Robert Frost’s New Hampshire: Rural Backwardness, Agricultural Improvement, and the History of Education

The lecture will examine Robert Frost’s 1914 book North of Boston through the lens of his links to New Hampshire. It will examine the ways that Frost sought to push back on ideas of rural backwardness and inferiority that were current at the time, especially in rural eugenics and rural improvement initiatives. Frost’s poems responded with impressive specificity to New Hampshire’s changing agriculture, education, rural tourism, and industry. The lecture will discuss Frost’s responses to rural and wilderness tourism, agricultural history, and the history of secondary and higher education in the state. Notably, Frost taught at a school that centered on technical education in agriculture, and the talk will explore the rise of scientific agriculture and agribusiness and the ways the poet’s work responded to those developments. With its highly regional focus, this lecture touches on the White Mountains, Plymouth State, and Rockingham County, and should interest anyone interested in literature, history, education, and the environment.

A specialist in U.S. literature, Maria Farland has taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Wesleyan Universities and is currently associate professor at Fordham University in New York City. She was previously in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University.

The lecture is drawn from Prof. Farland’s forthcoming book, Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agricultural Reform, and the Rural Modern in U.S. Literature, 1840-1950 (Johns Hopkins University Press), a history of ideas of rural backwardness and inferiority in terms of the antipastoral mode. Antipastoral is a literary mode that responds to the idea that rural America is deficient, backwards, and inferior, even as it insistently dramatizes the modernization of the countryside. The book uncovers neglected links between antipastoral writing by modern writers like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and Henry Thoreau—and high modernists like Robert Frost, Jean Toomer, and W. E. B. Du Bois—and rural reformers’ accounts of the suffering of farmers and threats to rural communities.

This is a hybrid event. To receive a Zoom link, please register HERE. 

This event is supported by a National Endowment of the Humanities’ Spotlight on the Humanities grant for Plymouth State University’s Sustainability Studies program.