This text is drawn from Mr. Frost’s May 17, 1954, Great Issues Course lecture at Dartmouth College.
WHAT AM I thinking about now, at eighty? Well, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking about freedom a good deal. I can’t have lived with all these free-verse writers that you read, without having considered the matter of freedom.
Freedom from what? Why are they called “free-verse writers”? (At one of their picnic parties, I guess ’twas, there was a sign up—a little box with some poems in the box—and it said “FREE VERSE HELP YOURSELF.”)
But free verse, what is it free from — from?
What’s the other preposition? (Of course the business of going to college, sometimes it seems to me, is all a matter of learning prepositions, getting you discriminating with prepositions.) Down in New York, for instance, all my friends love to think they have the freedom of the city.
That’s why they’re there, seven million of them. (How many is it?) They’re there because they think they have achieved the freedom of the city—its theatres, its streets, its everything, you know; all its advantages. But for their children, they want freedom from the city. So, they take them out to raise ’em in Connecticut.
Now, there’s the two: the of and from—freedom from. And the free-verse writer has taken the freedom from rhyme and metre. I’m not disparaging him when I say that, but that’s what he’s wanted, freedom from rhyme and metre, because he thinks he’s less likely to be sincere and sociological, and do the world less good, you see. He can say what he means, and he can talk deeper and darker and more earnestly, if he isn’t bothered with the frivolity of rhyme and metre. That’s the doctrine.
Well, that’s all right. One wouldn’t quarrel with that. I read somewhere that when I talked a little this way not so many days ago that I “attacked” free verse. But that’s no attack on free verse. That’s praising free verse for its attempt to be more sincere than any other kind of verse—get down to things. And they’ll say, “Well, there are grave subjects, aren’t there, that you wouldn’t want to be rhyming about or writing metre about?”
The only defense for that would be—or one defense for doing the other thing; writing metre, anyway—would be Shakespeare. He writes about King Lear—(And that’s about as deep and dark and serious as anything can be.)—and he calls it a “play.” He’s just playing, when he writes it. He does it in metre, plays it in metre; plays it very well, as you know.
Well, let’s begin. I begin with the dictionary. If I were revolutionary enough, I might say I’m going to get along without the dictionary; I’m going to get free from the dictionary—and write Finnegans Wake. All right, if you want to take that chance. It’s an awful chance to take. There aren’t many’ll follow you.
The freest way would be to get rid of words entirely and simply scream. If you got your true feeling, you’ll say, “That’s the way I feel—” Scream like a siren, up and down.
Then, there’s another freedom I want—not freedom from, but freedom of. I want the freedom of our syntax and our idiom; the idiom particularly. I’d like to command—command the dictionary; command the idiom more than anything else. I’d rather have all the uses of “the,” the article “the”—the six or seven uses of it that I could think of—than to have seven different words; the idiomatic.
I’ve always thought that. I remember lecturing on that about twenty years ago, that subject, with John Erskine present. ’Twas a meeting of vocabularians. They were all there to talk about vocabulary. And I talked anti-vocabulary. I talked idiom. I had to, you know. Had to have some opposition, they had to have.
The freedom, then, of the dictionary, the freedom of idiom; and then one more freedom, that I didn’t need to achieve or attempt, was the freedom of rhyme and metre. You see, could I swing the dictionary, swing the idiom, and swing the rhyme and metre? That was sort of excessive. That was from an exuberance of spirit.
It’s the same about your country. It’s the same about a ball field. It’s the same about a tennis court. You don’t want a freedom from the tennis court, you want the freedom of the tennis court, with the net just so high and the court just so large, always. And you don’t want to go to conventions for changing the tennis court, like reformers. You’re no reformer, you just want to see what good you are on the tennis court as is.
And so I—with these things—I accept the dictionary; I accept the idiom; I accept the rhyme and metre. But beyond all that is a love of a hope that I have won the freedom of my own country, that I can say almost anything anywhere in it and not be in bad taste.
Somebody, a friend of mine—oh, a very distant friend of mine, who writes verse; regular verse, not free—lately put on a record—for use in the United States generally—put on a record along with some others. And he thought he must assert this other kind of freedom. He must break down the rules. So, he got his money in advance, and then he stipulated that nothing should be altered, and then he put on a lot of dirty words.
And then he said, “Well, that’s in all the books, you know, From Here to Eternity and everywhere else.” And why hadn’t he a right to put ’em on the air? And now that’s going on; it’s being settled.
A lot of people say that’s freedom of speech. And what is that line? Well, now, I wouldn’t be bothered with anything like that. I’m not interested in freedom from any particular rules. I’m interested in my own freedom of things.
Freedom of the city. Someone gave me the key to the city of Gloucester a little while ago. So, I have the freedom of Gloucester, anyway, if I haven’t of New York. I can do anything I please there, within the law. I haven’t got the key with me, but I’ve got it, a little gold key, a nice one. (“Keys” is the word usually. Plural is the way we say that: “the keys to the city.” I should have had more than one, but I’ve only got one—symbol.)
