On November 17, 1959, Mr. Frost spoke at Rockhurst College, as part of the institution’s fiftieth-anniversary celebration, and received the college’s Chancellor Award. During this same interval at Kansas City, Missouri, the poet made a visit to the headquarters of Hallmark Cards Incorporated.
THIS IS GREAT pleasure being in the middle of the United States with this crowd. Isn’t it something? I feel as if every year I got nearer the center of the United States, in a metaphorical way. But here I am literally at the middle of the United States, with plenty of the United States here with me. […]
I’m a teacher more than I am a farmer, but I’ve been both all the way along. And I’ve been a newspaperman, too. I’ve been—you know, American style—I’ve been a little of everything as I came up with an art—with an art, you see.
And one of the things about art is that you have to find a refuge, while you’re starting it, from hasty judgments. And farming was one for me. And teaching was another. And newspaper work was another. The years of hasty judgment I got by that way.
I wonder sometimes if anything can be done about that, to make it easier; foundations and things, if they can help—if they could find an underground cave for poets and artists to get into, against bombs, as well as hasty judgments.
You realize that I’m not judging the judges. I’m one of the judges of others, and troubled in myself all the time about the new boys coming up; how to single out those that are fit to bet on. And that is a hard part of the world, part of art and all.
The United States is more concerned about it than any country in the world, probably, unless it’s Russia. I don’t know, they seem to be working hard, too.
School is a fine thing. You can linger in school. I didn’t linger; I ran out. If I’d known enough, I would have seen that it was a fine place to hide in and a comfortable place—and a place that made it comfortable for my friends and relatives. They could say: “He’s at So-and-So. He’s at Columbia.”
As it was, as I lived it, they didn’t know what to say about me. They didn’t say, “He was failing as a poet.” That didn’t come out. It didn’t get that bad. But “he” was nothing you wanted to talk about. Those are serious things.
Now, the education. I’ve been quoted as saying, “Education is hanging round till you catch on.”36 That sounds rather slangy, and it is meant to be. But it describes the whole thing, “hanging round till you catch on” that is, you hang around for the refinement of sentiment about all these things: success and failure, life and death, and religion, politics.
That’s the all-important part of it. You might as well learn two or three subjects while you’re about it, too. And that keeps you from getting too self-conscious about it all. Get busy. But the busyness isn’t the main thing—being with the right people till you get the right sentiment about many things.
Precepts don’t do it. They help a little. And there’s no teacher does as much to you as some of your fellows who just exchange glances over something foolish you say. That punishes you and that puts you in, whips you in, and teaches you about sentiment.
Sentiment is a very hard thing to talk about, and a very hard thing to practice without running into sentimentality. You’re always dancing on that dangerous verge of sentimentality. And the great masters of sentiment are the great artists, that’s all. And that is school, too, you know. The school should be a place of the great arts, the humanities.
Our schools more and more—in the last fifty years that I’ve known them and taken part in them—have been more and more like what I describe. I’m not complaining. I’m not advocating. I’m describing what they are. […]
I’ve been—speaking today—I’ve been in a place where sentiments are handled for birthdays, Christmas, and all sorts of cards. And very interesting to me to see the people at work in there, making sentiments or writing out sentiments, and pictures to go with them—and people of various nationality at work on it. And I looked seriously at ’em, the young people at the work, and I thought a great many thoughts.
For instance, they probably didn’t have any card—( I suppose they didn’t. I didn’t ask that.)—about the death of Christ—(You see, that’s one of the mighty sentiments.)—and the great sentiment about failure, defeat, and the need of mercy. Those aren’t Christmas cards.
The Christmas card is more like: “God rest ye noble gentlemen, / Know you no dismay, / For Jesus Christ, our Saviour, / Was born on Christmas day.” You know, cheerful about His life; looking at Him as a saviour of us, by what He went through. But that’s a sentiment very difficult to handle—dark, deep sentiment. […]
Some sentiments of my books are tender things. Tenderness is another difficult thing to handle. And sometimes you wouldn’t expect to have it brought out in a crowd like this. And sometimes you wouldn’t expect to see it in a newspaper. You’d think they’d get to something tragic or dramatic or something like that. But tender and the gentle you hesitate about.
I’ve often hesitated. I have certain poems that I’ve never brought out onto my sleeve, so to speak. They’re there in the book, and I’d rather people would encounter them in the book than encounter them with me in public; quite a few of ’em.
People ask me if I don’t like those. Why do I avoid ’em all the time? It’s ’cause I like ’em too well, the ones I’m sensitive about.
But that’s one of the great questions in my life. How public is my life? It didn’t begin very publicly, you can be sure. I didn’t have to be afraid of having anybody laugh at me. They didn’t know I was there; that was all.
If they had noticed me, they might have tapped their heads, you know. I’ve known fellows who suffered the cruelty of being thought of as just a village defective—poets. I knew one through many years. […]
But the education. I’m always getting a new definition of education. It’s an old one, “hanging round till you catch on.” I made that last year. And this one is that it’s the refinement of sentiment. It’s getting you to refine your sentiments and handle your sentiments with refinement.
And the masters of sentiment are the great poets, the great dramatists, the great novelists, too.
—at Hebrew Union College, April 2, 1960:
THE PROPHET and the poet seem to me to go together, somewhat. The prophet is the great bewarer. Bewareness is his life, telling the king what to beware.
And the poet, his great thing is awareness—awareness, luxuriating in what God gives us; luxuriating in it all, the spiritual, the mental, the physical.
—Yale University, November 6, 1962:
THERE ARE two kinds of music, the music of poetry and the music of music, and they aren’t the same thing.