(book) Robert Frost : Speaking on Campus(2009) - Edward C. Lathem(ed.)

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(book) Robert Frost : Speaking on Campus / excerpts from his talks 1949-1962(2009)

- Edward C. Lathem(ed.)

New Hampshire(1923) 2~28

Introduction by David M. Shribman

•  Getting up things to say for yourself - April 11, 1949
•  Where poetry comes in - May 7, 1951
•  Handling figures of speech - May, 1952
• “Anxiety for the Liberal Arts”  - May 18, 1953
• A book side to everything - May 19, 1953
• Not freedom from, but freedom of - May 17, 1954
• Of rapid reading and what we call “completion” - December 15,
  1954
• No surprise to me, no surprise to anybody else - April 4, 1956
• Pieces of knitting to go on with - June 11, 1956
• Everything in the world comes in pairs - October 11, 1956
• My kind of fooling - December 3, 1956
• About “the great misgiving” - April 10, 1958
• Wondering how convictions are had - May 18, 1958 at at the Tniversity of California at Berkeley
• Something you live by till you live by something else - June 6, 1958
• Some gamble—something of uncertainty - October 30, 1958
• The future of the world - April 13, 1959
• Hang around for the refinement of sentiment - November 17, 1959
• What I think I’m doing when I write a poem - January 19, 1960
• Of the “elect” and the “elected” - October 23, 1960
• Fall in love at sight - November 3, 1960
• Thinking about generalizations - November 29, 1960
• “In on the Ground Floor” - April 14, 1961
• A certain restlessness - October 25, 1961
• About thinking and of perishing to shine - January 5, 1962
• A gentler interest in the fine things - April 2, 1962
• Let’s say bravely…that poetry counts - October 13, 1962
• I’ll tell you a little about my walks - November 13, 1962

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흔히 알려진 바와 상이하게, 프로스트 詩같이 복선이 복잡하게 얽혀 있는 詩가 많지 않을 듯. 심지어는 T. S. Eliot의 詩(예를 들면, the waste land, four quartets)보다도 복마전이 더 심한 경우가 적지 않다 싶을 정도.

프로스트 詩를 제대로, 보다 폭 넓게 즐기기 위한 보조 채널

1. Frost : proses, letters, interviews and lectures

2. biographies and papers & criticism on Frost's poetry

3. web-site, YouTube and other lectures

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from Introduction by David M. Shribman

Robert Frost’s poetry has triumphantly survived him, but most readers today have not known him in one of his most significant capacities—as teacher and lecturer. Here, collected for the first time, are excerpts from forty-six of his presentations delivered to students at more than thirty academic institutions over three decades. Frost’s topics include: “What I think I’m doing when I write a poem,” “Getting up things to say for yourself,” “The future of the world,” “Fall in love at sight,” and “Not freedom from, but freedom of.”

Gathered by Edward Connery Lathem, editor of The Poetry of Robert Frost, and introduced by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist David M. Shribman, Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus reveals Frost in the setting of both classroom and lecture hall, where he inspired thousands.

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 Introduction by David M. Shribman / 2. A Star in a Stoneboat / New Hampshire(1923)

 Getting up things to say for yourself / 3. The Census-taker
 Where poetry comes in / 4. The Star-splitter
 Handling figures of speech / 5. Maple

 “Anxiety for the Liberal Arts” / 6. The Ax-helve / New Hampshire(1923)
 A book side to everything / 7. The Grindstone
 Not freedom from, but freedom of / 8. Paul's Wife

 Of rapid reading and what we call “completion” / 9. Wild Grapes
 No surprise to me, no surprise to anybody else / 10. Pace for a Third
 Pieces of knitting to go on with / 11. Two Witches
 Everything in the world comes in pairs / 12. An Empty Threat
 My kind of fooling / 13. A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears and Some Books
 About “the great misgiving” / 14. I Will Sing You One - O
 Wondering how convictions are had / 15. Fragmentary Blue
 Something you live by till you live by something else / 16. Fire and Ice
 Some gamble—something of uncertainty / 17. In a Disused Graveyard
 The future of the world / 18. Dust of Snow
 Hang around for the refinement of sentiment / 19. To E. T.
 What I think I’m doing when I write a poem / 20. Nothing Gold Can Stay
 Of the “elect” and the “elected” / 21. The Runaway
 Fall in love at sight / 22. The Aim was Song
 Thinking about generalizations / 23. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
 “In on the Ground Floor” / 24. For Once, Then, Something 
 A certain restlessness / 25. Blue-betterfly Day
 About thinking and of perishing to shine / 26. The Onset
 A gentler interest in the fine things / 27. To Earthward
 Let’s say bravely…that poetry counts / 28. Good-by and Keep Cold
 I’ll tell you a little about my walks / 29. Two Look at Two

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He was a poet of rural byways, at a time when the nation was building urban and interstate highways. He was a high priest of the leisure thought, at a time when the country worshipped the hurry of commerce. His focus often was on agriculture and the pastoral, at the high tide of industry. He seemed sturdily to be a remnant of the past, in a world that prayed at the altar of the future. He articulated big truths, in a century that perfected the big lie.

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Frost from time to time retreated to the farm, but never was a hermit. 

