2   HOME IS WHERE THEY HAVE TO TAKE YOU IN

1. Quoted by Gardner Jackson in “I Will Teach Only When I Have Something to Tell,” Boston Sunday Globe (November 1924), 3.

2. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

3. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 19.

4. Tape in ACL.

5. Interview with Richard Eberhart.

6. Interview with Reginald L. Cook.

7. See Richard A. Proctor, Our Place Among Infinities (New York, 1876), 37–38. Proctor writes: “We may believe, with all confidence, that could we but understand the whole of what we find around us, the wisdom with which each part has been designed would be manifest; so clearly understand all as to be able to recognize the purpose of this or that arrangement, the wisdom of this or that provision. Nor, if any results revealed by scientific research appear to us to accord ill with our conceptions of the economy of nature, should we be troubled, on the one hand, as respects our faith in God’s benevolence, or doubt, on the other, the manifest teachings of science. In a word, our faith must not be hampered by scientific doubts, our science must not be hampered by religious scruples.”

8. Elinor White Frost to Mrs. Edna Davis Romig, February 4, 1935. Courtesy of Frederick B. Adams, Jr.

9. Reginald L. Cook interview.

10. Sergeant, 23.

11. High School Bulletin (October 1891), 5–6.

12. Quoted in Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost and the Lawrence, Massachusetts, “High School Bulletin”: The Beginning of a Literary Career (New York: The Grolier Club, 1966), 16.

13. High School Bulletin, May 1892, 4.

14. Frost retold this story countless times, to friends and interviewers.

15. Lawrence Daily American (July 1, 1892), 1.

16. Mertins, 47.

17. Edward Connery Lathem, “Freshman Days,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (March 1959), 17–20.

18. This copy of the Independent is still in the Dartmouth College Library.

19. Frost to Harold Goddard Rugg, October 15, 1914. DCL.

20. Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson (New York: Library of America, 1995), 807. Hereafter CPPP.