22

AGES AND AGES HENCE
1960–1963

Great times to be alive, aren’t they?

—FROST TO JOHN F. KENNEDY, JULY 24, 1962

The presidential election of 1960 was perilously close, with Kennedy and Nixon dividing the electorate almost evenly. Frost, who had supported Eisenhower with enthusiasm, balked at the prospect of a Nixon presidency, preferring the debonair, highly cultured senator from his own neck of the woods. “The only Puritans left these days are Roman Catholics,” he had declared when touting Kennedy at his eighty-fifth birthday dinner, and now as he traveled across the country to read and lecture, he seemed almost to be campaigning for Kennedy.

The intermediary between Kennedy and Frost was Congressman Stewart L. Udall, who had come into contact with Frost during his tenure as poetry consultant at the Library of Congress. They often dined together when Frost was in Washington, and Udall had recently stopped by to see Frost in Ripton. “It was Udall who suggested to Kennedy that Frost read a poem at his inauguration,” recalls William Meredith, who had grown increasingly close to Frost in the past year. “It was a novel idea, and one that focused attention on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture.”1 Furthermore, Kennedy had long admired Frost. “He liked poets and poetry, and he knew Frost’s work well. There was, of course, the Harvard and Cambridge connection, too,” says Gore Vidal. “During his campaign, he had a set speech that always ended with his thanking those who had come, then he’d quote Frost—from the end of ‘Stopping by Woods’ about having ‘miles to go before I sleep.’ That was the coda, always the same quote.”2

It was at Kennedy’s home in Georgetown, in early December of 1960, that Udall raised the possibility of Frost reading at the inaugural ceremony. “Oh, no!” Kennedy had said, when Udall first suggested it to him. “You know Frost always steals any show he is part of.” Kennedy was joking, but he may have entertained real misgivings about Frost. In any case, he went along with Udall’s proposal, believing that the benefits of associating with a beloved national icon outweighed the minor risks.

Kennedy telephoned Frost in Cambridge to discuss what he might read at the ceremony, gingerly suggesting that he write a poem especially for the occasion. The poet quickly dismissed the president-elect’s notion: “Oh, that could never happen,” he said. Kennedy followed with another suggestion: How about his reading “The Gift Outright,” changing the last line from “such as she would become” to “such as she will become,” making it a bit more optimistic and emphatic. “I suppose so,” Frost responded, hesitantly. Even a president-elect should not tamper with his work.

“Frost stayed at my house in the few days before the inauguration,” recalls Hyde Cox, “and he began to work on a poem specifically for the occasion. He felt he ought to.”3 Frost struggled right up to the night before the ceremony on January 20, 1960. What he had written was called, simply, “Dedication,” and he read it to a surprised Stewart Udall when the congressman came to pick him up at the hotel just before the inauguration. “Will it be all right if I make a few prefatory remarks?” Frost asked Udall. Already worried about Frost upstaging Kennedy, Udall asked how long the remarks might take. “Oh, I don’t know,” Frost said. “You can never tell, can you?” Udall was not amused.

The poem opens:

Summoning artists to participate

In the august occasions of the state

Seems something artists ought to celebrate.

Today is for my cause a day of days.

Sweeping grandly through the history of Europeans in the New World, beginning with Columbus, Frost prophesied “A golden age of poetry and power / Of which this noonday’s the beginning hour.” The poem is dreadful, but nobody could expect a poem written to order to meet Frost’s usual standards. It was at least appropriate for the occasion.

The newly minted poem was meant by Frost to serve as a preamble to his reading of “The Gift Outright.” It had been typed the night before in the hotel office, and the letters were not adequately dark. Frost worried that, in the January sun, he might have difficulty reading, and Udall volunteered to have the poem hastily retyped that morning on a special large-print typewriter with a fresh ribbon.

The ceremony began at ten on a bright, bitterly cold day with snow covering the ground. Richard Cardinal Cushing gave the invocation—thus recognizing the president-elect’s Catholicism, an American first. Marion Anderson sang the national anthem, and Lyndon B. Johnson was duly sworn in as vice president. One hour into the ceremony—just ahead of Kennedy’s swearing in—Frost was called forward. He ambled slowly to the podium, then fumbled for a while with his manuscript; at last, haltingly, he began to read his “Dedication.” But the light struck the page in such a way that he could not see, and he said, “I’m having trouble with this.” The new vice president tried to help by shielding the page with his top hat, but Frost brushed him aside with a joke. He then delighted the audience by launching into “The Gift Outright,” which he declaimed by heart. He ended magnificently, dragging out the last line: “Such as she was, such as she would become, has become, and I—and for this occasion let me change that to—what she will become.”

The crowd began to cheer, drowning out a gaffe: Frost thanked the “president-elect, Mr. John Finley.” (John Finley was a classicist at Harvard whom Frost knew slightly.) But the mistake passed unnoticed, and Frost was easily forgiven by those who heard it. He was by now the embodiment of American poetry: an icon caught in the act of being an icon. As the Washington Post said the next morning, “Robert Frost in his natural way stole the hearts of the Inaugural crowd.”4 Decades later, Americans who watched the ceremony on television still recall the hoary-haired figure in the black overcoat who put aside the script he could not read to recite from memory in his folksy manner. Poetry and politics had rarely rubbed shoulders so publicly in the history of the republic.

Paying a call on the freshly installed president at the White House before he left Washington for Cambridge, Frost deigned to offer grandfatherly advice: “Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don’t be afraid of power.”5 In a thank-you note to Frost, a week later, Kennedy scrawled in the margins, “Power All the Way.” He pointedly, it seems, did not include the other half of Frost’s formula (“poetry and power”) for the new Augustan Age, perhaps knowing intuitively what W. H. Auden once wrote, that “poetry makes nothing happen” but “survives in the valley of its making.”

