20

THE GREAT ENTERPRISE OF LIFE
1948–1953

There is a shadow always on success

Often mistaken for a sense of sin.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1950

Irma’s condition deteriorated throughout the summer, and by early August it became clear that she was no longer able to look after herself. One day she left her house in Acton and wandered aimlessly around Cambridge, confused and anxious. Toward the end of the afternoon, she called Lillian, who was staying at her father-in-law’s house on Brewster Street (Frost was still in Vermont). Sensing trouble, Lillian persuaded her to come to Brewster Street. That same afternoon, she called Frost to explain the situation, and he contacted his friend Dr. Merrill Moore for help. That night, Kay drove him from Ripton to Cambridge.

By now, it had become clear that Irma’s husband, John Cone, would take no further responsibility for her, although he could be counted on to look after Harold. Irma was entirely in her father’s charge, and he understood the grim task ahead of him. On Moore’s advice, he arranged for Irma to be placed in the state mental hospital in Concord, New Hampshire, aware that he could not afford (literally or figuratively) the kind of continuous help his daughter would require at home. Irma resisted, but not vigorously, as she was driven (by her father and Moore) to the hospital. It was a sad day for Frost, who now looked back over the fate of his children with a sense of despair. As he wrote to Untermeyer, “Cast your eye back over my family luck, and perhaps you will wonder if I haven’t had pretty near enough. That is for the angels to say. The valkyries and the eumenides.”1

Frost returned to Ripton in time for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was greeted by the news that Louis Untermeyer would not attend this year—a disappointment for Frost, who always found Untermeyer buoyant and supportive company. In his place was Benny DeVoto, whose relations with Frost had been awkward since 1943, when Frost had made those careless remarks about him in Bloomington. There was also tension between Frost and DeVoto over Kay: DeVoto, like Lawrance Thompson, had grown extremely fond of Kay (and may well have been a lover). The DeVotos and the Morrisons were neighbors in Cambridge, and DeVoto was apparently furious with Frost for attempting (as he saw it) to disrupt the marriage between Kay and Ted.

“Kay Morrison was a planet,” Louise Reichert recalls, “and these men circled around her, barely avoiding each other—her husband, Frost, Thompson, DeVoto, others. She was beautiful but cold. The coldness was, perversely, attractive to them all. And she obviously had a way of connecting to them. She was witty and bright. The situation must have appealed to her, at least in some way.”2 Reichert also notes that Kay, who was born in Nova Scotia, had “the stiffness of an Episcopal clergyman’s daughter.” She retained an elegant detachment from those around her, “a certain aloofness.” This manner had been acquired during her teenage years in Philadelphia, where she’d attended the fashionable Miss Hill’s School. “Kay had a sense of herself as someone from the upper echelons, though she wasn’t haughty. It wasn’t that. She was just supremely confident.”

Her trim build and auburn hair were complemented by well-chosen clothes. According to Wade Van Dore, she possessed an “outward calmness” that “seemed to be hers by birthright.” Others found her extremely remote, even icy. The poet Adrienne Rich, for example, described her as full of “repressed anger and bitterness.”3 Louise Reichert detected “a feeling of resentment there,” although she adds, “Kay could be remarkably good company—when she was around those she liked and trusted.” Peter J. Stanlis points to her mercurial temperament: “Kay was a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. I found her either very warm and friendly, and socially charming, or cold and harshly austere, depending upon circumstances—which had nothing personal about them.”4

“People knew that the way to Frost was through Kay,” one friend noted.5 Hyde Cox, being well attuned to Frost, understood this point, and proposed a party in Kay’s honor in the summer of 1951. Frost replied with enthusiasm, “A tribute to Kay would be the ideal thing for our concerted expense. I’m glad you thought of it and glad of the way you express it. No one can praise her too much for me. I have cried her praises myself in such pieces, to be specific, as The Silken Tent, Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same, and—if the truth were known—the character of Thyatira in the better Masque [A Masque of Reason].”6 But not everyone was as sensitive to Frost’s feelings about Kay—and Frost “was often anxious on the subject.”7

Another source of tension this summer was Earle J. Bernheimer, the assiduous collector of Frostiana. For some time, Frost had come to depend on regular infusions of capital from the wealthy Californian. Bernheimer had by now assembled a magnificent trove of manuscripts, letters, printed books, and other items. All along, Frost’s hope had been that Bernheimer would one day donate everything to a single university library. “I confess to long having entertained the hope that you would deposit your collection some day where it would link our names in public for the years to come,” Frost wrote to him.8 He had in mind Dartmouth, Harvard, Middlebury, or Amherst as appropriate repositories for his work—all institutions to which he felt some personal attachment.

