Part of the context for what Mr. Frost said at Phillips Exeter Academy on October 23, 1960, was the presidential-election campaign then being waged between Senator John F. Kennedy, the Democratic nominee, and the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
I WAS THINKING of a word tonight, just one word: the word “elect.” And in this neighborhood—not far from here, down in Salem and so on—it once meant something very different from what it means now. These two men that you’re watching on the television every night—(I suppose it’s almost every night.)—of these two men one will be “elected.” And that’s a little different from being “elect.”
“Elect” is almost like the word “select.” There was a man named Calvin, in Geneva, who fixed it on everybody—on his Protestant world, on Geneva and on Scotland—that only a few were elect. Of all those born, only a few were elect.
You can pick that up—if you want verse for it—you can pick it up in the Bible. You can pick almost anything up in the Bible. That’s why some people don’t believe in the common people reading the Bible. They don’t know how to handle it.
In the Bible it says that people that aren’t elect can’t read poetry. Many people will try to act as if they were reading poetry, of course. But only a few are reading it, the Bible says. Many people will act as if they were religious, but only a few will be saved.
Dreadful, isn’t it? And then you look at each other—(Right now you look, and there’s someone beside you.)—and you think: “I wonder if you’re saved. I wonder if you can read poetry. I wonder if you know a joke when you hear one.”
It’s only the elect can take a joke, too, you see. And there’s quite a difference there. Take a joke like this, for instance. Suppose I were giving you an oral examination now, and I tell you one like this. (All of you can laugh, if you want to, but I can tell which are laughing honestly. We used to say, “like a duck” I can.) There was a man dreamt all night he was eating a twenty-pound marshmallow. All night dreamed that, and in the morning he couldn’t find his pillow. (I wish I had made that up!)
And, you know, what you’re getting an education for is so that you’ll wish you thought of some things first, before others did. That’s to prove you are one of the elect, I tell you. An envy is a good thing to develop, envy of those that are first to think and first to say and first to be.
And that brings you to the wonderful question of leadership. I’ve heard a lot around colleges about being trained for leadership. But I suspect that it’s only the elect that have it. The rest have to behave.
The old saying: “You can’t be like us. You must try to be as like us as you can.” That’s what the elect say. You see, they know they’re elect. But the thing that spoils all that is that no man on earth can judge another man very well about that. That’s too fine.
My people, I know, were here in New England and were of those that didn’t bother to feel elect. They were very worldly, the ones that came here first for me. But the ones that ruled the colony and all that, had to be pretty sure they were elect. They weren’t voted for. They had to just come to that feeling, that they were elect.
Want to hear something that sounds very undemocratic, right out of the Bible? It says, “These things are said in poetry——” (In “parable” is another word for it.) “These things are said in parable, so the wrong people won’t understand them and so get saved.”39
That sounds like another joke, doesn’t it? And it is, kind of. At least it’s very undemocratic, isn’t it? But it’s very aristocratic. It’s very Calvinistic in psychology. And we laugh, we sneer, we dismiss the story of Calvin and his tyranny over Geneva, his tyranny over Scotland—all based on this idea.
And what he said was, virtually, that a few people are elect and are what you might call “sincere,” and they’re saved. And the rest of ’em have to be hypocrites and pretend they’re saved—all the rest of ’em. And they had to obey the police. And they had to obey the preacher. And they had to take their medicine—the koine. […]
Now, you see, this question; we have to dismiss it. It’s all over, all over our talk. It all comes to the word “sincerity,” I suppose, nowadays. We say one person seems “sincere” about art, we’ll say—talking about paintings. And some people are really insincere. They keep up an appearance. They think travel is broadening, and they travel. And they go to the museums, and they do the best they can.
But who’s to decide? Nobody else can decide. I couldn’t, marking you in school. Yes, I could! I could, in a way. In classes I know in the course of a year, even without asking any questions, about who’s “A,” “B,” “C”—and “out” those are outside of it.
And sometimes I think that some of the teachers I could judge that way. I judge ’em about my own poetry. They make some awful breaks, from my point of view, some of them do. And some of ’em are just as easily right as if I had brought ’em up. Isn’t that strange?
We live with each other in this state of judging sincerity. We’re drawn to those that we feel drawn, and sort of averse to those that we feel are not “in” not to the manor—manor—born. (That word you have to be very careful of. It sounds as if I may be saying “m-a-n-n-e-r.” But I’m not. It’s another word. It’s spelled another way: to the “manor” born.) […]
Take a matter of patriotism, again, sincere patriotism. Sometimes you’d say, wouldn’t you, that the quiet people about it—that aren’t whooping it all the time and aren’t hunting communists all the time and doing all that sort of thing—are probably nearer the elect, nearer the chosen spirits?
But perhaps it’s this way. Some seem elect in one of the arts—one in music, another in another. We’ve got nothing to go on here. We have to live together, elect and non-elect—and looking suspiciously at each other, you know, and thinking, “You, you poor thing, you’re out; you’re going to burn in hell.” And so on.
