On October 13, 1962, Mr. Frost was a participant in Mount Holyoke College’s observance of the one hundred and twenty-fifth anniversary of its existence as an institution devoted to the education of women. And in the course of his remarks he pointed out that it was for him personally a time of celebration, too, this centering upon his having earlier in the year—on the occasion of his eighty-eighth birthday-published a new book of his poetry, entitled In the Clearing. Also, he made reference to his visit to the Soviet Union, for the U. S. Department of State, which had taken place little more than a month earlier.
I’M GOING TO write a book on college presidents someday. I’ve known quite a lot of ’em. And I might tell you right now, the book’s going to turn on one sentence, with a semicolon in it, I guess: “The college presidents are to be divided into two kinds;”- (from my point of view and yours, too)- “those that have a conscientious concern for our things and those who have a weakness for them.” Our things, you know; can’t let ’em alone.
There’s quite a story to tell about it, make a little book that I threatened a long time to write. I started it on an occasion like this, once years ago—thought of it then, about the president I was with. He was resigning; one of the lovely ones who had a strong weakness for our things.
You see, I say “our things,” plural. I don’t say “my thing”-“our things.” And that brings me to the question of what I mean by “our things” and whose are they? I get asked about that a good many times as I kick around. I’ve been asked it twice the last two visits I’ve made.
I sit round sometimes with the boys afterward and the girls, and I get asked if poetry matters much in the world—(I got asked that in another country, even.)—and who does it matter to, if it matters to anybody?
And then they ask, “Does it matter more to women than to men?” Then, I always tell ’em that if I catch a man reading my book—red-handed, you know; guilty—catch him reading my book, he usually looks up and says, “My wife’s a great fan of yours.” Puts it off on the ladies.
Then, pressed further about that: “What you writing poetry for?” Well, like any other thing. Somebody asks me, in a religious way if it was a sort of “offering.” Yes, on the altar of something. (That makes you think, “Here’s a good Congregationalist; doesn’t mind some Old Testament in his life.”)
One of the greatest prayers in the world is the one—(I think maybe it’s repeated. I don’t know how many times. But it always stays in my mind as one of the big, big, big things in my life.)—the prayer, “May my sacrifice be acceptable in Thy sight.”45
That’s your life if you die on the battlefield. That’s your poem. That’s your everything. It means to sacrifice—means the whole of you, you know, into it-and still the fear of God. You see, that’s the fear of God-that it’s still a question: Is it acceptable in His sight?
What does that mean in our English language? Does what I do amount to anything? Does it count? And we don’t know. That’s where you launch off into your religion, with that prayer: May it count; may what I do count.
In Russia, I said the other day that I suppose the men of action in the world accorded poetry something, though they get far from it most of the time. But they accord a place.
And it’s similar to the place they accord women. They grant that women, in some sense of the word, “run” the world. And in that same sort of sense, they might grant that poetry does. They might smile at this claim of a poem you probably know that says:
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth:
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the new of the old world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying…
A dream, you see.—
Or one that is coming to birth.23
That’s sort of the claim of it, its own claim. I leave that to you, and I leave that to the world. But I think the men might grant that, in the way they grant that women have really run the world—in the same way—and maybe that poetry might be called the “link place” between men and women, about all that, with the women having the strong hold on it at the one end. But those are just thoughts about it.
The boys are a great crowd to read to, talk to. And does poetry with me get more political with them? I sometimes get sick of the puny poetry that thinks money’s a bad thing and that men are a bad thing and that power is a bad thing.
I’ve been joking about liberals, so that I’ve got to write a book about them pretty soon, to satisfy people.
For instance, I say that a liberal is one who would rather fuss with a Gordian Knot than cut it. And then I could say, more seriously, that a liberal has his doubts about anything that’s arbitrary. He doesn’t realize that the height of it all is the arbitrary—even where we vote about every day of our lives; we vote, vote, vote, vote.
I’ve been with a head of a steel company—just brought me up here today—one of the steel companies. He’s chairman of the board now. He’s retired from the presidency and all that. But he’s a man who’s lived somewhat an arbitrary life. You ask him if his board ever tells him what to do or vote what to do. No, they just accept it when he tells them that he’s done it. He’s an arbitrary man.
The head of my publishing house confessed that. I search ’em; how much is voted—voted approval? (They say that a manly head of a big company said, “All those in favor say ‘aye’ the rest of you resign.” And that’s illiberal, you know.)
With me, this isn’t anything new at all. It runs all through my poems, if you notice them—for those that care about that sort of side of things, the political and all. The very life of the country, it depends something on that.
It says, “It shall wave” our flag—it says, “It shall wave a thousand years.”44 So, it’s liberal and progressive to give the country away as fast as you can, before the thousand years are up. You see, spend it; see, give it all. Give it to the poor. Give it to the—Well, what shall I call ’em?
Sometimes I say about them that if I ran it—(I don’t run it, of course.)—if I ran the country, I wouldn’t run it to disembarrass the good-for-nothing, so as to make them think when they go on relief it’s an honorary degree. You see, there’s my leaning—though I’m a Democrat. (One thing you can say about the Democratic party is that there’s more kinds of Democrats to be than there are kinds of Republicans; it’s looser.)