*   *   *

Frost was lifted high, emotionally, by the national attention that came his way. “After the inaugural poem,” a friend recalls, “Frost’s fame penetrated to a new level. People on the street suddenly recognized him. He could not go into a restaurant without someone asking for his autograph or wanting to shake his hand.”6 For a man prone to depression, the adrenaline lift of public activity was extremely useful, and Frost was therefore highly responsive to a request that arrived barely eight weeks after the inauguration for him to visit Israel and Greece. The invitation came from Hebrew University, asking Frost to deliver the first lecture in their new program on American culture and civilization. “For Frost, who had always had so much interest in the Old Testament, this was irresistible,” noted Victor Reichert. “When somebody suggested he was too old for such a trip, he said he must go because he was too old.”7

Frost hoped that Kay would go with him, but she refused. Lawrance Thompson, however—always the faithful (if somewhat resentful) amanuensis—agreed to go. This excursion was quite an undertaking for a man of nearly eighty-seven, but “he believed every trip was going to be his last, and he wanted to make sure to get it in,” says Lesley Lee Francis. According to Thompson, Frost was now hotly in pursuit of “more fame and more glory,” that elusive halo.8 There was also Frost’s genuine wish to see Israel and Greece, the two cultures from which Western civilization had got its “running start / As it were from scratch,” as he wrote in “Kitty Hawk.”

The itinerary included Israel, Greece, and England, with Frost’s eighty-seventh birthday celebration to occur in Cambridge with E. M. Forster—an odd final twist, promoted by Thompson but never quite to Frost’s liking. Flying first-class overnight to the Lod airport in Israel, Frost was surrounded by reporters, most of them en route to the opening of the new Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv—the first American-owned hotel in that city. Also on the plane was Harry Golden, a writer who in conversation with the poet kept making comparisons between Frost and Carl Sandburg, much to Frost’s annoyance. He was especially upset when Golden told him they had similar haircuts. In his biography, Thompson finds this moment of apparent rivalry more telling than, perhaps, it really is; Frost certainly knew by now that his work had overshadowed Sandburg’s, and the comparisons launched by Golden must have been simply annoying.

Relations between Frost and Sandburg were actually quite cordial, though Frost was often annoyed by the fact that the press constantly linked them when they had little in common apart from a shock of unruly white hair. Sandburg’s fragile, imagistic lyrics and rambling Whitmanesque poems bore no resemblance to Frost’s work. It irritated Frost that Sandburg went around the country with his guitar, making a spectacle of himself instead of behaving in a more “dignified” way. More important, Sandburg was a liberal, defined by Frost as “someone who can’t take his own side in a quarrel.” “We’re entirely different in our work,” Frost said of Sandburg. “He has a good heart. He says in his poetry, ‘The people, yes.’ I say, ‘The people, yes—and no.’” As ever, Frost was a bundle of contradictions, but never irrational. He had put both agricultural life and the common man at the center of his best poems, celebrating physical work better than any poet before him. His poems were full of men digging, mowing, raking, and piling hay, mending walls, chopping firewood, planting seeds, pruning trees, picking apples, and so forth. Nevertheless, he maintained his anti–New Deal conservatism to the end, believing it was better for one to provide for oneself and one’s family than to have the state do it. He hated the notion of the collective, of the masses. And he was always resistant to the concept of trying to legislate morality. “Laws are what make crime,” he wrote in one of his last journal entries.9 In this, he was perhaps less a conservative than a libertarian.

During his ten days in Israel, Frost stayed at the majestic King David Hotel—the former headquarters of the British during the Mandate and the scene of bloody fighting during the War of Independence in 1948. Its amber stone walls were still pocked from gunfire, a vivid reminder of that war. Frost and Thompson were given a tour of the Jordanian Old City the next day, followed by American cameramen from NBC as they entered the ancient walled city through the fabled Dung Gate. Led by an Arab guide, they climbed the narrow, winding pathway of the Via Dolorosa, tracing the Stations of the Cross. Frost was taken inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the holiest sites of Christianity, and shown the spot where the True Cross was supposedly planted. The guide asked if he wanted to kiss the spot—the traditional gesture for pilgrims—but Frost claimed (half whimsically) that he was “not good enough for that.” To Thompson, Frost expressed his personal disbelief in the literal aspects of Christianity, although he said he preferred these myths to the more secular myths about the origins of humanity that had come down from Darwin.10

The centerpiece of the Israeli visit was the lecture at Hebrew University on March 13. Frost announced, humorously, that he was not going to talk about American civilization but to be it. He quickly moved into a reading of several of his major poems, then opened the floor to questions from the capacity audience. The cameramen from NBC were still following him, and he was bathed in bright light. He explained to the university audience that he had spent much of his life “as a professor, among professors,” and he argued that “education elevates trouble to a higher plane.” In essence, he gave a brilliant defense of his own skeptical approach to life, a life “with more questions than answers.” The performance—mostly a monologue, with a few polite interruptions from the audience—lasted for two hours, with huge applause at the end. As usual, Frost had delivered value for money.

He spent the rest of the week touring the country and meeting with local dignitaries, including President Itzhak Ben-Zvi. Although Frost had previously said that he viewed Israel as an “American colony,” he found the strangeness of the landscape, architecture, customs, and food more than he had banked on. Making matters worse, he was soon gripped by a fierce intestinal disorder that meant he had to spend most of his time in the hotel room. He asked Lawrance Thompson to cancel the English leg of the journey, and he nearly canceled the Greek portion, too.

After a couple of days in bed, he felt well enough to continue on to Greece, where he was met by the American ambassador, Ellis O. Briggs, whose wife took Frost in hand, prescribing a diet of tea and custard that worked almost miraculously to soothe Frost’s digestive problems. The recovery was so remarkable that Frost felt strong enough to lecture three times. The Greek audiences were impressed by his energy, wit, and ample knowledge of ancient Greek culture. By chance, an old friend and colleague from Amherst, G. Amour Craig, was visiting Greece with his wife at this time, and they took Frost to the Acropolis. But extensive sightseeing was out of the question: Frost had managed to summon the strength for three public performances, and that was all there was left in him. Thompson said in his notes that Frost seemed “terribly homesick” and wanted to get back to Cambridge as soon as possible.

He was driven to the airport in the ambassador’s limousine and deposited like a head of state on the runway itself. He and Thompson stopped only briefly in England on the way home—just long enough to attend a party honoring him at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. He also had tea with Sir Charles Tennyson, a descendant of the great Victorian poet, who headed a society, as Frost put it, “created for the prevention of forgetting Tennyson.” The excursion to see E. M. Forster in Cambridge was canceled because Frost began to experience intestinal problems again, with added dizziness and faintness of breath.