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During March of 1962, slightly more than a year after his having dramatically played a cameo role in John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration, he told a Florida interviewer: “I’ve been publicized more this year than ever in my life. It turns me outside in, or inside out. So much pleasant attention. But on the outside, that isn’t where you write poetry.”

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“The utmost of ambition is,” he wrote in a tribute to his fellow poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of….” 

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He himself had run away from colleges—most notably, as an undergraduate, from both Dartmouth and Harvard. (“Dartmouth is my chief college,” he told an interviewer in 1960, “the first one I ran away from. I ran from Harvard later, but Dartmouth first.” And sometimes he would add, as he did at Connecticut College in 1961, “Dartmouth’s where I began my career, by running away.”) However, he ran to colleges as well, acknowledging that they were the oxygen of poetry in America. “I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be in existence if it hadn’t been for patronage of colleges,” he said while speaking to a college audience in May of 1954, and exaggerating only slightly. “In America we don’t have any lords and ladies to patronize poets. And so we have to depend on colleges and the audiences that they give us. One of the best audiences the world ever had is what I call a mixed town-and-gown audience in a college town. And that’s what’s given me my life, my living.”

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Frost had a term for his literary peregrinations; he called them “barding around,” which is a nice phrase, perhaps a bit self-aggrandizing even as it is possessed of a playful self-effacing tone. To Frost, barding around was what poets did—what he himself did from sea to sea, as well as sometimes across an ocean. And by barding around he was bonding with a great tradition. “That’s the way the poet does his begging, you know,” he said to the students at Choate School in 1962. “Ever since Homer we were beggars.” And he went on to quote lines from a Thomas Seward poem that read: “Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead, / Through which the living Homer begged his bread.” Then, he confided: “I’ve begged my way through more than that. I ‘get around,’ as they say, with these poems. And it’s all in such a nice American way.”

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He was a showman, and he was good at it, and he knew it. “He is, in fact,” wrote poet-critic-translator John Ciardi of Frost, in a Saturday Review article, “a king of the old pros: he knows how to tickle an audience and he knows how to knock it for a loop.”

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But it hadn’t always been that way. For Frost the stage was an acquired taste, and an acquired skill, hard-fought for and hard-won. In his early years he was terrified of being before an audience, and part of the Frost life narrative, as told by his official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, is of how he was consumed with fright when he was to deliver his valedictory address at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school in 1892. Thompson relates that Frost, “unbearably nervous,” dashed from the stage shortly before he was scheduled to speak, ran down the auditorium’s back stairwell, soaked his handkerchief in a sink, drenched his face in cold water, paced in the hall’s lower corridor, and finally crept back—almost paralyzed with trepidation—to his place on the stage, there to face the excruciating ordeal of speaking.

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Twice, in 1906 and in 1907, he was filled with such dread at the prospect of reading a poem of his aloud to the Men’s League of the Congregational Church in Derry, New Hampshire, that the pastor had to read his work for him. In 1909, when called upon to address a group of fellow teachers, he placed pebbles in his shoes, in the hope that the discomfort in his feet would distract him from his fear. And Thompson provides this account of Frost’s appearing before a group in Boston a half-dozen years later, just after his return from England and the publication of his first two books:

“Having determined to suffer whatever the cost to his nerves, so that he might improve his own poetic stature through making such public appearances, he had done his best to assert courage, boldness, daring. Yet when he had stood up to speak before the audience at the Authors’ Club his hands had trembled so much that he had feared he would drop the book he held. Before he had uttered a single word he could feel his lips trembling, and his voice had actually quavered, noticeably. He had seen that some of his listeners were suffering with him.”

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Frost never really mastered his stage fright, only controlled it. A third of a century later, in the postscript to a letter to the editor of the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly, in a declaration only partly in jest, he wrote: “The only reason I go on the platform at all is to show my bravery…. I do it to make up for never having faced bullets like the real hero. I suffer more before and after than during action.”

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There were sometimes occasions when Frost, he having beforehand provided a title for his talk, would appear and speak about something else entirely. Once, in the spring of 1954, when he had been listed on a college course syllabus to speak on “The Natural and Supernatural Bounds of Science,” he began his talk by saying, “You’ve had that, the name of the lecture, so long in front of you that I think you’ve probably figured out for yourselves what it was to be about, so I’ll talk about something else.” And he did. At a Washington press conference in 1960 he said: “It always is a mystery about what I’m going to say to anybody about anything until I see the whites of their eyes. Only this year they asked me out in Ohio, Columbus, if I’d give them a choice of three subjects. I haven’t got three subjects. No choice; they have to take what they get from me….”

Though lighthearted or casual, whimsical or capricious, as they sometimes might seem to be, Frost never took his speaking engagements lightly. “Mr. Frost likes very much to be left entirely alone before he is going to speak,” H. Bacon Collamore in 1938 advised a prospective host of the poet. “In other words, if you are going to have him talk in the evening he likes to go somewhere and rest and not have to say a word to anybody. Also, he eats a very light supper before talking. This usually consists of a cup of warm milk and one or two raw eggs…. He just hates to have someone give a dinner for him prior to his talking, which makes it necessary for him to carry on a conversation with people. It upsets him dreadfully.”

