Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan: Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class Mobility

Abstract

In the fall of 1894 after a spat with his future wife, Elinor White, Robert Frost bought a one-way train ticket and set off on an ostensibly suicidal trip to the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. By the time he decided against throwing himself into the murky waters, he found he didn’t have enough funds to make his way back home to Lawrence, Massachusetts. Assessing his situation, Frost embarked on a series of adventures that read, in retrospect, as if purloined from turn-of-the-century headlines and popular fiction about the menace of tramps, the unemployed and homeless men who haunted urban and rural America in the wake of the major depressions of the late nineteenth century. “Nearly out of money,” biographer Lawrence Thompson narrates, “Frost decided to try his luck at leaving Elizabeth City [N. C.] hobo-fashion, by stealing a ride in a freight car.”¹ Sleeping for a while, Frost awakened to find himself at a lumber camp, where he hopped another train to Washington, D.C. There Frost “spent that evening in a hobo jungle just outside the capital, studying the grizzled and shabby veterans who crouched or sat around a little fire made of sticks and branches.” As Thompson relates the scene, “there was poetry of a sort for Frost to hear that evening, ballads and songs, one of which he learned by heart” (Thompson, 185–186).