ABSTRACT
In Beaconsfield, Robert especially had been torn between the serious business of writing, on the one hand, and, on the other, the exhilaration of being with other poets and their families. He had wanted to get further away from the seemingly artificial literary coteries in the London coffeehouses, yet he had longed for companionship with his artistic peers in a more natural setting. At first, Little Iddens and the gathering of the poets in the spring and summer of 1914 seemed idyllic. Much of the Georgian verse presented an optimistic, even rosy view of the cultivated English countryside. The Ryton/Dymock region of The Gallows had experienced only gradual change, a less catastrophic decline than elsewhere during the depression. Sailing from Liverpool on the SS St. Paul, February 13, 1915, the Frosts were shaken by the proximity of the blockade and the uncertainty of war and their own future in America, an uncertainty heightened by the suddenness of their departure.
