Volume One of Robert Frost’s Letters wound up in 1919 with his resignation from a teaching position at Amherst College, where he disliked the progressive curriculum fostered by the President, Alexander Meiklejohn. By the second year of Volume Two, he has more than recouped the loss, with steady employment as a lecturer at the Bread Loaf School in Vermont and a sideline job as a consulting editor for his publisher Henry Holt. Always a canny negotiator, Frost took charge of his career; he responded with equal dexterity to the demand for new poems and invitations to deliver public readings. He was keen on popularity but minded how he got it: there is never a hint of the meretricious, and he seems to have made a conscious decision early to stay out of the front lines where his admirers were helping. He must have had offers to edit an anthology, for example. He never went for it. But in his late forties now he was looking for variety in his base of operations.
Against his usual suspicion that college was good for no one, he would reconcile himself by 1927 to “doing the itinerant teacher this year at Wesleyan, Amherst, Michigan, Dartmouth, and Bowdoin – two to ten weeks each. I expect to be ten weeks at Amherst every year from now on. It is a strange relation to colleges I have grown into”. Frost indeed was willing to instruct in every setting from the book club to the university oration. Presumably, he was brokering his fame to buy himself time for writing; but his energy was squandered in the binges of performance; and there is a pattern to it: he rebukes himself but travels the circle again. Even so, the books he ended up publishing in these years, New Hampshire (1923) and West-Running Brook (1928), show only a slight falling off from the extraordinary achievement of his previous three volumes. “A Star in a Stone Boat”, “Two Witches”, “Dust of Snow”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “For Once, Then, Something”, “To Earthward”, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”, “Spring Pools” and “Acquainted with the Night” are the great poems of this period, but every line in both books has the workmanship that proved Frost a master poet a decade earlier. The letters have little to say about the poems.