But on his last visit with Bernheimer in Beverly Hills, he had begun to see the depths of his collector’s personal problems. Bernheimer’s marriage had broken up, and he was caught in expensively rancorous divorce proceedings. In short, he needed money, and had explained quite frankly to Frost that he might have to sell off the collection piecemeal. His most precious possession was Twilight, which he had persuaded Frost to let him own until the poet’s death, at which point he had promised to give it to an appropriate library. Without being explicit, Bernheimer was telling Frost that he now considered the little book his to sell to the highest bidder. (He had paid $4,000 to Frost in 1940 to “borrow” it until his death, but it was now worth twice that on the open market—a fact that must have rankled Frost.)

Bernheimer resisted selling the Frost collection for a couple of years, but in 1950 his financial situation had deteriorated to a point where he had no choice. Ironically, the market for such collections had also deteriorated, and Bernheimer recouped only about $15,000 for a collection that would have been worth a great deal more in a few years. Twilight itself fetched only $3,500—less than Bernheimer had paid for it; nevertheless, the New York Times reported that it was “the highest price ever paid for a single work by an American author.”9

Frost was upset by the whole affair and told Louis Mertins, “Collecting is the lowest form of literary appreciation. Very low.” For his part, Bernheimer was furious that Frost had spoken ill of him and his collection at a point when a good word would have enhanced the value of the whole. Recalling the episode twenty-one years later, Bernheimer said, “Frost did me a good deal of harm through a person who was the editor of the Antiquarian Bookman just before my collection came up for auction at the Parke-Bernet Galleries in 1950. Frost, of course, was always a consummate and clever sort of scoundrel and didn’t mind lying a little to suit his crochety whims.”10

The Ticknor fellowship at Dartmouth had been in place now for nearly half a decade, but Frost had been longing to return to Amherst for some time. In February a letter came from Charles Cole, the president of Amherst, inviting him to receive an honorary doctor of letters degree at the commencement in June. (His previous honorary degree from Amherst—his very first, awarded in 1918—was an M.A.) Frost accepted with alacrity, and believed an offer to join the Amherst faculty was not far away.

Frost was also to receive another honorary degree that summer, from the fledgling Marlboro College in southern Vermont. Marlboro’s first president was Walter Hendricks, whom Frost had met as a student at Amherst just after the First World War. Hendricks, in fact, had had a checkered history with Frost and his family. In an early delusional episode, Irma had accused Hendricks of trying to molest her, and Frost had at first believed his daughter. When it became clear to him that Irma was imagining the situation (from this point on she frequently imagined that men were trying to molest her), Frost had made amends with Hendricks. The friendship between them had been fully restored, and it meant a lot to Hendricks to have Frost as the main speaker at his inauguration.

In late fall, Frost at last (after many anxious months of waiting) received a letter from President Cole saying that Amherst would indeed like to reestablish a connection. Frost was offered a position as Simpson Lecturer in Literature. In exchange for a salary of $3,000 per year (equivalent to the Dartmouth fellowship), he would be expected to spend one month each semester in residence at Amherst. No formal teaching duties were involved, but he would give at least one lecture and one reading a year; he might also attend classes as a guest and meet with students informally. The intention was to continue this association for as long as Frost felt willing and able to maintain it.

Frost wrote to Cole, “Your letter of some time back brightened in the New Year for me by wiping out the last of any lingering estrangement I may have felt (however mistakenly) from Amherst College.”11 He remembered the role played in his life by Alexander Meiklejohn, whom he called “my first Amherst president to whom I owe my existence among you.” Meiklejohn, he said, “picked me up out of nowhere and sprang me full fledged a professor among the professors. I saw him long enough for a good old fashioned Scottish tilt at logic with him. His spirit never dies.”

