^* Frost was prone to make asides about Lucretius. In Mertins’s table-talk Frost says of the Roman poet, “he had the atomic theory well in hand” (303). Reading “West-Running Brook” at Rutgers, October 5, 1949, he pauses at “Not just a swerving” and says in an aside, “As in Lucretius”—meaning the primal swerve of the atoms that initiates Creation (Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, 624 n. 9). Late in life, as an octogenarian, Frost confessed to “covet[ing] a new boundary in education. We need to map out new horizons beyond Lucretius even. As for poetry, I’ve said somewhere that poetry is a way to take life by the throat. I’ll stand by that” (Mertins, 338).