An English doctor was recommended by the U.S. Embassy, and the diagnosis (delivered to Thompson) was unnerving: “I can tighten up his bowels, all right,” the doctor said, “but it’s his heart that worries me.” The beat was irregular and slow. When Thompson conveyed this to Frost, the poet grew panicky. He dictated a wire to Kay: “I AM ORDERED HOME BY EMBASSY DOCTOR, WORN OUT.” They flew home two days later, with Frost “unsteady on his feet, pale, shaky—like a very old man.”11

*   *   *

Frost went home to Cambridge to be nursed by Kay. Showing great resilience, he appeared at Amherst two weeks later for his usual round of talks and readings. “One of the main things about Frost’s life in these last years was his robustness,” recalls Jack A. W. Hagstrom, who by now had become a doctor. Hagstrom found Frost “astonishingly fit for a man his age, always ready to go on long walks, eager to stay up late. There was never any sign of his wanting to go to bed. He would never say, ‘I’m tired, and I need to get some sleep.’”12 Frost held court in the lobby of the Lord Jeffrey Inn until well past midnight most evenings.

The next big event on Frost’s plate was a reading at the State Department in Washington, billed as “An Evening with Robert Frost.” It had been planned for some time, and the president and first lady were planning to attend. Once again, Stewart Udall—now secretary of the interior in the Kennedy cabinet—was involved in arranging this event. Gratefully, Frost wrote to him, “By the accident of our falling in friendship with you and Lee [Mrs. Udall], we have been brought out on top of a new pinnacle of view that makes me for one feel dangerously like a monarch of all fifty states I survey.”13

The reading was held in the State Department auditorium on May 1, with a full house that included numerous members of the U.S. House and Senate, a couple of Supreme Court justices, and various ambassadors from abroad. Douglas Dillon, the secretary of the treasury, introduced Udall, who, in turn, introduced Frost. Much to the poet’s disappointment, President Kennedy was prevented from coming by a sudden crisis in Southeast Asia—the very beginnings of U.S. involvement with Vietnam. Frost began the hour with observations on the differences and similarities between science and poetry, one of his favorite topics, then read a selection of his most well known poems. The audience was so taken with him that they called him back on stage for several encores.

The following day, Frost had a chance to do something for Stewart Udall, who had been called onto the carpet for allegedly asking a wealthy oilman to solicit his associates to contribute to a $100-a-plate Democratic fund-raiser. Udall and Frost were planning to have lunch together anyway, but Udall asked the poet to appear next to him at a press conference beforehand. In essence, Frost would appear as a tacit character witness. With some reservations, he agreed to help the man who had done so much for him in the past year: quite literally, he stood beside him, so that photographers could mark the event. Somewhat pointedly, he refused to make any comment on Udall’s situation.

Frost remained in Washington for a couple of weeks, giving another lecture as consultant in the humanities to the Library of Congress, and performing other small duties associated with the job. He was, however, glad to get back to Vermont, where his latest, and final, book of poems awaited finishing touches. “He was aware that this would be his swan song to poetry,” a friend recalled. “It had already been postponed many times, largely because Frost was unsure about the quality of the poems.”14 For some time now, the working title had been The Great Misgiving, a suitably ambiguous phrase. Frost reconsidered at the last moment and chose a more obvious and optimistic title, In the Clearing—derived from “A Cabin in the Clearing,” the third poem in the book (which had been his Christmas poem for 1951).

Frost worked on the volume right through the new year 1962, finishing the last poem (which he characteristically claimed to have written “right off the reel” in one sitting) on January 12, at Pencil Pines. The poem is fresh and lyrical, addressing a theme familiar to readers of Frost’s earlier work:

In winter in the woods alone

Against the trees I go.

I mark a maple for my own

And lay the maple low.

At four o’clock I shoulder ax,

And in the afterglow

I link a line of shadowy tracks

Across the tinted snow.

I see for Nature no defeat

In one tree’s overthrow

Or for myself in my retreat

For yet another blow.

This poem, stylistically, might well have been included in A Boy’s Will. Frost recapitulates a familiar theme: the poet striking out by himself, moving “Against the trees.” There is no merging with nature; the human separation, even exclusion, from nature is Frost’s perennial subject. There is a sense of violence, too, as the poet lays the maple low with his ax in an act of defiance, of asserting his will over the natural state of things. But, wisely, Frost sees “no defeat” for nature in this single act of transgression. And, by implication, there is no defeat for the poet himself in death. The last two lines, to my ear, suggest defiance, a point Frost emphasized at a reading of this poem when he said the last line was “a threat to write another book.”15

As ever, Frost drew on earlier material for several of the poems included in this volume, including “The Draft Horse,” written in 1920, about the same time he wrote “The Lockless Door” (which was published in New Hampshire). This strange, even cruel, poem opens with a typical Frostian image:

With a lantern that wouldn’t burn

In too frail a buggy we drove

Behind too heavy a horse

Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

As George Monteiro notes, there are echoes here of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” although the “little horse” is replaced by a “too-heavy horse.”16 Overall, the effects of the later poem are immeasurably darker, and less subtle, than “Stopping by Woods.”

In the second stanza, something astonishing and unexpected happens:

And a man came out of the trees

And took our horse by the head

And reaching back to his ribs

Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down

With a crack of a broken shaft.

And the night drew through the trees

In one long invidious draft.

Read solely on a literal level, these stanzas make no sense. Men do not leap out of the woods and stab a horse to death, at least not in the realm of ordinary reality. I read this as a poem about the failure of vision, with the “too frail” buggy in the first stanza standing in for the poet’s craft, which seems to be failing him here. It is depression, accompanied by a lack of imagination, that leaps from nowhere and hobbles the poet at the source of his creative power.

The speaker, part of a “we” who is not identified, seems bewildered by the experience and defensive. He does not want to “ascribe” to hatred any more than seems absolutely necessary. The poem ends:

We assumed that the man himself

Or someone he had to obey

Wanted us to get down

And walk the rest of the way.

Frost takes for granted a violent, confusing universe where dark agents enforce their wishes in the most unexpectedly harsh fashion. He also takes for granted that his work as a poet has been, and will continue to be, hampered by fierce and unexpected bouts of anxiety and depression—indeed, by a lack of imaginative power.