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Once, however, the transformation from terrified reader to in-control speaker had been achieved, his listeners were provided with a rich complement to his poetry, not merely an occasion to compliment his poems. Though what he had to say was not written down, it was not off-the-cuff either. He was informal, but not improvisional. He may have seemed to have been a stream-of-thought speaker, but his speaking waters ran deep, not shallow, and his presentation was generally masterful. “A deceptive air of nonchalance might lead the uninitiated to assume that he regards lecturing lightly,” his friend Reginald Cook, who had many times heard Frost address various audiences, wrote of him in 1956. “But the facts point to an opposite conclusion.”

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It was one of the great writer/talkers, Mark Twain (like Frost both a literary and public figure, beloved both in America and in England), who drew a distinction between speeches and talks, and who declared that“speeches can be conveyed in print, but not talks.” He asserted that whereas speeches consist of carefully crafted sentences and the rounded expression‎‎ of thought precisely communicated, such is not characteristically so with talks. “The soul of a talk,” he held, “consists of action,” not simply words—action that included gestures and vocal inflection; “the unvoiced expression‎‎ of the thought”—all of which is uncapturable by a stenographer’s record of what is uttered.

But Mark Twain to the contrary notwithstanding, there can be great value in collecting and presenting in printed form talks given by certain speakers. Talk is not always cheap; often it is exceedingly rich—especially when, as in the case of both Twain (whose talks have in fact been posthumously published) and Frost, it emanates from a master of both the written and spoken language. In its spontaneity—whether totally spontaneous or in greater or lesser degree so—it can convey not just what its speaker thinks, but how the speaker thinks. A talk is not simply the product of thought, it can also reveal significantly the process of thought.

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But I have always had some turning up in talk that I feared I might never use because I was too lazy to write prose. I think they have been mostly educational ideas connected with my teaching, actually lessons. That’s where I hoped you would come in. I thought if it didn’t take you too much from your own affairs you might be willing to gather them for us both.”

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“The temptation is to go even further than you with this and round it into a real piece. But perhaps that wouldn’t be fair to those who heard it as a speech or talk. They might feel bamboozled. It hurts like everything not to bring my point out more sharply.

Actually, Frost always found it exceedingly difficult to bring himself to revise his spoken texts. He failed, for example, to fulfill his contract to revise for publication his six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1936. He evidently didn’t even open the package of stenographic transcripts of them that was sent to him from Harvard University Press, and Lawrance Thompson speculates that he finally simply burned them.

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Robert Frost’s performances—the word is not chosen lightly; Frost was a “performance artist” before the term existed—were for both the eye and the ear. As Reginald Cook observed in his 1956 article “Notes on Frost the Lecturer”: “The voice, although a major part of the play, is augmented by the constant gesture of the hands, the frequent nod of the head, the changing facial expression‎‎, and even the stance, squared away, confronting his auditors, and depending very much upon the feel of the group. What the human aspects—the voice, gesture, expression‎‎, and appearance—represent is a natural presence not soon forgotten. Frost behaves as he looks. You never see him when he affects the poet, and you never hear him when he isn’t one.”

His audiences, small or large, unquestionably knew they were experiencing the “natural presence” of someone of consequence. And that knowledge, shared by speaker and listener alike, forged the initial bond that, by a given occasion’s end, tended to link them inextricably—a link strengthened because in an auditorium Frost always preferred to have the house lights left on, in order that he might clearly see his listeners.

As he addressed his audience, frequently he hesitated; often he was tentative. His talks are full of small asides. He varied the tempo of his remarks with the speed of his mind. In this regard, Peter J. Stanlis, a friend who knew Frost well as a talker in various settings, informal and formal, wrote of him for one of the volumes of Frost Centennial Essays: “He often gave the impression that he was thinking out loud and improvising as he rambled on from point to point, even from phrase to phrase, with pauses between points and phrases, while he visibly probed his mind, fishing out from some dim recess an original idea, image, or analogy, which became reflected in his face and gestures, as the idea, image, or analogy welled up inside him andspurted out of his mouth in a voice that also seemed to be searching for exactly the right word and tone to convey it directly to each listener.”

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His manner was, in a word, conversational. And because conversation is an auditory medium, not a written one—and, whenever face-to-face with those being talked to, can be very much a visual one as well—the true texture of what Frost said, the total effect of precisely how he conveyed what he uttered, cannot be fully captured, it must be conceded, on a printed page. Mark Twain was, a century ago when dictating his autobiography, surely right in asserting that. And the editor of talks undoubtedly has frequent occasion to echo, in this respect, Frost’s own revisional lament of nearly three score years ago: “It hurts like everything not to bring my [Frost’s] point out more sharply.”

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On the pages that follow are included excerpts from forty-six talks, as delivered at thirty-two academic institutions in the period 1949 to 1962, the final fourteen years of Robert Frost’s life. There is a preponderance of talks given at Dartmouth, in part because Frost made an annual appearance there before the college’s storied Great Issues Course, in which the presentations by guest lecturers were routinely tape-recorded, this in an era when such recording elsewhere was not so common as it would later become.

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“The business of the teacher is, I presume, to challenge the student’s purpose,” Frost said in an interview published during December of 1925 in The Christian Science Monitor, an interview in which he described his teaching method as being “education by presence.” (It is a description or characterization that should be especially evocative to those who dip into or linger over the pages of this volume.) “…I do not mean,” he explained, “the challenge should be made in words. That, I should think, is nearly fruitless.” And he went on to declare: “…I am an indifferent teacher as teachers go, and it is hard to understand why I am wanted around colleges unless there is some force it is thought I can exert by merely belonging to them. It must be that what I stand for does my work.”

