Western civilization, celebrated creativity and innovation in incendiary manifestos, rejected all assumptions about art, and challenged artists to reimagine art by experimenting with new forms.
“Hired Man” reflects the Modernist perspective. There is Frost’s daring experiment with form—“Hired Man” reject his era’s templates for American poetry, most notably the stately wisdom literature of the Fireside Poets and the carefree anarchic yawps of Walt Whitman. Moreover, Frost excuses from the poem any evidence of the poet. As Modernists argued, that cool impersonality endows the poet with God-like distance and puts the focus on the artifact. There is Frost’s certainly over the indifference of nature, the inevitability of death, and the absence of a reassuring God, elements of the Modernists’ bleak perception of the industrial era. Frost, like other Modernists, offers the craft of the poem itself as the sole consolation in such a grim world.
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