Many poems in this book fall into the category of light verse, though there is often a darker side to the joke, as in “The Objection to Being Stepped On,” a poem about stepping on a rake and being smacked in the “seat of my sense.” Frost, as ever, enjoys the doubleness of a concept; a tool may turn unexpectedly into a weapon; indeed, the Latin word arma (as Frost knew) could be translated either way. The poem had been Frost’s Christmas poem for 1957, and was probably based on the time Elinor, in 1927, stepped on a rake and broke her nose when the handle flew up into her face. Frost’s own meditations on this poem before a reading at Bread Loaf certainly reach beyond anything that is actually in the text: “You have to be reminded,” he said, “that the Hungarian Revolution that occurred just before my time, that I heard a lot about when I was young, was all fought with farm tools—the poor peasants—pitchforks and flails and anything they could lay hands on. Weapons go to tools and tools go to weapons—it’s back and forth.”17

“Away!” and “A Cabin in the Clearing” count among the better poems in the volume, and they show off Frost in two of his favorite forms: the brief, ironic lyric and the dramatic dialogue in blank verse. The former ends with an aphoristic snippet worthy of one of poetry’s great aphorists:

And I may return

If dissatisfied

With what I learn

From having died.

The latter offers a conversation between a garden mist and a wreath of chimney smoke, which are both watching two human beings in their cabin. As Richard Wilbur said, “The ‘clearing’ of the poem is a little area of human coherence, a bit of the universe become a colony of mind.”18 As ever, Frost leaps to metaphysical considerations from small, familiar images. The world, for him, is a cache of symbols; hardly anything is not useful to the observant eye.

The volume was published on Frost’s eighty-eighth birthday, and was an immediate best-seller, eventually reaching sixty thousand copies—a staggering amount for a book of poetry. The reviews were usually respectful; indeed, most of them were written by friends and admirers: Richard Wilbur, Peter Davison, John Ciardi, John Holmes. For most critics, the publication of In the Clearing was another occasion to look back on the whole of Frost and to ponder the shape of the career. Ciardi, for instance, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, noted “two main stages” in Frost’s verse: “the poet of passion and the poet of wit and whimsy.”19 Shrewdly, Ciardi observed that in many of Frost’s poems a mix of these two modes occurs, and this can be confusing. It was Frost himself who once wrote: “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling / To get adapted to my kind of fooling.”

Many poems in this last volume do not do justice to the man who wrote “Mowing,” “Home Burial,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Design,” “The Silken Tent,” “The Most of It,” and “Directive.” But enough glimmers of that poet occur to make one grateful for the book’s existence. In a way, one can often learn to read a poet better by focusing on his or her lesser poems, where the dazzle is less intense, and hence the lineaments of the art more visible.

*   *   *

It had been a difficult winter for Frost. On his customary stopover in Georgia at Agnes Scott College, he had felt that some of the questions from the audience were belligerent, and he’d vowed never to return to the college, which had been a regular point on his compass of readings for many years. He arrived in South Miami quite ill, and was soon hospitalized with a case of pneumonia. Throughout February he lay quietly at Pencil Pines, recovering with the aid of two nurses.

Returning to Cambridge in March, he was well enough by his birthday to respond to a letter from President Kennedy urging the poet to accept from him personally the Congressional Gold Medal that had been authorized during the previous administration. Thus Frost traveled again to Washington. The evening of the same day he received the medal, a party for his eighty-eighth birthday was held for him at the Pan American Union building, with two hundred invited guests in attendance. A number of friends gave toasts in his honor, including Chief Justice Earl Warren, Adlai Stevenson, Justice Felix Frankfurter, Mark Van Doren, Al Edwards, and Robert Penn Warren. Robert Penn Warren recalled, “It was one of those rare public events when people from many fields—all of them distinguished—join to celebrate a poet. Frost was recognized as more than a poet. He was a monument. He looked the part, too, with a massive head, his hair unruly and long and snowy. He was the last to speak, and it was late. Everyone had gone on too long. But Frost was sparky. He was ready for his say. He told jokes, and held the floor for over half an hour. He recited a few poems, but mostly he talked. There was granite in his voice, steady and strong. He was as happy as I’d ever seen him.”20

Frost ended his talk with a tribute to Kay Morrison, whom he called his “devoted secretary” and praised for her “two decades, even more, of friendship.” He then recited “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” which he claimed “was written for her in the first place.” He spoke the poem slowly, paused, and with a gesture of the hand toward Kay, repeated the last two lines:

Never again would birds’ song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

He returned to Cambridge, then to Amherst for ten days in residence at the Lord Jeffrey, as usual. He was basking in the success of In the Clearing now, with frequent calls from Al Edwards bearing news of strong sales and good reviews. His energy was high, as the Scottish poet Alastair Reid noted at a dinner party in late April in Cambridge. “I went to dinner at the house of Peter Davison,” Reid remembers, “and Frost was the centerpiece, the attraction. He clearly expected everyone to listen to him, and they did. He talked excitedly about poetry, about politics—whatever came into his head. The evening wore on, and there was no sign of his stopping. I was told that recently he had given a reading at Sarah Lawrance that lasted for three hours, and nobody dared interrupt him. The level of energy was amazing. Nobody could leave the dinner, not without offending Frost. So we stayed, and stayed.”21

In early May, he returned to Washington to spend a week as consultant in the humanities—part of the busy public round that now made up his life. One night, while he was dining with the Udalls, an intriguing possibility was set before him. Udall wondered if Frost might go to the Soviet Union if an exchange could be arranged. The poet indicated interest, but said he would have to think it over carefully. He was now a very old man, and his health was uncertain. With some trepidation, he recalled the trip to Israel and Greece, which had put immense strain on his heart. He decided he would go only if a personal invitation from President Kennedy arrived, and he hinted that if he went, he hoped very much to meet the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev.