Now, what’s beyond it all? What freedom am I thinking of more than all?
There ought to be something done in psychology, some rule of thumb, that would help us free, so that we could get from an attachment to an attraction—change countries, for instance, change loyalties. There’s an old poem that says:
All those who change old loves for new
Pray gods they change for worse!21
Well, there ought to be some help about that. How do you get from loving one person to loving another? Or how do you get from loving one country to loving another? How do you change loyalties? […]
What are the limitations of psychology? Can psychology help us? Put that down in your mind, will you, for me? Is there any psychology to help you about getting from an attachment to an attraction?
That isn’t of interest to me, how you escape. That’s the escape idea. How do you escape? Is freedom escape?
No, freedom isn’t escape at all, for me. You see, you’d think that a life was an escape from an escape from an escape from an escape. And so you went on until you got buried, escaping something all the time, with drink and everything.
I’d rather if anybody was going to drink it wouldn’t be for escape. I’d do it as a pursuit. There’s a certain pride in that, isn’t there; a pride in doing things in your life being a pursuit not an escape?
I loathe the word “escape.” It’s that other thing: from always. And pursuit of and freedom of—skill, ability; in the court as it is, in the form of society as it is.
And then I’m going to not make it too much longer; just one thing more to say. The freedom of my material is what makes me a thinker, if I am one—freedom of my material.
A schoolboy, by definition, is somebody who can tell you what he’s learned, in the order in which he learned it. And a free person is a person who’s forgotten more than most people will ever know. He’s let it all scatter out and break down in his mind. And he can bring it together in his own forms by his own power of association.
And the whole of writing, of course, is that. All of having an idea is bringing things together that people hadn’t brought together before, that bring freshness to the conversations, associations.
Your free associations are a proof that you have the freedom of your material you take out of different levels of knowledge, different times in your life—out of school, out of books, out of play, out of the past, out of the present, out of dreams—everything.
And things come together in pair. Things pair with a kind of love of each other. Things pair, and that’s what makes poems. That’s what makes metaphor. That’s what makes thinking; makes everything.
When Schopenhauer said The World as Will…, all he was saying was a vast metaphor: that the universe or the whole thing may be likened unto that quality in man which we call “will.” That’s all he was saying. And it hadn’t been said before. ’Twas one of those great things, that he must have felt strangely free in—that he’d commanded those two things that hadn’t been together before.
And I suppose if we’re here for any reason at all, it’s to get more and more of that freedom, the freedom of association.
I don’t think anybody’s thought at all unless he’s surprised himself and surprised other people, now and then, by putting two unexpected things together—unexpected by him; surprise a little to him, as well. No surprise in him, no surprise in his listeners. He’s got to be a little surprised and pleased, so they’ll be surprised and pleased.
The freedom that you can put it all into, it’s all yourself. I wonder what gives you it. You have all the stuff, all the material of the years, all broken down and scattered in your mind in a beautiful disorder. And you can say, if you think about it, how chaotic it all is. But how delightfully chaotic. You’re the boy what can put order into it, gleams of order, with associations like that.
When people talk about being confused, it’s because they’re contemplating all they know, without the ability to do anything with it. Any little thing gives you the sense of power, any little combination you make. And the more unexpected to yourself and to others, of course, the happier, the more felicitous.
I wonder when I have it most. I always think it’s from well-being. I have to feel fine from having been outdoors and had a good time or been with nice people—and in being in a nice frame of mind, not being able to remember any of my enemies. If a thought of some enemy crosses my mind, that’s apt to spoil this happiness of command.
It’s the one self-assertion; it’s the top assertion: the giving a little bit of form to what looks all chaotic and disorderly. And it’s all yours or it’s nothing.
You’re just now, most of you—most of you are just getting some more material. And the question is, can you command it or do you want to command it in the sense in which I say? It isn’t for literary men just. It’s for thinkers. It’s for inventors. It’s for scientists.
The simple thing that we know Fermi for; we know him for having thought of the thing which we were all surprised that he should think of—very simple. You’d think that one particle of matter would be more apt to break into another one if it was going fast, charging hard, wouldn’t you? It occurred to him to try it to see if slowing it up wouldn’t do it. And it did it. And that’s what the whole business is.
That’s one. And his name, you see, one of the greatest names of our time. A little thought like that.
And so, then, in the end the one freedom we ask for is the freedom of the city, the freedom of our own material, the freedom of the books, the freedom—you might say—freedom of the city of life. And it doesn’t very much matter about freedom of speech. (There were “Four Freedoms” they used to talk about then, and they were a funny assortment.)
This is a central freedom: the freedom of your own material. That’s all there is to mind.
If you don’t get it here and enter into it here, you can enter into it outside. We were saying, some of us, the other day that man is either self-made in college or self-made out of college. It’s what you mean by “self-made”—passing that threshold into that sense of responsibility to do something with the disordered material that has been supplied you by the confusion of the order and disorder, the broken-down order and everything of life.