Over the next few weeks, Frost proved an able negotiator, managing a five-year contract at $3,500 per year, with an annual retirement allowance of $2,500 per year after that. Frost regretted leaving Dartmouth, but he had no choice now. Dartmouth’s president, John Sloan Dickey, recalled: “Frost had a long-standing allegiance to Amherst. It was the first college that had taken him in. I don’t think any college before this had ever taken a poet on board—as a poet, to be a poet. Amherst had been remarkably foresighted. We understood perfectly well that Frost had no choice now. He had to go back to Amherst.”12

That spring, Frost delivered his final lecture as Ticknor fellow in the Great Issues course that was the brainchild of Dickey. “He was at his best that day,” Dickey recalled. “He recited Shakespeare from memory—the sonnets. He talked about the difference between science and the arts, favoring (of course) the latter. He mixed some politics into the talk—always provocative, always thoughtful. The boys found him delightful, often very funny.” Another member of the audience sensed in Frost “a peculiar combativeness, a defensiveness. He seemed to be challenging the students—laying down the gauntlet. But his timing was perfect. You had the sense of a mind whirling around a subject, coming at it from many angles. It was a singular mind. There was nothing like Frost in performance when it was going well.”13

*   *   *

The saga of Ezra Pound took an interesting turn in late February 1949. Pound had been at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., for the past four years—still under indictment for the treasonous broadcasts he had made over Rome Radio in 1941. While imprisoned by the Allied Forces at Pisa, he had begun his Pisan Cantos—a harrowing sequence of poems that brought a much-needed focus to his Cantos, which for years had meandered (often brilliantly) in pursuit of subjects and themes. Frost still had complicated feelings about Pound, and he was stunned to hear the news that Pound had received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for 1948. The prize committee included T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, W. H. Auden, and Louise Bogan—a virtual Who’s Who of contemporary poets. For his part, Frost was relieved that nobody had asked him for his opinion on the subject. Privately, to Kay Morrison, he wrote a memo suggesting he would have liked to bring “Ezra out into the open to stand trial like an honest traitor.”14

Frost’s writing career was nearly over, consisting now mostly of Christmas poems printed each year in booklet form and sent to friends, but he still hoped for a new edition of his Collected Poems. He had been loyal to Holt many decades—even when much of the adult trade department jumped ship in 1946 to follow William Sloane to a new firm. One officer of the firm who remained steadfastly at Holt was Alfred C. Edwards, whom Frost liked immensely. Direct editorial responsibility for Frost was assumed by Glenn Gosling in 1948. With Edwards and Gosling, Frost planned a new volume, to be called the Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1949. This would supercede his Collected Poems (1939). The finished edition was beautifully bound in cloth, and included the complete original text of each of Frost’s eight volumes, from A Boy’s Will (1913) to Steeple Bush (1947) in chronological order. “An Afterword” containing three recent poems preceded A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy, which brought the volume to a close. “The Figure a Poem Makes” once again served as an introduction, and there was a full-page photograph of the white-haired Frost by Clara E. Sipprell opposite the title page.

The Complete Poems lifted Frost to even higher levels of public recognition. Time followed an adulatory review of the book in June with a cover story on October 9, 1950. The anonymous writer said, “Of living U.S. poets, none has lodged poems more surely where they will be hard to get rid of.” But this writer also acknowledged that Frost seemed, to many younger writers, a throwback: “Today’s bright young men [sic] look to the intricate, mannered, literary methods of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden for their models. They grudgingly admire Frost as a kind of 19th Century relic, resent his commanding popularity, and smart under the reproach.” Thus far, in the United States alone, Frost’s work, the article reported, had sold over 375,000 copies—an astounding figure.