And to finish up about all this and get to the poems; I think my poems belong to politics, religion, and history and all. And I hate to have that forgotten for a minute. And if I get into affairs of the world and feel pleased to be in ’em, it’s because I want my poetry to be like that.
I want it to count with men as much as with women. With women in their way; and men, probably it’s through women to men that I get there, a good deal, you know—a good deal.
I have a great experience of it. I’m very, very, very experienced and know all about it. I can tell a good deal by who puts the finger on the right word somewhere in the poetry—who says just one word in some one place.
I can’t tell by questionnaire. I’ve never found out anything by questionnaire. The liberals send around questionnaires. I never got out questionnaires, even when I was teaching. […]
I give somebody “A” for life if he says the right thing at the right moment about the right thing. And I give ’em “D” for life if they say just one wrong thing that shows they just don’t know what it’s all about. That’s all.
And it goes clear into your religion, your Bible. The height of religion is that prayer I said to you. That’s the fear of God that you hear liberals say you must get over. No fears at all; don’t have any fears anymore, children.
But you’d better be afraid of God, in that sense: You don’t know whether you count with Him. And a pagan would say, “It’s on the lap of the gods.” It means practically the same thing. Your fate is “on the lap of the gods”—and your acceptance, you know; what you write.
You’ve got to remember that, when I read you poems and things, that I read them in that fear of God. I’m not afraid of you. […]
Well, this is a celebration, sort of, of yours and one for me, too. I’ve got a new book, you know. I leaf over it myself, and if somebody mentions something in it—especially some boy or girl—that’s my favorite poem for the time being. I feel, “Oh, well, I’ll have another look at that; that’s a very good poem, isn’t it?”
But beyond all that is what I speak of, the fear of God.—Does it count? And how does it count?
Just one word more: how it counts. It counts, if it counts, somewhat politically.
Again, to make a rather amusing distinction, there’s two things; there’s grievance and grief. A grievance is something that something can be done about, political sort of a thing. That’s politics, statescraft, everything—grievances to correct and handle. And grief is in the lines that I’ve said to some a number of times lately. Out of the fifteenth century, I guess it is. It says:
I know my life’s a pain and but a span;
I know my sense is mock’d in everything;
And, to conclude, I know myself a Man—
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.4
That’s a grief. That’s the grief of it that stays there. And poetry has a happy-sad way of talking about that a lot of the time. There’s a song—(A college song, I think it is.)—that struck me years ago. I don’t know it very well. But it had for a refrain in it, about drink, that it would “make you happy, make you sad.” Happy-sad; that’s the poetry of it. That’s the grief of it: the brevity of our life, the span, and our not knowing what’s still bothering us. And the poetry deals with that. But also it comes into reforms.
I think when I’m asked if it counts very much, if it does much,—(Does it go in for reforms? Is it in favor of doing this or that?)—it’s a lower class of poetry that gets down to politics. And when I get down to politics, I know I’m sort of a little shallower. It’s deeper when it’s with the happy-sad. […]
Well, leave that; leave it a little happy-sad—sometimes with tears. Isn’t this odd, that in that poem—
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth….23
there are the two things again? But why he gave them to Nineveh and Babylon, I’ve always wondered. Was Nineveh a sad place? Were they a sophisticated sad city, with that kind of beautiful melancholy touch? Was their beauty that kind? And was the other a sort of riotous mirth, you know, coarser lower-class?
In poetry, they really blend. But it’s a pretty thing, that pairing again in Babel and Nineveh—mirth and sadness—isn’t it? They’re there. And the strangest blend of all, the wonderfulest thing of all, is the happy-sad blend of just that sort of low-class song about drink:
Sadly thinking,
with…
Let’s see.—
With spirits sinking…
Let’s see if I can say that poem.—
Sadly thinking,
With spirits sinking,
Would more than drinking
My cares compose—
A cure for sorrow
From sighs I’d borrow;
And hope tomorrow
Would end my woes.
But since in wailing
There’s naught availing,
And Death, unfailing,
Will strike the blow;
Then, for this reason,
And for a season,
Let us be merry
Before we go!…46
That’s an Irish one, in this same play with all that. Well, I’m tempted to linger about it all. I’ve seen so much about it lately, the pros and cons of it all.
Let’s say bravely, we girls, that poetry counts. Not necessarily mine, but it counts.
—at New York University,
March 23,1956:
NEARLY EVERYTHING I get into is unpremeditated. That’s my happy life, fortunate life.
I’m just academic enough, you know, to be a teacher. And I’m just farmer enough to be a farmer. And I’m just poet enough, I guess, to be called a poet.
I never got called that till I was forty. And I was embarrassed when I was first called it, though I’d been writing for twenty years. But all of it’s been kind of haphazard and accidental.
Somebody asked me once, when I began to make up my mind that I’d write poetry. I said I never dared to let anybody know I’d made up my mind, if I had. It was more or less my own private affair; and I went ahead and wrote little poems. I wrote ’em because I couldn’t let ’em alone, because I fell into rhyme and metre at the age of fifteen, in a high school where there was no English taught. […]
I had no courses in English. All I had was Latin and Greek and mathematics and a little tiny bit of history. But the whole course of high school and college to me was just Latin and Greek and mathematics; no English at all.