Robert Frost began his presentation at the University of Michigan on April 2, 1962, with references to his own intervals there at Ann Arbor first, as Poet in Residence and, then, as Fellow in Creative Arts—during the early 1920s, making special mention in doing so of Marion LeRoy Burton, who, following presidencies at both Smith College and the University of Minnesota, had headed the University of Michigan from 1920 until his death in 1925, and of Raymond Mollyneaux Hughes, president of Ohio’s Miami University from 1913 to 1927 and subsequently of Iowa State College.
JUST BEFORE I start reading, I want to say to you I wonder what’s come over us—the country, you know—that everything is so for me and younger poets and all. There’s so much excitement about us. It’s got so that we can hardly keep out of national politics, and no designs at all.
But it began, you might say, right in the colleges and universities. It began with the president of this university, for one, about forty-odd years ago, Mr. Burton, my friend.
I had seen him once when he was at Smith College, in my neighborhood, in New England. And then he asked me out—(I don’t know whether he was in my audience or not.)—he asked me out to speak at Minnesota. And then he asked me here to live, and I saw a great deal of him.
His idea was one of the initial ideas in this all. I know four or five or six poets now that are among the privileged few in the academic world. They haven’t anything to do but “rake the leaves where the gentle zephyrs blowed ’em,” as somebody said. They have very pleasant lives. […]
In this with Mr. Burton was President Hughes of Oxford, Ohio. And their idea was to have one poet a year or one artist a year, one painter or one musician. And that was all.
And that was a mistake. It didn’t work. They didn’t get ’em. There weren’t enough to get one a year and keep it up for forty years. Something was lacking.
And it came into this other thing, with a sort of a privileged connection, with the universities as patrons—as if the universities must take the place of the aristocracy in Europe in patronizing the arts. That came into their heads. And I saw all that happening.
After they tried the first way one year, then the president said to me: “You’ve done nothing but go out to dinner, the whole year. I’m going to give you a year in hiding here.” So, I came another year to hide. I didn’t hide very successfully.
Then, that was over, and they went looking for other kinds of people. And they had no luck about it.
One mistake was in trying to get a dramatist. And a dramatist is either so good that he makes so much money he won’t come to things like this, or he isn’t very interesting. It was a nice case of dramatists—gentlemen and all that. But it wasn’t what they meant by stirring up any excitement.
And then Mr. Burton himself—very enterprising man—he lit out for England and brought home the Poet Laureate of England, for a year. He came for part of a year. I was brought out here to welcome him and tell him not to be afraid of the rough western boys. […]
And Mr. Meiklejohn, a famous college president, was another of my benefactors in this similar way. I was back and forward between here and Amherst College, between the two places.
Now it’s gone on. I really think that the educator world sort of melted toward us contemporaries. They used to be very proud of not reading anybody later than the eighteenth century. But they began to melt, in this way.
And at last we’ve got a department—not a department—an office of the fine arts in the White House, with two friends of mine in charge of it; and presiding over them, the President and his wife.
Isn’t it pretty? And I hope it will stay right in the White House—(I’ve just been down there with it all.)—and I hope it will stay in the White House and won’t go out into a big building, all departmental. But I don’t know that it can. The Congress is getting excited, too, and all that.
And, you know, a country like this—so rich, so great in riches and the diffusion of riches; the greatest the world has ever seen—has reached a point, I think, where it can afford to be considerate of nice things.
And considerateness in affairs, it looks sometimes a little weak and a little timid or something. We’re so considerate of other nations’ feelings, we hesitate to go at it before we’re sure there’s any issue. We’re looking for the issue all the time.
And that’s considerateness. That’s one of our great virtues. But it’s a dangerous one, you know. But it’s the virtue that we can afford now. I watch it with a great deal of interest.
Just that word “considerateness”—and the word “weak” the “weak” is a great word. I’m willing to take favors from people who give them out of a conscientious concern for me, but I like people better who have a weakness for me and the arts. […]
There’s a new sort of thing in Washington. I used to think Washington was the coldest city in the world for me to read in. I read there sometimes, but it was cold to me. And so the buildings looked cold. And now they all look warm.
That’s been happening in two administrations. It’s not just this one. Mr. Eisenhower was in this, too, very much—though he’s not a reading man. But neither was George Washington.
You probably don’t know it, but George Washington tried to write a poem once. It’s in existence still, partly written. ’Twas to a girl, and he never got through with it quite. I think they have it in the archives. I’ve seen it somewhere. But that wasn’t his line. He was a great general. […]
All this that I’m talking about, this melting that I feel in the country and in the educational world—(I live with these universities and colleges; that’s where my life is.)—I take it that it’s something that’s come over us in our affluence, belongs to the affluence of a great nation coming into an age of affluence and caring for fine things—a gentler interest in the fine things and a passing out of the boorish—(The “boorish” we’ll call it; just the crude and rude and the go-after-everything.)—just something easing off.
—at Yale University, May 19, 1961:
SOMEBODY asked me in Israel the other day if I believed in education. I said, “Yes, yes, yes.” See, just like that. And they said, “Why do you believe in it?” I said—(I was cornered.)—I said, “It lifts trouble and sorrow to a higher plane of regard.” I don’t say it gets over it, makes any difference in it; it lifts it to a higher plane of regard, as in King Lear.
They quoted that in the paper, but they left off the plane “of regard” they lifted it “to a higher plane.” That meant it made a bed of sorrow or something. I didn’t mean that, I meant it lifted it to a higher plane of regard.