Frost wrote a long, somewhat unctuous, letter to Kennedy, his enthusiasm for this trip spilling over into the margins. “How grand for you to think of me this way and how like you to take the chance of sending anyone like me over there affinitizing with the Russians,” he exclaimed. Frost said he could imagine “the Russian and the American democracies drawing together, theirs easing down from a kind of abstract severity to taking less and less care of the masses: ours creeping up to taking more and more care of the masses as they grow innumerable.” He spoke of a “noble rivalry” between the two great superpowers.22

The State Department arranged the trip for August, and Frost invited his friend Frederick B. Adams, director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, to accompany him. Stewart Udall was going, too—it was originally his trip; as secretary of the interior, he was heading a delegation to visit hydroelectric plants. A young poet and Russian translator, F. D. Reeve, was also invited along (at the suggestion of William Meredith) to help with the language. Reeve recalls, “The assignment was unusual for all three of us. Frost had traveled to England and Israel in recent years, but he hadn’t been abroad much and never under such authority. Adams, as a leading librarian, had dealt with many people of various persuasions, but never with Russians in their own country. And I, though I had been to Russia and I remembered Frost personally in a hazy, boyish way—he had taught our high school English class one day twenty years before—had never been a cicerone, much less aide to such a man.”23

One intriguing absence on this trip was Lawrance Thompson. After the Israel-Greece trip, where a good deal of tension between Thompson and Frost had developed, Frost was perhaps not eager to spend much time in close quarters with his biographer once again. He pretended that he had meant nothing by not inviting him, but Thompson knew better. Indeed, this may well have been the fatal straw that turned Thompson against Frost in such a way that he would take it out on the poet in his three-volume biography, where he never lost an opportunity to discover and underline faults in Frost.24

On the plane going over, Frost mused to Reeve, “It’s a grand adventure, isn’t it? This going to Russia, I mean. Crazy, too. At my age going all the way over there just to show off.” Frost was in high spirits, meditating on poetry: “Every poem has its own little tune,” he said. “That’s the way it comes to me, as a tune. You got to know how to do that, say it so you get the tune, too. Rhyme. You can’t do it without that. Most of the time. You got to know how to take care of the rhyme.”25

Arriving in Moscow on August 29, Frost was greeted by a delegation that included two American diplomats and five members of the Writers Union, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a young star on the poetry scene (his “Babi Yar” had been published to vast acclaim the year before, and “Stalin’s Heirs” was soon to appear). The writers who gathered around Frost were sympathetic to the fiercely independent quality of his work, and they appreciated his humanism. “For them,” says Reeve, “Frost personified this tradition [of humanism]. Frost’s most important accomplishment in Russia was not the political embassy he aspired to but the enactment of freewheeling literary activity which he, by his poetry readings and by his talk, encouraged among the Russians.”26

Frost, Adams, and Reeve were driven in long black Zims to the Sovietskaya, a prestigious hotel reserved for foreign guests. (Udall was lodged elsewhere.) On the outside, the hotel was modern looking in the dreary style of 1930s modernism; inside, the lobby was adorned with clunky pillars of marble and leather armchairs. Small clusters of visitors—Arabs, Chinese, French—moved about in self-contained groups. Frost was besieged by requests for interviews, and he readily gave them. As Reeve put it, “the business of being the leading American poet as an official guest in Moscow nearly overwhelmed us.”27

Frost was occupied during the day with appearances and interviews, and often dined at night with well-known Soviet writers, including the seventy-year-old novelist Konstantin Paustovsky, and Kornei Chukovsky, the eighty-year-old critic and writer of books for children. Chukovsky was a winner of the Lenin Prize and, only a few months before, had received an honorary degree from Oxford University; he told Frost that his collection of Russian folktales had sold over sixty million copies. “Chukovsky’s acumen and style, his erudition and unusual knack for the apt gesture, set the tone of the evening,” Reeve said.28

One evening they went to a café as the guest of Yevtushenko, whose youthful arrogance and energy were a contrast to Frost, who seemed reserved by comparison. Other young poets were there, including Yevgeny Vinokurov and Andrei Voznesensky. The host kept filling everyone’s glasses with wine, playing the role of arbiter bibendi to the hilt. At one point, the conversation turned to good people versus bad, and Yevtushenko suggested that there were few bad people in the world, but they were well organized. He said they occasionally even provoked good people into “doing good.” Frost replied, “Yes, like killing them.”

Frost recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to the whole café—to everyone’s obvious pleasure. The group went back to Yevtushenko’s apartment for dinner. “Frost was enjoying himself among these vibrant, self-confident poets,” said Reeve, “but, I think, he more and more felt that their world was scarcely his.”29

On September 3, Frost’s party traveled to Leningrad, one of the world’s most beautiful cities and a virtual museum of Russian imperial history, with palaces and elegant town houses, museums and libraries. The Leningrad Pravda recorded Frost’s arrival the following day, and its assessment of his career focused on the proletarian nature of his work:

Literary critics rightly call Frost a worker poet, a poet of labor. Farmers, hired hands, woodchoppers, workers are the central figures in his verse tales. The poet is very familiar with the people he writes about: for thirty-eight years he worked as a village teacher, a farmer, a newspaper reporter, before he made up his mind to publish his first book of verse.

Frost’s poetry is profoundly civic. In many of his works he reflects on the human worth of the simple laborer, on his creative energy and love of freedom. Frost can genuinely be regarded as a spokesman of the dreams of the progressive, democratic segments of contemporary America. The basis of his creative writing is philosophic reflection on the permanent grandeur of the laboring man, the humanistic idea of the harmonious and all-inclusive reconstruction of the world.30

Pravda was not entirely wrong. Frost is genuinely a poet of labor, a man whose actual experience on the farm had profoundly affected him; more than any other poet of similar stature, he celebrates work, putting the activity of labor at the center of many of his best poems. Nevertheless, “the harmonious and all-inclusive reconstruction of the world” could not be called a self-conscious aspect of his project.

The highlight of the visit to Leningrad was an encounter with Anna Akhmatova, the greatest Russian poet of the century. They met over lunch at the dacha of Mikhail Alexeyev, a literary critic and director of research at Pushkin House. The dacha, some fifty minutes from Leningrad by car, was an airy and bright country house surrounded by a waist-high wooden fence. Akhmatova arrived shortly after Frost, “in a dark dress, a pale lilac shawl over her shoulders, august and dignified with her white hair and deep eyes.”31 The poets greeted each other deferentially, and the conversation at lunch ranged widely over favorite writers, from Greek and Latin to American and English. Akhmatova proved an erudite, formidable conversationalist, and Frost was impressed. Despite obvious differences, these poets had something in common: both came of age just before the First World War broke out and both were known for clear, distinct imagery and traditional subjects. Both had suffered much, achieved much, and been granted huge amounts of respect in their own countries. (Akhmatova, in particular, had been attacked for her refusal to write poems that seemed appropriately political, and it was only during the recent cultural thaw that she had been rehabilitated.) For both poets, the effort to bring ordinary speech into the realm of poetic expression had been central to their poetic enterprise.