In the magazine’s idealized cover portrait of Frost, painted by Boris Chaliapin, Frost offers a slight, wry smile, his white hair adrift. He is standing with a dry stone wall behind him—as if to recall “Mending Wall.” There are wintry birches in the back, and a brook runs beside the wall. The poet has an open collar. His face is deeply lined but rugged. One imagines that his hands, which are out of sight, are equally creased and rugged, the hands of a ploughman-poet. The myth of Frost was now gathering tremendous force, yet the poet in his private notebooks acknowledged, “There is a shadow on success.”15

Myths are hard to maintain. The public face of a man of letters—the “smiling public man” that Yeats wrote about in “Among School Children”—often seems to hide a more fragile self. Frost, perhaps more so than most, was fragile inside. He still suffered often from depression—“a daily gloominess” that he noted in his journals. Close friends were aware of the energy he put into public performances, even dinners and casual meetings. “You could sense the strain, even with the brilliance,” one noted. Frost seemed increasingly “to need long hours alone, time to read or think, to walk in the countryside by himself. But it became harder and harder for him to find this kind of solitude. And part of him didn’t want it. Part of him said, ‘I must go out.’”16

It seemed to many that Frost would soon receive the ultimate accolade: the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was told in the winter of 1950 that he was among those nominated by the Swedish committee, but the award failed to come. Perhaps in recompense, the U.S. Senate decided to toast Frost on his seventy-fifth birthday with a resolution to offer him the “felicitations of the Nation which he has served so well.” As Robert Penn Warren said, “After the war, the only two American poets on the mountain peak were Eliot and Frost, but Frost was more American. Eliot had a remoteness—he had lived abroad his whole adult life. Frost was rooted in his own landscape, he was America’s own voice, and that was recognized. He was hardly a prophet without honor. In fact, the opposite was true. There was no end of honor.”17

*   *   *

The Bernheimer episode had left a bad taste in Frost’s mouth, but he soon gravitated toward Louis and Marguerite Cohn, two booksellers with whom he had been friendly in recent years. The Cohns had supplied Bernheimer with many of his first editions of Frost, and had gotten Frost to sign them. The Cohns, in fact, had bought a significant part of Bernheimer’s collection when it went on sale at Parke-Bernet. Despite the evident dispersal of his books and manuscripts, Frost still entertained hopes of having a substantial repository of his work somewhere.

In 1950 Frost met Edward Connery Lathem, a Dartmouth student now in his senior year. Lathem had been collecting first printings of Frost poems in magazines for several years, while still an undergraduate, and showed great interest in the poet and his work. An attractive young man with a keen and sympathetic intelligence, Lathem had been raised in rural New Hampshire. Not long after graduating in 1951, he became director of Special Collections for the Baker Library at Dartmouth and began building up their impressive collection of Frost books and manuscripts. (He eventually became Frost’s literary executor.)

From his first years of teaching, at Pinkerton and elsewhere, Frost had fastened on to, even singled out, certain students. John Bartlett was the first of these, and he remained a lifelong friend. But others had followed, especially in the years after Elinor’s death, when Frost was lonely. Increasingly, he depended on these young men for friendship: Hyde Cox, Edward Lathem, and others. He also reveled in the company of younger poets, and admired especially Richard Wilbur, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Philip Booth, and William Meredith. In his last years, he enjoyed the company of Peter Davison, a young poet whose father was Edward Davison, the English poet who had nearly become Frost’s official biographer.

Davison lived in Cambridge, and he saw Frost regularly. He remembers: “I was often a visitor to his living room and can even recollect the fragrance of it, a little like dusty patchouli. Frost’s workroom, which I only once saw, was upstairs, with a Morris chair in it, a writing board across the arms, and a snowdrift of papers which, in the early afternoons, were shoveled and stacked by Kathleen Morrison, the devoted, astringent, and affectionate amanuensis who gave order and grace to his life in these years.” Davison recalled many small dinner parties at the homes of Archibald and Ada MacLeish and the Howard Mumford Joneses. These dinners would often be attended by younger poets in Frost’s circle. “We all cherished these evenings with him, especially the males: he was less open, perhaps, to the women poets,” says Davison.18 The one exception was Adrienne Rich, who had a deep knowledge of Frost and had been a student of Theodore Morrison’s at Harvard. She and Frost got along exceptionally well.

