1962 Robert Frost was America’s unofficial poet laureate. He was an icon, a national treasure, a bestseller compared to contemporary poets, widely consulted on cultural matters. In January 1961, he had been chosen to read a new composition at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration – the first poet to be so honoured. Entitled ‘Dedication’, the poem prophesied a new ‘Augustan age / Of a power leading from its strength and pride, / of young ambition eager to be tried’. But after a few lines the sun’s glare troubled his eyes so that he could read no further, and he had to fall back instead on one prepared earlier (as the television cooks say) that he could recite by heart.
There were gaps between the public and private Frost. He was the genial poet-philosopher drawing universal truths from nature, but accused of being an uncaring father and husband. He was born and brought up in cities – San Francisco and Lawrence, Massachusetts, a textile-manufacturing centre – before spending two years at Harvard, yet his popularity owed a lot to his persona as a plain-speaking New England farmer. As the poet and critic Yvor Winters has written, ‘the rural life is somehow regarded as the truly American life’; yet he adds, ‘it is the poet’s business to evaluate human experience, and the rural setting is no more valuable for this purpose than any other or no particular setting’. 1
Another surprise is that some of his best-known poems, thought to be most typical of felt life on his New Hampshire farm – ‘Mending Wall’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’ – were written in England, where he lived from 1912 to 1915 before he moved to New Hampshire, and where he networked with other poets like Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and T.E. Hulme. Though now long regarded as the antithesis of modernism, his work piqued the interest of Ezra Pound, who reviewed it and got it published in Poetry.
So maybe it should be expected that his goodwill trip to Russia should have turned out to be less straightforward than anticipated. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, a friend of Frost’s, was due to go to the Soviet Union on a diplomatic mission, and suggested that Frost go along to read his work and do some general cultural interacting. Frost was keen to go, though fearful of the effect on his 88-year-old constitution. Kennedy endorsed the idea.
But Frost really wanted to meet Nikita Khrushchev, to tell the Soviet premier how much he admired his forceful denunciation of Stalin and encouragement of young writers like Yevtushenko and Solzhenitsyn, and to suggest a new relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States – not ‘mutual co-existence’ (Khrushchev’s formulation, which Frost thought too negative) but, as Udall remembered the exchange, ‘a hundred years of grand rivalry based on an Aristotelian code of conduct he called “mutual magnanimity”’.
What neither man knew was that Khrushchev had already begun to install missiles in Cuba, and was using his meeting with Frost partly to gauge how Kennedy would react to the disclosure. According to Udall, ‘the only truculent outburst during our long talk’ was a coarse joke Khrushchev made about some American senators talking big about invading Cuba but being unable to ‘perform’.
Interviewed in New York after a long flight, unable to sleep for eighteen hours, Frost reported accurately on their hopeful exchange, but then, misremembering the joke (or misinterpreting its tone), claimed that ‘Khrushchev said he feared for us because of our lot of liberals. He thought that we’re too liberal to fight.’ The next day the Washington Post carried a banner headline: ‘Frost Says Khrushchev Sees U.S. as “Too Liberal” to Defend Itself”.2
Kennedy, who had already garnered intelligence of the missiles, was furious. Frost was sorry. If the president had been any less sure-footed, the provocation might have started the Third World War. Just under five months later the poet was dead.
1 Yvor Winters, The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957, p. 160.
2 Stewart Udall, ‘Robert Frost’s Last Adventure’, New York Times, 11 June 1972: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/specials/frost-last.html