Reeve thought that Frost “seemed to feel out of things” when several Russians began to sing the praises of Akhmatova. He tried to rescue the situation by praising Frost, and made remarks meant to draw attention his way. But the old poet turned on him, furious: “No more of that, none of that, you cut that out,” he snapped. When Reeve tried to explain what he meant, Frost hushed him, saying, “Cut it out.”

Frost declined to recite any poems, but encouraged Akhmatova to do so, and she offered two poems in Russian; her nobility and passion communicated itself, even though Frost did not understand what she was saying. He thanked her sincerely. “It’s very musical,” he said. “You can hear the music in it. It’s very good.”

That night, Frost gave a public reading at Pushkin House, on Vasily Island just across from the Winter Palace. The auditorium was crowded, and the audience responded warmly to Frost, even to his characteristic joking. He recited (often from memory) many of his classic poems, including “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Birches,” and “Mending Wall.” The poems were then read in translation by young Russian poets, although sometimes the translations and originals did not exactly coincide. No one seemed to care. The applause was thunderous.

Back in Moscow a day later, Frost eagerly awaited an invitation to meet with Premier Khrushchev. It looked, at first, as though only Stewart Udall would meet the premier, and this upset Frost terribly. When he learned that Udall had, in fact, already departed for Georgia, where Khrushchev was staying at his dacha, Frost was outraged, considering this a form of desertion. He had been wanting to confront the Soviet leader, to show his mettle in the face of immense power. Meeting Khrushchev had come to seem a test of some kind, and he wanted it to happen. When the invitation finally came, he was both thrilled and nervous.

Shortly before the trip began, Frost experienced severe stomach cramps, but a suggestion that the trip be canceled was dealt with sternly by Frost: “No, this is what I came for.” He flew on September 7, as planned, to the Crimea. At the airport in Sochi, he and his group were greeted by an official delegation and driven in a limousine to Georgia, an hour away, where the premier’s dacha was located on a lush hilltop. First, however, they stopped to rest and eat at the guest house of the Ministry of Health.

Frost was by now feeling worse, and a local doctor was called in. She examined Frost and said he was neither very well nor very sick. He was suffering from a case of nervous indigestion, she suggested. If the situation worsened, he must return at once to Moscow for further treatment. Frost, of course, refused to entertain this idea. He would meet Khrushchev at whatever cost to himself.

Frost’s Soviet hosts soon informed the poet that the premier was sending his own physician to look after him, and that he would come himself to see Frost as soon as possible. Soon a slim, middle-aged doctor appeared in a tan nankeen jacket. He examined Frost with self-conscious gravity. The patient had developed a fever, and seemed agitated and weak; his stomach rumbled. The doctor quizzed Reeve about the poet’s past medical history, his recent travel, and the background to his present condition. A bland diet and rest were recommended.

Outside the room, palm trees swayed in the warm winds. Before long, Khrushchev himself appeared at the guest house and spoke in the hall with the doctor. Frost was informed of the premier’s arrival, and immediately rose to put on socks and shoes. Reeve could see that Frost was terribly anxious, but still eager for this encounter. He had definite things he wanted to say.

Khrushchev came into the bedroom in a dapper olive-tan suit, which he wore over a beige Ukrainian blouse—rather different from the image he had projected on his visit to America some years before. He seemed, to Reeve, full of vigor and courtesy. He said he was honored to meet Frost, and warned him to follow the doctor’s orders carefully. Frost expressed pleasure that the premier had made this effort to see him, and joked that doctors could not be trusted. He boasted that he would live to be a hundred, which would make him half the age of his country at its bicentennial. The conversation ranged widely, from art to poetry and the relation of the artist to society. Frost said that Khrushchev had obviously done a good deal to support poetry: he was very impressed with what he had seen of Russian poets. He also brought greetings from President Kennedy.

Khrushchev apparently suspected that Frost was holding back, that he had something in particular to say to him, so he asked the poet directly if this was the case. Frost acknowledged that he did. For years, he had thought about the conflict between the superpowers, and now was his chance to put a significant oar in the water. He “made it clear that he assumed the Soviet system was here to stay,” says Reeve, “that, like it or not, socialism was inevitable,” and he told Khrushchev that he admired the way he used power with courage and audacity.32 In this he was quite sincere: Frost always admired people who could summon and utilize authority well.

Turning to the role of the poet, Frost suggested that a poet could help a government foster character: “A great nation makes great poetry, and great poetry makes a nation.”33 Circling around this theme, he spoke warmly of the “noble rivalry” between the United States and the Soviet Union, and pressed for “candid understanding” between the superpowers. He also argued for the benefits of cultural exchanges.

Then he moved to the core of his burden: the Berlin situation. With stunning audacity, he proposed reuniting East and West Berlin, a suggestion that provoked Khrushchev into defending the current arrangement. He was genuinely worried, the premier said, about the threat posed by West Germany, and he regretted the fact that NATO had allowed it to become remilitarized. He added that NATO was not a real threat, given Soviet military power: within thirty minutes, Soviet missiles could blast all of Europe to smithereens. He told Frost that Kennedy himself had wanted to sign a pact with him, but that he couldn’t because of political conditions in the United States.

Frost returned to the issue of Berlin, saying that this unstable arrangement could provoke a world war. Perhaps to flatter the premier, he said that the next hundred years belonged to the United States and the Soviet Union together. At this point, Khrushchev noted that “the Warsaw Pact countries were forging ahead economically and that they would soon overtake the Common Market,” at which point Frost returned to his earlier theme of “horse-trading, of recognizing the present limits of political power and the continual drawing closer of the capitalist and the planned economies, of what he called the democracy straining upward toward socialism and the socialist democracy humanizing downward from the severity of its ideal.”34

At a crucial turn, Frost declared, “God wants us to contend.” He added, “You have only progress in conflict.” Khrushchev responded by saying that the Warsaw Pact nations were young and vital, but that the United States and Western Europe were based on a system thousands of years old; indeed, they were saddled with a “defunct economic system.” “This reminded him,” said Reeve, “of an anecdote reported in Gorky’s memoirs of Tolstoy, where Tolstoy told about being too old and too weak and too infirm to do it but still having the desire.”35 Frost laughed, and said perhaps he and the premier were too old to “do it,” but that the United States was still too young to have to worry in that regard.