Frost’s circle in Cambridge was wide, and included John Holmes, a professor at Tufts, as well as Harvard professor I. A. Richards. The latter was a huge presence in the 1950s, an influential literary critic and theorist who also wrote poetry. He and Frost would meet for dinner or afternoon tea, and the conversation would often continue for many hours. Richards recalled that Frost “had an unusually theoretical mind, and liked to talk about language and meaning. He thought that poets understood more about language than linguists. Poets were the historians of language, he said. He knew vast stretches of English and American poetry by heart, and reached easily for examples in his conversation. I was always startled by his verbatim recall of poets from Shakespeare through Tennyson.”19

In public, Frost was consistently genial, even charming. In letters to friends and collectors, he maintained a gentle, Olympian tone, even when the subject was grave. In the summer of 1951, for example, a malignant growth on his face required surgery at the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover (and would require further surgery a few years later). Frost wrote jocularly to Louis Cohn about “what the sculptors did to me at the Hanover Hospital. General Ridgeway in Asia would call it operation Save Face, and that’s all right with me, if it turns out that my face is saved—more or less.”20

Although Frost wrote very little major poetry in his last decade or so, he had certainly not abandoned the idea of verse composition, and scattered through his later work one finds a number of memorable poems. To a large extent, his sense of self-value depended on the continuing production of verse. In his notebooks, he wrote, “We’ll have to have a new book pretty soon again only to show our development hasn’t been arrested by prosperity. Kay says so.”21 But it would be a dozen years before In the Clearing, his final volume, would appear, in 1962.

One of the best of the later poems is “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” This amusing parable, which Frost read to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the spring of 1950, concerns a king and his son who escape life in the palace to pursue a new life “in the guise of men.” Richard Poirier finds it “remarkable for the clarity and candor with which Frost declares what he has been about.”22 The king in the poem becomes a cook in some other king’s kitchen, but his natural wisdom shines through, and he is allowed to lecture his new boss on governance and the conduct of life. One “lesson” he presents is also a retrospective key to Frost’s own poetry:

“The only certain freedom’s in departure.

My son and I have tasted it and know.

We feel it in the moment we depart

As fly the atomic smithereens to nothing.

The problem for the King is just how strict

The lack of liberty, the squeeze of law

And discipline should be in school and state

To insure a jet departure of our going

Like a pip shot from ’twixt our pinching fingers.”

From beginning to end, Frost writes of journeys; departures and sudden arrivals are frequently the occasion for a poem. The arrival, as in “Directive,” “The Wood-Pile,” or “Ghost House” (which anticipates “Directive” by several decades), is often in a deserted landscape. Even “Into My Own,” which opens A Boy’s Will and remains the entry into Frost’s Complete Poems, is about a journey that the poet does not make:

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,

So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,

Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,

But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

Although Frost presents himself as a “realist,” he repeatedly suggests that the landscapes he writes about are interior settings, more dreamscape than landscape. He feels a pang of regret that the trees swaying before his eyes are “the merest mask of gloom” and not something hard and real. The power of Frost’s poetry derives, in part, from the aura of powerful sentiment barely held in check. “A poet is a master of sentiment,” he said to himself in his notebooks.23 “You’ve got to feel it, the emotion,” he said elsewhere, “but you hold back from saying it, keep it in. The power is there.”24

Frost thought a good deal about the nature of poetry, and his notebooks of 1950–55 are full of jottings such as these:

Poetry is a process

Poetry is the renewal of words

Poetry is the dawning of an idea

Poetry is that which tends to evaporate from

    both prose and verse when translated

Poetry is the liberal arts.

For Frost, poetry was life, or the perpetual effort to relate poetry to life and life to poetry. Poetry not only provided a spiritual life for Frost, it offered a concrete living, as he remarked in 1952: “Poetry has got me indirectly or directly practically all the living I have had.”25 It got him his job at Pinkerton, his Amherst job, the Michigan fellowships, the positions at Dartmouth and Harvard. It also brought him the substantial income (usually between two and three hundred dollars per reading) that came from his countless appearances at colleges and universities. Victor Reichert recalled that “performance was not incidental for Frost. His poems were meant to be embodied, to be ‘said,’ and he liked to say that they were especially meant for his voice. Reading aloud to audiences was more than just a way to earn a living. It was making a living in the profoundest sense.”26