One of the great cardinals of England, Manning, had it come over him that the whole thing lay in one place in the Bible. It says—(I think I can come somewhere near it.)—“but the terrible and unbelieving”—not “terribly unbelieving”—“but the terrible and unbelieving shall partake of the fire of brimstone that burns forever.”40 (I’ve missed it a little. But that’s somewhere near it.)
And he said, from the age of eight, all through his life, that was the most governing thought in his life—and what it meant to be believing and what it meant to be unterrible. (I don’t know what that means.) You see: “the terrible and unbelieving shall partake of the fire of brimstone.”
It governed him all his life. It came over him, the first terrible moment, when he was about eight years old, and he got under a table to protect himself. And he said it never left him, that thought, the rest of his life: Was he a true person? […]
I’ve never talked about it to anybody this way, as severely as this, before. Here’s a whole lot of you, and are you “in”? Are you taking this in the right way? Are you taking this “culture,” as they call it, in the right way? Or are you taking it in the way that Sinclair Lewis would make fun of?
What a mean man he was. He spent his time just being mean about the non-elect. That’s right; that’s right. I thought of it the other day. In a book of humor—humorous stories—there was one of his that wasn’t funny a bit. It was just mean, mean about the non-elect. […]
But it matters in a way—(In a sort of a free way; you mustn’t be too strict about it.)—but it matters not to “feign emotion”—(Stevenson says, Robert Louis Stevenson, never to “feign emotion.”41)—never to feign delight; never to pretend you’re in on anything that you’re not in on.
And it’s a fine mental age to stay in, that lives in a kind of fear of that, awe of it.
Now, take me and Shelley. I have never pretended I liked him. I remember he was given to me when I was fourteen years old, a book. And I went to work on him; and I gave him up. And then—(My mental age is sort of permanent about that.)—I was afraid I was to blame. So, I read him again in about a year or two or three or four or five. (You see, I didn’t have to hurry. I wasn’t in any class.) And so on, down to now. And, no.
‘Twas the other way with Keats. I was given a book about the same time. And I turned away from that—on Keats’ own showing. Keats says—in a little preface to the first poem in the book Endymion—he calls it “mawkish.” And it certainly was. And I felt the mawkishness. And I dared to dislike him.
And then by accidence, you know, I took another time, for fear it was my fault. And this time I didn’t begin at the beginning of the book again. (I’ve learned never to begin with a poet’s first poem. Plunge in somewhere else. Stick a pin in, the way they used to do with the Bible, and see what you get.) And then I came on the odes of the greatest poet since Shakespeare.
But now I’m bothered with the “Beatniks.” I’ve dismissed them two or three times. But I’m still afraid that it might be my fault. So, we’ll look again.
But this thing: Are you “in”? Are you “in” have you got it? It’s the same question with a pitcher. You watch the great pitchers, the great ones that have something special. And how much can it be used? How many times a week?
There was a fellow named “Iron Man” McGinnity that pitched five and six days a week. And nobody is asked to do that anymore; that is, the spirit fails. There wouldn’t be that much spirit in anyone. This is the thing we’re talking about. How much of this real quality can be called on? […]
Take these two people running for the presidency. You’re probably partisan about ’em. I’m not. I’m a Democrat, but—(Wait till you hear the rest of it.) I’ve been more or less unhappy since 1896.
You see, “election” isn’t it a strange word? The “elected” and the “elect”—two different words, really. The same thing, really, only one’s elect of God, chosen of God, and the other’s chosen of the mob rule in America. […]
Speaking of “leadership” again; how do we get it? First comes impulse. That’s young; comes out of youth, in that sense—impulse: falling in love, being brave, charging into life, games and war and everything. The charge is young. That’s the leadership there is there.
Shakespeare speaks of having taught a horse to be managed that’s got to be managed. And out of that comes some that are elect—somebody elect—to take charge of all that impulse and give it leadership. It comes out of the mob. You don’t know how.
And if you’re like me—if you’ve been watching these two people running for office—I don’t know how you felt about it, but all the time I felt, I wish they were a little bit more impetuous, that they took a lead the same as Franklin Roosevelt would or the way Teddy Roosevelt would. (It seems to run in the Roosevelt family, going back there, doesn’t it?)
Something of that sort of seizing the thing and carrying it; they don’t seem to seize it. They haven’t got that fierceness about it. Maybe they’re too young. But they haven’t that strength, to me. I want more, anyway.
I wish for them—(I’m not talking against them.)—I just wish they had more of that. I look in vain. Maybe you can’t do it on a television. Maybe it’s too much of a Hollywood affair. I don’t know what’s the matter with it—disappointment.
—at Amherst College, April 25, 1960:
BEFORE YOU give God up, you’d better know a whole lot about the word “grace.” It has a remarkable history. […]
There are two words the Puritans talked about, “justification” and “sanctification.” […] They were great words that they worked on. […] By the “sanctification” they meant this same thing, “grace.”
Poetry ought to mean that on all our learning. It ought to mean that on the humanities. Poetry is sort of the grace of humanities.
This justification/sanctification: “Justification” means “works,” you know; and that saves you by “works”—doing good and doing right and studying hard and all that. And the “sanctification” is sort of almost mysterious—the grace of God; and if you got it, you’re saved; if you aren’t, no matter how hard you work, you’re damned. And the word “grace” comes in in sanctification.