Frost reminded Khrushchev that both the United States and the Soviet Union had a common European ancestry, with certain cultural values that were shared; by contrast, he said that Africa showed an “absence of culture,” while China was “impossibly foreign.” Khrushchev remained passive, patient, even indulgent. He and Frost soon agreed that there should be no name-calling, no propaganda or blackguarding between their two countries.

After ninety minutes had passed, Khrushchev asked if Frost was not getting tired. Frost said no, and that he was delighted to have such a frank exchange. In fact, he felt quite well now. Khrushchev, in turn, said it was a pleasure to meet such an eminent poet; he asked that Frost convey his greetings to President Kennedy when he returned home and pass on the substance of their conversation. They stood together, shook hands, and the premier left, followed by his aides.

Frost immediately slumped back onto the bed, putting his feet up. “Well, we did it, didn’t we?” he said to Reeve, obviously pleased by the meeting. “He’s a great man,” he added. “He knows what power is and isn’t afraid to take hold of it. He’s a great man, all right.”36 Reeve reminded Frost that he had wanted to give the premier a copy of In the Clearing, and Frost hastily inscribed a copy and gave it to Reeve to take to Khrushchev before he departed. “I took it downstairs and handed it to Khrushchev, who was sitting beside the drive in a green, open Chaika convertible,” Reeve recalls. “His secretary and doctor were in the back. The escort was a short way off. For a moment it seemed improbable, there in that lush, azure world, that the dramatic meeting which we all had been at had actually occurred.”37

It had been a spectacular meeting. The most powerful figure in the Soviet Union had met with an American cultural icon, and they had freely talked about matters of huge cultural import. They had exchanged witticisms and barbs, had praised each other for their vitality, and had acknowledged the responsibility of government in the maintainance of cultural traditions. They had, as Reeve put it, “decried the horrors of war and insisted on the necessity of using force to maintain control, to preserve pride, to assert tradition.”38

On Sunday, September 9, Frost and his companions flew home on a Pan American jet. The seventeen-hour flight exhausted him further, and when he arrived at Idlewild Airport he was in no condition to be interviewed; but a cluster of reporters surrounded him, and he made some off-the-cuff remarks about his meeting with Khrushchev that he would soon come to regret. “Khrushchev said we were too liberal to fight,” he remarked. “I suppose he thought we’d stand there for the next hundred years saying, ‘on the one hand—but on the other hand.’” When asked if he had any message to deliver to President Kennedy, Frost acknowledged that he did. “I don’t ‘plan’ to see him. I wait for the President,” he said.39

As it was, Kennedy never called or even sent a note to thank Frost for his efforts, and Frost was deeply hurt. Even worse, letters arrived questioning Frost about the remark that Americans were “too liberal to fight.” He was accused of aiding and abetting those, like the John Birch Society, who actually sought to make matters worse between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Reeve was philosophical about Frost’s remarks: “Plunged into a press conference at Idlewild, just off the plane and tired after two weeks on the road and a seventeen-hour trip home, Frost may appear to have put his foot in it, so to speak, in quoting Khrushchev as he did. But he had expressed many times before this press conference both his own attitude toward liberalism and the attitude he understood Khrushchev to be taking. He believed that the world today is dominated not so much by ideals and ‘isms’ as by actual power balance. He urged that his country be ready ultimately to risk its own defense and be willing always to make every gesture of magnanimity. Political power, cultural excellence, and moral integrity were, for him, inseparable. Those ‘liberals’ who lacked his strength of conviction seemed to him, as he put it, sapheads. He didn’t admire them. He deeply admired Khrushchev, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party—‘he’s our enemy and he’s a great man’—for the drive and purposefulness of his vision of power.”40

*   *   *

Old age had finally caught up with Frost, who now stumbled from crisis to crisis. Most frightening, a prostate condition that had plagued him for some years became suddenly worse after he got back from Russia, and his doctor in Cambridge explained that surgery loomed in the not-too-distant future. In the meanwhile, he refused to lie low. First, he visited Dartmouth, where he gave a major address, then traveled to Amherst for his usual fall stint, staying at the Lord Jeffrey for ten days. The current president of Amherst, Calvin H. Plimpton, announced that a recent gift of $3.5 million would be used to construct a major new building at the center of the campus: the Robert Frost Library. The long, often affectionate, and mutually productive relationship between Frost and Amherst would be fittingly marked. Frost was profoundly moved by this gesture.

On October 20, Frost headed to Washington, D.C., where he addressed the first National Poetry Festival three days later at the Library of Congress. This was a particularly tense week in Washington as the Cuban missile crisis was under way, posing a very real threat of nuclear war. Only President Kennedy’s firm, clear-eyed handling of the situation averted disaster, and Frost was duly impressed by the president’s resolve. While giving his talk at the Library of Congress, he interrupted himself to return to the remark he had made at Idlewild: “I’ve joked about liberals a great deal,” he said, “and there’s been something going around. I wonder how many of you’ve heard it: that I was told in Russia that Americans were too liberal to fight, or something like that. Nothing like that did I hear. What I heard was, rather, a pleasantry from the greatest ruler in the world, you know, the almighty, and in his genial way he just said, ‘As Tolstoy said to Gorki’—or vice versa, I’ve forgotten which; it was a very literary conversation—‘As Tolstoy said to Gorki, “There’s such a thing as a nation getting so soft it couldn’t—wouldn’t fight.”’ See, that’s all. He was just saying there was such a thing, and he might be suggesting that we better look out. See, that’s all, it was a pleasantry. It wasn’t a defiant thing, nothing was defiant.”41 The old tongue still flickered back to this broken mental tooth. He wanted to put something right that he had got a little wrong by speaking too offhandedly.