In one of the talks from which an excerpt is included in this volume, drawn from an afternoon’s presentation at Harvard in 1956, Frost notes the link within his own life between conversation and education, and he quotes two lines of his verse that as subsequently published read: “It takes all sorts of in- and outdoor schooling / To get adapted to my kind of fooling.” Much of Frost’s poetry is set outdoors, while almost all of his teaching occurred of course indoors. To see Frost whole, one needs to examine the outdoor man when he was indoors. And no places indoors give us in this regard the opportunity for so many insights concerning him as do college, university, or preparatory school classrooms and lecture halls—the places within which over the years he spoke to many thousand students, as well as to others in those town-and-gown audiences he liked so well. 

In some notebook jottings of his, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1951 under the title “Poetry and School,” there are tucked into the middle of a paragraph two sentences that combine his outdoor genius with his indoor genius, lines that are poignant to us today: “The best educated person is one who has been matured at just the proper rate. Seasoned but not kiln dried.” What Frost said in the previously unpublished talks that are represented here, some of them now more than a half-century old, most of them all but forgotten, may perhaps be thought of as having now, with the passing of time, matured for us at just the proper rate. Turn the pages of this book and you can discover for yourself: They are seasoned, and not kiln dried.

from Introduction by David M. Shribman

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Introduction by David M. Shribman

ROBERT FROST was America’s preeminent poet, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any poet. He was called by The Times of London, in its obituary announcing his death in 1963, “undoubtedly the most widely known and loved literary figure in America” to which the paper added, in a separate editorial tribute, that his fame in England was such that, in mourning, “we are also regretting a loss that feels to have happened at home.” The President of the United States said of him that he had left “a vacancy in the American spirit”: “His death impoverishes us all; but he has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” A year earlier, within an introduction for the British edition of Frost’s final book of new poems, England’s Robert Graves had declared, “The truth is that Frost was the first American who could be honestly reckoned a master-poet by world standards.”

During the course of a career that spanned nearly a full half-century—from his first published book, in 1914, until his death—Robert Frost attained immense prominence and popularity as a poet and man of letters. He was that rarity in literary life, celebrated by the general public and scholars alike. He was another rarity, too, an achievement matched in his century perhaps only by William Faulkner: a writer of high art inextricably bound to one region, but nonetheless inarguably regarded as national—even universal.

He was a poet of rural byways, at a time when the nation was building urban and interstate highways. He was a high priest of the leisure thought, at a time when the country worshipped the hurry of commerce. His focus often was on agriculture and the pastoral, at the high tide of industry. He seemed sturdily to be a remnant of the past, in a world that prayed at the altar of the future. He articulated big truths, in a century that perfected the big lie.

Yet Frost, the countryman in a country of cities and an apparent antique in the culture of the new, was as current as the morning newspaper, with mass appeal in the first mass-market, mass-culture nation. He appeared on the covers of literary magazines, such as The Atlantic Monthly and Saturday Review, but also on the covers of popular mega-circulation magazines, such as Time and Life. He was both well-regarded and well-loved.

As the years passed, awards flowed to him, cascaded in upon him. He was given more than forty honorary degrees, including ones from both Oxford and Cambridge, a dual tribute that had been accorded but two American writers before him, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, back in the nineteenth century. A mountain was named for him in his home state of Vermont. A unanimous vote of Congress, which had previously saluted him with formal resolutions on his seventy-fifth and eighty-fifth birthdays, led to the striking in his honor of a special gold medal, presented to him in 1962 on his eighty-eighth birthday. All this for a man who, as expressed in his poem “A Considerable Speck,” had “none of the tenderer-than-thou / Collectivistic regimenting love / With which the modern world is being swept.”

Frost from time to time retreated to the farm, but never was a hermit. Increasingly over the years, he became a public man—a personage. And it was not too much to say that, as such, he embraced the public and it embraced him. During the closing period of his life, he referred to the “publicality” of his existence—the word is his, as was the profile. But this publicality wasn’t something he took on only in grandfatherly old age (and indeed there was much to Frost, early and late, that was not grandfatherly, for his was a world of conflict, not confection). However, his role as a public figure was perhaps underlined by his appointment in 1958 as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress—equivalent to designation as Poet Laureate of the United States—and being thereafter the Lbrary’s Honorary Consultant in the Humanities.

During March of 1962, slightly more than a year after his having dramatically played a cameo role in John F. Kennedy’s presidential inauguration, he told a Florida interviewer: “I’ve been publicized more this year than ever in my life. It turns me outside in, or inside out. So much pleasant attention. But on the outside, that isn’t where you write poetry.”

For a man who was a student of the inner life, and who stirred the inner life of the public, being out in public was ironic, and he himself was struck by the many ironies it prompted. He went to the Soviet Union that year of 1962, engaging while there in an historic, much-publicized one-on-one meeting with Premier Nikita Khrushchev. (He had earlier been on cultural goodwill missions, also arranged by the State Department, to several countries: Brazil, Great Britain, Ireland, Israel, and Greece.) Later, to an Amherst College audience he said of his Soviet trip: “My career as a teacher and as a writer has almost been wiped out by my going to Russia. I haven’t met anybody lately that doesn’t know I’ve been to Russia, though they’ve never read one of my books.”

