Today’s Poem: Sugaring

Raymond Holden in Robert Frost’s woods

Boiling maple syrup (Wikimedia Commons)

In any literary era, there’s only so much room. Some poets will rise to the top, to shine their light down on everyone else. Others will appear to us as shadows in that light. So much in this world amounts to an accident of time and place, of coincidence. An American poet publishing a New Hampshire snow poem in 1920, for example, will inevitably, if unfairly, strike us, reading that poem in 2024, as a shadow of Robert Frost (1874–1963). A 1920 New Hampshire snow poem not written by Robert Frost — no matter how fine a poem it might be on its own merits — is bound to suffer a little by the comparison we can’t force ourselves not to make.

In the case of Raymond Holden (1894–1972), overlap with Frost, twenty years his senior, is more than a passing coincidence. The two had met in Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1915, and in 1920, when Frost moved from New Hampshire to Vermont, Holden bought his land. These poets are writing not only about a similar land…