Frost went on to Ohio, where he spoke at Kenyon College, then to Michigan to receive an honorary degree from the University of Detroit and to give a reading. His host was Peter Stanlis, who recalls that “Frost was very nervous before the reading, which was held in a huge auditorium. Over ten thousand people were there—the largest audience Frost had ever read to—and they cheered the poet. There was great enthusiasm for this reading. He was in wonderful form.”42

Frost continued on to Chicago for a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Poetry, a magazine that had been so influential in making his name known to the reading public so many decades before. On November 27, he was back in Hanover, to speak at Dartmouth’s newly built Hopkins Center on the subject of “extravagance.” He referred to the extravagance of the building—an elegant glass-and-steel structure with tall windows overlooking the green—and went on to talk about the “extravagant universe.”43 “And the most extravagant thing in it, as far as we know, is man—the most wasteful, spending thing in it—in all this luxuriance.” He added that poetry itself was “a sort of extravagance, in many ways. It’s something that people wonder about. What’s the need of it? And the answer is, no need—not particularly.” He went on to read his poem “Away!” In that autumnal poem, he says:

I leave behind

Good friends in town.

Let them get well-wined

And go lie down.

Don’t think I leave

For the outer dark

Like Adam and Eve

Put out of the Park.

In other words, he was not going to the land of the dead as an exile. Rather, he was going home.

Forget the myth.

There is no one I

Am put out with

Or put out by.

Unless I’m wrong

I but obey

The urge of a song:

“I’m—bound—away!”

And I may return

If dissatisfied

With what I learn

From having died.

Frost had by now acquired a benevolent, almost welcoming attitude toward death, keeping a little in reserve: the threat to “return” if he found himself “dissatisfied.” But he did not want to end his Dartmouth talk on that note. He concluded with “The Night Light,” a little poem that had appeared in Steeple Bush as one of the five “nocturnes.”

She always had to burn a light

Beside her attic bed at night.

It gave bad dreams and troubled sleep,

But helped the Lord her soul to keep.

Good gloom on her was thrown away.

It is on me by night or day.

Who have, as I suppose, ahead

The darkest of it still to dread.

“Suppose I end on that dark note,” he told the overflow student audience in Spaulding Auditorium, adding emphatically: “Goodnight, goodnight to all of you.” He walked off the stage to a standing ovation.

Returning to Cambridge, he gave a reading at the Ford Hall Forum, in Boston, on December 2, 1962. This was another regular stop on his yearly compass of readings. As usual, he put every ounce of himself into the performance, but the prostate problem had become severe, and Frost now faced the long-awaited operation. After the reading he felt weak and dizzy and was short of breath; he had to be helped to his car. He may have sensed as he left the Forum that Sunday night that he had just given his last public reading.

He entered Peter Bent Brigham Hospital the next day. An examination showed that his prostate was abnormally large and his bladder was infected. A diagnosis of chronic cystitis was put forward, although the doctors were worried about the condition of his heart as well—the beat was irregular and weak. Soon a bladder stoppage occurred, and tests showed that colon bacilli had collected there; this complication required immediate surgery.

The procedure took place on December 10, and revealed even worse problems. The prostate was malignant, and the disease had spread to the bladder. But the operation was successful, the cancerous tissue apparently removed. Frost spent two weeks in recovery, but on December 23, a pulmonary embolism nearly killed him.

He recovered, but he was obviously in bad shape. On top of everything, his heart had been damaged. “With all these countless friends in the hospital and without, I find myself better than a little less than bad,” he commented to one friend, showing that he still had his wits about him. He was cheered when, during the first week of the new year, Yale awarded him the Bollingen Prize for poetry. The award gave him, he declared, “one new reason to live.”

But another embolism struck him on January 7, and he barely managed to continue living. Through all of this, Kay Morrison and her daughter, Anne Morrison Gentry, attended Frost on a daily basis, controlling the flow of visitors, who included his daughter Lesley, Edward Lathem, Hyde Cox, Franklin Reeve, Stewart Udall, Al Edwards, and John Sloan Dickey. When he was not greeting visitors, he worked on a poem that he planned as a sequel to his Christmas poem of 1962, which he had called “The Prophets Really Prophesy as Mystics/The Commentators Merely by Statistics.” In the new poem, a king summons prophets to his court to interpret his dreams, but he discovers they are all “false mystics” and orders them to be taken away and “executed, every one.” Then, suddenly, a wastrel wanders in:

The king said “Who are you? I thought I had you all wiped out. False prophets.”

He answered “I was not a member of the guild.”

The poem is fragmentary, but it remains interesting as an example of what was on Frost’s mind now, as the last hour approached. He was dwelling on the subject of legitimacy, thinking about how one tells a “false mystic” from a true one. He was questioning his own voice, and arguing that a true prophet dreams “the only dream there is to dream,” a dream of reality. Anything less than the truth would have seemed too weak for a man faced with his own finitude.

Louis Untermeyer spent an hour with Frost on January 22, talking about the Russian trip, about poetry and politics, and about their long friendship. It had recently been announced, much to Frost’s chagrin, that John Steinbeck had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Frost realized now that this, the ultimate accolade, would be denied him.

For the next week, he received visitors and vaguely worked on his final poem about the king and the prophets. On January 27, Ezra Pound’s daughter, Princess Mary de Rachewiltz, stopped by to thank him for his efforts on behalf of her father. “You are a dear and so is Ezra,” Frost said. “I’ve never got over those days we had together.” He added, thoughtfully: “Politics make too much difference to both of us. Love is all. Romantic love—as in stories and poems. I tremble with it. I’d like to see Ezra again.”44

When she was gone, Frost dictated a response to Roy Elliott and his wife, Alma, who had written a note wishing his speedy recovery. Frost’s note ended: “If only I get well … I’ll go deeper into life with you than I ever have before.”45 Frost had known Elliott since 1919, when he published “The Neighborliness of Robert Frost”—an early and important article that Frost regarded as crucial to his personal myth-making. Later, they were colleagues and friends at Amherst. As ever, Frost was incredibly loyal to old friends, who by now were legion.

He died the next day, near midnight, losing consciousness soon after another blood clot reached his lungs. “I feel as though I were in my last hours,” he had said to Jack Sweeney and his wife that same afternoon, and his predication was correct. A great and long life had come, quietly, to an end. America had lost a poet of astounding grace and wisdom, one who had lodged dozens of poems in places where they could certainly not be gotten rid of easily, or at all.