Robert Frost’s poetry has survived him, and in truth appears to have grown in renown. “The utmost of ambition is,” he wrote in a tribute to his fellow poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of….” Clearly, by that gauge, Frost’s own poetic ambition has been monumentally realized and his reputation as a poet rendered amply secure.

But most readers today do not know Frost—have had no way of knowing him—in one of his most important roles, as teacher and lecturer. He was in fact one of America’s great teachers, one of its great presences as such, in a classroom or on a platform or stage. Although many years, many decades, have passed, there do remain today some for whom the memory of Robert Frost on an academic campus—college or university or preparatory school—endures with a special power and vividness, both intellectual and visual. He did with frequency speak elsewhere, before groups of various sorts and to general audiences, in cities and towns all across the land. But his academic audiences were those he liked best.

He himself had run away from colleges—most notably, as an undergraduate, from both Dartmouth and Harvard. (“Dartmouth is my chief college,” he told an interviewer in 1960, “the first one I ran away from. I ran from Harvard later, but Dartmouth first.” And sometimes he would add, as he did at Connecticut College in 1961, “Dartmouth’s where I began my career, by running away.”) However, he ran to colleges as well, acknowledging that they were the oxygen of poetry in America. “I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t be in existence if it hadn’t been for patronage of colleges,” he said while speaking to a college audience in May of 1954, and exaggerating only slightly. “In America we don’t have any lords and ladies to patronize poets. And so we have to depend on colleges and the audiences that they give us. One of the best audiences the world ever had is what I call a mixed town-and-gown audience in a college town. And that’s what’s given me my life, my living.”

Frost had a term for his literary peregrinations; he called them “barding around,” which is a nice phrase, perhaps a bit self-aggrandizing even as it is possessed of a playful self-effacing tone. To Frost, barding around was what poets did—what he himself did from sea to sea, as well as sometimes across an ocean. And by barding around he was bonding with a great tradition. “That’s the way the poet does his begging, you know,” he said to the students at Choate School in 1962. “Ever since Homer we were beggars.” And he went on to quote lines from a Thomas Seward poem that read: “Seven wealthy towns contend for Homer dead, / Through which the living Homer begged his bread.” Then, he confided: “I’ve begged my way through more than that. I ‘get around,’ as they say, with these poems. And it’s all in such a nice American way.”

Even when his presentations to an audience were to be essentially a reading of his poetry, he would typically begin, like an opera, with an overture, talking informally. As he said in explanation at the University of Miami in 1960: “I permit myself one free-verse poem, extempore, to begin with…. It is some little theme I have—sometimes political, sometimes religious, sometimes historical. It’s about something I’ve just arrived at.” Similarly, at the University of Iowa in 1959, he told his audience: “I begin with a little talk like this, as my only free verse. I don’t write free verse. I talk free verse, extempore.” But even speaking extemporaneously, he came through as the sage of the written page.

Over the years, Frost as teacher became a masterly figure, in classrooms, lecture halls, and auditoriums—before audiences consisting of students in but a single academic course or before a throng of listeners. (More than eighty-five hundred attended what, at the University of Detroit in November of 1962, would prove to be one of his last platform appearances.) He was a showman, and he was good at it, and he knew it. “He is, in fact,” wrote poet-critic-translator John Ciardi of Frost, in a Saturday Review article, “a king of the old pros: he knows how to tickle an audience and he knows how to knock it for a loop.”

But it hadn’t always been that way. For Frost the stage was an acquired taste, and an acquired skill, hard-fought for and hard-won. In his early years he was terrified of being before an audience, and part of the Frost life narrative, as told by his official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, is of how he was consumed with fright when he was to deliver his valedictory address at the Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school in 1892. Thompson relates that Frost, “unbearably nervous,” dashed from the stage shortly before he was scheduled to speak, ran down the auditorium’s back stairwell, soaked his handkerchief in a sink, drenched his face in cold water, paced in the hall’s lower corridor, and finally crept back—almost paralyzed with trepidation—to his place on the stage, there to face the excruciating ordeal of speaking.

Twice, in 1906 and in 1907, he was filled with such dread at the prospect of reading a poem of his aloud to the Men’s League of the Congregational Church in Derry, New Hampshire, that the pastor had to read his work for him. In 1909, when called upon to address a group of fellow teachers, he placed pebbles in his shoes, in the hope that the discomfort in his feet would distract him from his fear. And Thompson provides this account of Frost’s appearing before a group in Boston a half-dozen years later, just after his return from England and the publication of his first two books:

“Having determined to suffer whatever the cost to his nerves, so that he might improve his own poetic stature through making such public appearances, he had done his best to assert courage, boldness, daring. Yet when he had stood up to speak before the audience at the Authors’ Club his hands had trembled so much that he had feared he would drop the book he held. Before he had uttered a single word he could feel his lips trembling, and his voice had actually quavered, noticeably. He had seen that some of his listeners were suffering with him.”

Frost never really mastered his stage fright, only controlled it. A third of a century later, in the postscript to a letter to the editor of the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly, in a declaration only partly in jest, he wrote: “The only reason I go on the platform at all is to show my bravery…. I do it to make up for never having faced bullets like the real hero. I suffer more before and after than during action.”