Frost increasingly spent time with Hyde Cox, who reminded him of Edward Thomas: intellectually gifted, emotionally fragile, unsure of his own course in life. Frost had first been attracted by the young man’s frank indecision about a career as he wandered the country doing odd jobs. In the early 1940s, Cox had gone into publishing, taking a job with the firm of Duell, Sloan and Pearce, but life in the city grated on his nerves. Frost urged him to go into teaching, and Cox soon followed this advice by accepting a position at Phillips Exeter Academy. In the late forties, he became a lobster fisherman in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where his house nearby in Manchester overlooked the sea. Eventually, Cox became an active participant in the cultural life of Gloucester and president of the Cape Ann Historical Association—as well as an ardent friend of Frost’s.

Cox acted as intermediary between two important artists who had some interest in working with Frost: Walker Hancock, the sculptor, and Andrew Wyeth, the painter. Hancock, in March 1950, sculpted an impressive head of the poet in Gloucester, a piece that Frost considered the best likeness of him ever done. In 1952, as Frost’s eightieth birthday approached, Cox and Wyeth discussed the possibility of having some Wyeth paintings of New England landscapes as illustrations to an expanded edition of North of Boston that Frost hoped Holt would publish as part of his birthday celebrations. The book project never came to fruition, largely because Frost had not written enough poetry since the publication of Steeple Bush in 1947 to warrant a new edition; but he and Wyeth remained on friendly terms; indeed, their work has a great deal in common—a vivid, if mannered, realism, and a devotion to the natural world, to ordinary people, to simplicity of surface with apparent depths below. Both men acquired huge followings among people who did not ordinarily read poems or look at paintings, yet both also won the respect of academic critics.

*   *   *

When in Amherst, Frost often visited Robert Francis, a poet who lived in a secluded cottage called Fort Juniper, on Market Hill Road. “He would come unannounced,” Francis recalled, “but I was happy to see him. I’d admired him for many years, and he knew that. I used to send him poems, and he was very shrewd and generous. He was usually open, kind in his own way, but he could frighten you. There was so much not spoken, held in reserve. And he took offense easily, which meant you had to be careful.” The friendship was dampened when Frost discovered a poem called “Apple Peeler” that Francis wrote about a “virtuoso” who could peel an apple in one “unbroken spiral,” a maneuver like “a trick sonnet.”

“Frost thought I was making fun of his sonnet ‘The Silken Tent,’ which is written in a single sentence,” said Francis. But I explained to him that other poets did it. David Morton, for example, did it often. Frost gave me a wicked smile, a half smile, and said, ‘Oh, so he does? I see. I see.’ But he didn’t see. We never spoke about it again, though. I think he enjoyed having something over me, even if it was nothing.”27

The two of them—older and younger poet—would drink the dandelion wine that Francis made himself, and take long walks in the surrounding woods. “Frost seemed happier, in a way, in his later years than I remembered him in the thirties. He had had family troubles in those days, and his mood seemed much darker. Now he was the acknowledged king of poetry. Nobody doubted it. He could hardly keep up with the honors—prizes, honorary degrees, invitations to address this or that group. But he was able to relax in his role, to play the role. His brain was still teeming with ideas about poetry, and he never lost his interest in nature. We shared these two interests, poetry and nature. He would stop on our walks to examine a shrub or a strange fern—so alert to everything. ‘If you don’t know something specifically,’ he would say, ‘you don’t know it.’”

It was in the summer of 1953, after a visit to North Carolina, that Frost wrote “Kitty Hawk,” which he regarded as “the most important poem that he wrote in his last decade,” and a poem that “had immense personal meaning.”28 Frost later called it “a longish poem in two parts. Part One is a sort of personal story, an adventure of my boyhood. I was down there [in North Carolina] once when I was about nineteen. Alone, just wandering. Then I was invited back there sixty years later.… I use my own story of the place to take off into the story of the airplane. I make a figure of speech of it: How I might have taken off from my experience of Kitty Hawk and written an immortal poem, but how, instead, the Wright brothers took off from there to commit an immortality.” The second part of this two-part poem “goes into the thought of the on-penetration into matter and our great misgiving,” he added, calling this “the philosophical part” of the poem.29