But once he had controlled his stage fright, he managed to make the stage his friend, in part because it had become for him a pulpit. He found inspiration there, in the pulpit, and his performances from the pulpit were in many cases inspiring. There he was able to project what he called “the nicety of words” as eloquently from his lips as he could from his pen. In the pulpit, as if on a mountain summit, he sometimes spoke as someone who had—as he put it in an entirely different context in a poem titled, pointedly, “Reluctance”—“climbed the hills of view/And looked at the world, and descended.” His was a life designed to “say back to the world”—even if he wasn’t at any given moment quite sure exactly what he would say. And in the pulpit that is what he did, incomparably and unforgettably.

The ease with which he approached the speaking arts can be measured by the ease with which in his talks he often wandered, no longer sustainingly subject to the muse on any given topic, but actually just musing about this and that. Even when Frost was invited to deliver a set-piece lecture or a commencement address, he spoke informally, without a prepared manuscript or notes of any kind, and did not resist the impulse to roam in his remarks into rhetorical roads not previously taken or roads unexpected and, in some cases, roads quite random.

There were sometimes occasions when Frost, he having beforehand provided a title for his talk, would appear and speak about something else entirely. Once, in the spring of 1954, when he had been listed on a college course syllabus to speak on “The Natural and Supernatural Bounds of Science,” he began his talk by saying, “You’ve had that, the name of the lecture, so long in front of you that I think you’ve probably figured out for yourselves what it was to be about, so I’ll talk about something else.” And he did. At a Washington press conference in 1960 he said: “It always is a mystery about what I’m going to say to anybody about anything until I see the whites of their eyes. Only this year they asked me out in Ohio, Columbus, if I’d give them a choice of three subjects. I haven’t got three subjects. No choice; they have to take what they get from me….”

Though lighthearted or casual, whimsical or capricious, as they sometimes might seem to be, Frost never took his speaking engagements lightly. “Mr. Frost likes very much to be left entirely alone before he is going to speak,” H. Bacon Collamore in 1938 advised a prospective host of the poet. “In other words, if you are going to have him talk in the evening he likes to go somewhere and rest and not have to say a word to anybody. Also, he eats a very light supper before talking. This usually consists of a cup of warm milk and one or two raw eggs…. He just hates to have someone give a dinner for him prior to his talking, which makes it necessary for him to carry on a conversation with people. It upsets him dreadfully.”

But for all the edginess of the hours leading to a talk, the performance itself typically had an easy air. The transformation had come slowly for a man who in his earliest public engagements had, verging on panic, sped through his presentations—“in terror of my life,” as he in 1950 described to a Tufts audience his experience there at the college in 1915 when he read two of his poems to its Phi Beta Kappa chapter: “like a rabbit scuttling…, without any awareness of what I was doing; just got through it alive.”

Once, however, the transformation from terrified reader to in-control speaker had been achieved, his listeners were provided with a rich complement to his poetry, not merely an occasion to compliment his poems. Though what he had to say was not written down, it was not off-the-cuff either. He was informal, but not improvisional. He may have seemed to have been a stream-of-thought speaker, but his speaking waters ran deep, not shallow, and his presentation was generally masterful. “A deceptive air of nonchalance might lead the uninitiated to assume that he regards lecturing lightly,” his friend Reginald Cook, who had many times heard Frost address various audiences, wrote of him in 1956. “But the facts point to an opposite conclusion.”

Poetry is of course meant to be spoken, as well as to be read—Frost would in the course of his “barding around” tell his audiences that he wanted to “say” some of his poems—and there was special interest in hearing him say the poems aloud and also in what he had to say about them. But supplementing that—surrounding it and enriching it—was the particular interest associated with hearing the “free-verse poem, extempore, to begin with” that usually was a part of his presentation—hearing that and the comments and observations he interspersed with “saying” the poetry.

What he imparted to his listeners was typically conveyed in the spirit of three words of invitation, drawn from his North of Boston poem “The Pasture” (the poem used by him as the introductory element for each of his comprehensive collected editions) : “You come too.”

It was an invitation that related to a broad sphere of subject coverage—to, as expressed within the dedication statement of one of his books, “range beyond range even into the realm of government and religion.” And the way in which what was conveyed was expressed was an affirmation of what might be called Robert Frost’s “Iron Rule of Language”: that—as is declared in his poem “The Mountain”—“…all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”

It was one of the great writer/talkers, Mark Twain (like Frost both a literary and public figure, beloved both in America and in England), who drew a distinction between speeches and talks, and who declared that“speeches can be conveyed in print, but not talks.” He asserted that whereas speeches consist of carefully crafted sentences and the rounded expression‎‎‎ of thought precisely communicated, such is not characteristically so with talks. “The soul of a talk,” he held, “consists of action,” not simply words—action that included gestures and vocal inflection; “the unvoiced expression‎‎‎ of the thought”—all of which is uncapturable by a stenographer’s record of what is uttered.

But Mark Twain to the contrary notwithstanding, there can be great value in collecting and presenting in printed form talks given by certain speakers. Talk is not always cheap; often it is exceedingly rich—especially when, as in the case of both Twain (whose talks have in fact been posthumously published) and Frost, it emanates from a master of both the written and spoken language. In its spontaneity—whether totally spontaneous or in greater or lesser degree so—it can convey not just what its speaker thinks, but how the speaker thinks. A talk is not simply the product of thought, it can also reveal significantly the process of thought.

Robert Frost thought in serenity, but he thought out loud, as well. And it is clear that from an early period—reaching back to the teens and the nineteen-twenties—he himself was concerned about there existing a record of at least some of what he expressed in talk. Writing in 1932 to his friend Sidney Cox, he explicitly focused upon the matter of possible talk-based publication: “I’ll tell you my notion of the contract you thought you had with me. The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse. But I have always had some turning up in talk that I feared I might never use because I was too lazy to write prose. I think they have been mostly educational ideas connected with my teaching, actually lessons. That’s where I hoped you would come in. I thought if it didn’t take you too much from your own affairs you might be willing to gather them for us both.”

A year and a half later, he is found writing again to Cox: “I didn’t mean exactly what you thought I did when years ago I was so incautious as to suggest that you might like to turn to account some of the theories of school, life, and art I let fall in talk but was too lazy ever probably to use in writing myself. You took it that I was asking to be Boswellized…. I meant something the most impersonal.” And farther along in this same letter, he added: “I shrink from prefaces as you know. Once in a while it comes over me to wish some friend would do my explaining for me. It shouldnt take much and it might better be based on my talk in general than on particular rambling talks with me.”

A few of Frost’s talks were published during his lifetime, some with his permission, some without. At Amherst while it was his academic home base in the early nineteen-thirties and again in the late nineteen-forties, two of his talks were brought out in the Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly, and in both instances Frost revised them himself prior to publication. In the earlier of the two cases (1931), he first made handwritten emendations, some of them extensive, to each of the twenty-two pages of the stenographic transcript; then subsequently he entered further changes to all of the pages of the typescript that represented his initial revision. And in the latter instance of publication (1948), he began what he wrote to theQuarterly’s editor about that text’s revision: “The temptation is to go even further than you with this and round it into a real piece. But perhaps that wouldn’t be fair to those who heard it as a speech or talk. They might feel bamboozled. It hurts like everything not to bring my point out more sharply.

Actually, Frost always found it exceedingly difficult to bring himself to revise his spoken texts. He failed, for example, to fulfill his contract to revise for publication his six Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1936. He evidently didn’t even open the package of stenographic transcripts of them that was sent to him from Harvard University Press, and Lawrance Thompson speculates that he finally simply burned them.

Two decades later, in 1956, the Fund for the Republic succeeded in securing his permission to publish the commencement address he had delivered that year at Sarah Lawrence College, and it was issued as a booklet entitled A Talk for Students. In his letter granting consent, however, Frost stressed that his remarks were to be regarded as “just talk,” made “without notes,” and were “not an essay written.”

There was one occasion when Frost, late in life, engaged actively in a quite comprehensive revision of one of his talks, the speech he delivered in 1959 when he received the Emerson—Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His topic then was Emerson, whom he admired deeply, and the attention he lavished, following its delivery, upon that text was undoubtedly a measure of his special regard for his subject.

Robert Frost’s performances—the word is not chosen lightly; Frost was a “performance artist” before the term existed—were for both the eye and the ear. As Reginald Cook observed in his 1956 article “Notes on Frost the Lecturer”: “The voice, although a major part of the play, is augmented by the constant gesture of the hands, the frequent nod of the head, the changing facial expression‎‎‎, and even the stance, squared away, confronting his auditors, and depending very much upon the feel of the group. What the human aspects—the voice, gesture, expression‎‎‎, and appearance—represent is a natural presence not soon forgotten. Frost behaves as he looks. You never see him when he affects the poet, and you never hear him when he isn’t one.”

His audiences, small or large, unquestionably knew they were experiencing the “natural presence” of someone of consequence. And that knowledge, shared by speaker and listener alike, forged the initial bond that, by a given occasion’s end, tended to link them inextricably—a link strengthened because in an auditorium Frost always preferred to have the house lights left on, in order that he might clearly see his listeners.

As he addressed his audience, frequently he hesitated; often he was tentative. His talks are full of small asides. He varied the tempo of his remarks with the speed of his mind. In this regard, Peter J. Stanlis, a friend who knew Frost well as a talker in various settings, informal and formal, wrote of him for one of the volumes of Frost Centennial Essays: “He often gave the impression that he was thinking out loud and improvising as he rambled on from point to point, even from phrase to phrase, with pauses between points and phrases, while he visibly probed his mind, fishing out from some dim recess an original idea, image, or analogy, which became reflected in his face and gestures, as the idea, image, or analogy welled up inside him andspurted out of his mouth in a voice that also seemed to be searching for exactly the right word and tone to convey it directly to each listener.”

With an easy air, mixing ideas and idiom freely, he often shifted into the vernacular. He wasn’t above shortening “because” to “’cause” or “them” to “’em” or “so as” to “so’s”—or saying “gotta” and “’tis” and “’tisn’t.” For effect he would even occasionally employ decidedly slangy expression‎‎‎, such as “That don’t mean…” and “Ain’t it hell….”

His manner was, in a word, conversational. And because conversation is an auditory medium, not a written one—and, whenever face-to-face with those being talked to, can be very much a visual one as well—the true texture of what Frost said, the total effect of precisely how he conveyed what he uttered, cannot be fully captured, it must be conceded, on a printed page. Mark Twain was, a century ago when dictating his autobiography, surely right in asserting that. And the editor of talks undoubtedly has frequent occasion to echo, in this respect, Frost’s own revisional lament of nearly three score years ago: “It hurts like everything not to bring my [Frost’s] point out more sharply.”