At Bread Loaf in 1959, before reading “Kitty Hawk,” Frost mused aloud that “the whole, the great enterprise of life, of the world, the great enterprise of our race, is our penetration into matter, deeper and deeper; carrying the spirit deeper into matter.”30

In Part One, Frost recalls his trip into the Dismal Swamp:

When I came here young

Out and down along

Past Elizabeth City

Sixty years ago,

I was, to be sure,

Out of sorts with Fate,

Wandering to and fro

In the earth alone,

You might think too poor-

Spirited to care

Who I was or where

I was being blown

Faster than my tread—

Like the crumpled, better-

Left-unwritten letter

I had read and thrown.

Frost is utterly in control of the rhyme and meter, an old master of the craft returning to a hot point in memory that still smoldered after so many decades.

The poem meanders, although not randomly, attached to a biographical matrix but swirling into other regions effortlessly. He sees himself here “like a young Alastor,” referring to Shelley’s hero in “Alastor,” who (as Shelley himself said in his introduction to the poem) represents a “young man of uncorrupted feeling and adventurous genius led forth by an imagination inflamed and purified through familiarity with all that is excellent and majestic to the contemplation of the universe.” That contemplation begins freshly in Part Two, as Frost with Blakean intensity imagines the penetration of spirit into matter, taking the first flight of the Wrights as a fitting example of one attempt at such:

Spirit enters flesh

And for all it’s worth

Charges into earth

In birth after birth

Ever fresh and fresh.

The poem sprawls in the latter half, lacking the autobiographical narrative of the first part; but it remains an important example of the later Frost: canny, sharp, witty, unpredictable.

*   *   *

The honors kept rolling in. In June 1953, for instance, Frost accepted from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill his twenty-fifth honorary degree. This honor was especially meaningful, since Frost often visited Chapel Hill to read and lecture, at the invitation of his friend Clifford Lyons, a professor in the English department. Only a couple of months before this honorary degree, he had been awarded a $5,000 prize from the Academy of American Poets. Not long before that, he had toured the West Coast, concluding his tour with a reading at the University of California at Berkeley that drew twenty-five hundred people—one of the largest groups ever to attend a poetry reading in Berkeley. The appeal of Frost seemed to go beyond poetry now; he had turned himself, or been turned, into an American emblem.

Frost’s eightieth birthday was celebrated in grand style. The day before, he gave a news conference in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, answering questions from two dozen reporters for three hours before a dozen television cameras and under hot lights. That same evening, Holt sponsored a dinner for eighty dignitaries at the hotel, with a guest list including not only poets and critics but senators and jurists. Alfred Edwards, from Holt, spoke movingly of Frost’s unique place in American letters.

The next morning, on his actual birthday, Frost traveled to Amherst, where a small black-tie dinner sponsored by Amherst College was held at the Lord Jeffrey Inn. On behalf of everyone there, Hyde Cox presented Frost with a watercolor by Andrew Wyeth called Winter Sunlight. Robert Francis, who was at the dinner, recalled “the immense delight of Frost at receiving this gift. He was especially fond of Cox, who spoke so sweetly, unpretentiously.” Raymond Holden read a letter from the governor of New Hampshire, and Archibald MacLeish sat next to Frost and spoke with great dignity about Frost’s unique place in American literature—even though they had not always seen eye to eye in the past. The playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder sat on his other side. Louis Untermeyer was also there, and spoke affectionately about his longtime friend, quoting some lines from memory. President Cole of Amherst spoke, too, saying how glad the college was to have Frost back in its fold. “Overall, the speeches could have been pro forma, but they weren’t,” recalled Francis. “It was all quite genuine.”

Frost spoke last. As reported in the Amherst Alumni News, he responded to the often-quoted line that “poets die young” by saying that they die in many ways: “not just into the grave, but into businessmen, into critics, or into philosophers.” He claimed to be unsettled by the fact that so many of his friends at the head table had used the word “great” in talking about him. “People say you’re this and you’re that and you wonder if you’re anything,” he said. “All I’ve wanted to do is to write a few little poems it’d be hard to get rid of. That’s all I ask.”31