An editor in bringing forth a talk’s text for publication cannot undertake to sprinkle it with bracketed indications (as in a script for actors learning lines of dialogue) of the way in which something is said: earnestly, casually, jokingly, and the like. A clear-cut example, from within this volume, of a statement by Frost that could potentially be misunderstood or misinterpreted when read is provided within his 1956 talk at the University of Oregon. Toward the beginning of his comments, he spoke elliptically about his philosophy of teaching, as well as about writing, and he then added what might seem to a reader an odd, jarring interjection: “That’s a curious thing in our day, speaking of the different kinds of people who set up to be as important as I am.” In this case, as in others, a transcript can’t reproduce the tone of voice and facial expression‎‎‎ that at the time of the sentence’s delivery the audience on that April evening in Eugene readily understood to be one of self-mocking jest.

In like fashion, the printed page cannot be made to carry and impart in any at all adequate degree the humor that attended Frost’s manner of telling, in a January 1960 talk that is also represented in these pages, of a taunting exchange that had been engaged in between himself and an inebriated fellow poet—an account in which his mimicry of the slurred speech that was involved (“I imitated his manner.”) produced amusement to his listeners.

On the pages that follow are included excerpts from forty-six talks, as delivered at thirty-two academic institutions in the period 1949 to 1962, the final fourteen years of Robert Frost’s life. There is a preponderance of talks given at Dartmouth, in part because Frost made an annual appearance there before the college’s storied Great Issues Course, in which the presentations by guest lecturers were routinely tape-recorded, this in an era when such recording elsewhere was not so common as it would later become.

It might be noted that Frost’s talks were oftentimes studded with quotations from the verse of others, poets both American and British, quoted by him entirely from memory and with a remarkable degree of accuracy. He did, however, now and again, as readers of what follows may discover, lapse in the verbatim recollection of texts that he with seeming ease brought to mind and recited. (During a July 1955 session with students at the Bread Loaf School of English, he asked, “Did you ever notice this about your memory, that in the course of years you corrupt a line in poetry in a pretty fair way until it’s got to be something else with you entirely?”)

He even on rare occasion faltered with his own poetry, even indeed with so familiar a poem as “Birches”—of which he told an audience at the Library of Congress in 1955: “I know that by heart, but I know it so well, I sometimes forget it in the middle of it…. I made a mistake with it the last time I said it.” And as well as he knew Emerson’s poetry, he on at least some occasions rendered the closing stanza of “Give All to Love” as beginning “Verily know…,” instead of “Heartily know…”

In addition, he sometimes was, as is evident on the pages that follow, forgetful or merely casual in making reference to the titles of published works—with Henry George’s Progress and Poverty transposed toPoverty and Progress, the “Federalist Papers” becoming the “Federal Papers,” and “The Hollow Men” cited as “The Hollow Man.” Nor were his own poems exempt from an occasional careless naming of them, as in “A Tuft of Flowers” for “The Tuft of Flowers.” All matters of no particular consequence—seemingly not to him and certainly not to his listeners.

There are many lessons in this volume, some about Frost, some about poetry, some about life, and some about how Frost, poetry, and life help explain one another. Certainly paramount among the lessons here is that Frost was a poet by profession, but fundamentally and always a teacher by temperament. He mixed the two, both in his poetry and in his public appearances—in his readings and his talks—and most especially when on an academic campus. He was never one without being also the other: poet and teacher.

“The business of the teacher is, I presume, to challenge the student’s purpose,” Frost said in an interview published during December of 1925 in The Christian Science Monitor, an interview in which he described his teaching method as being “education by presence.” (It is a description or characterization that should be especially evocative to those who dip into or linger over the pages of this volume.) “…I do not mean,” he explained, “the challenge should be made in words. That, I should think, is nearly fruitless.” And he went on to declare: “…I am an indifferent teacher as teachers go, and it is hard to understand why I am wanted around colleges unless there is some force it is thought I can exert by merely belonging to them. It must be that what I stand for does my work.”

In one of the talks from which an excerpt is included in this volume, drawn from an afternoon’s presentation at Harvard in 1956, Frost notes the link within his own life between conversation and education, and he quotes two lines of his verse that as subsequently published read: “It takes all sorts of in- and outdoor schooling / To get adapted to my kind of fooling.” Much of Frost’s poetry is set outdoors, while almost all of his teaching occurred of course indoors. To see Frost whole, one needs to examine the outdoor man when he was indoors. And no places indoors give us in this regard the opportunity for so many insights concerning him as do college, university, or preparatory school classrooms and lecture halls—the places within which over the years he spoke to many thousand students, as well as to others in those town-and-gown audiences he liked so well. 

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In some notebook jottings of his, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1951 under the title “Poetry and School,” there are tucked into the middle of a paragraph two sentences that combine his outdoor genius with his indoor genius, lines that are poignant to us today: “The best educated person is one who has been matured at just the proper rate. Seasoned but not kiln dried.” What Frost said in the previously unpublished talks that are represented here, some of them now more than a half-century old, most of them all but forgotten, may perhaps be thought of as having now, with the passing of time, matured for us at just the proper rate. Turn the pages of this book and you can discover for yourself: They are seasoned, and not kiln dried.