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Cluttered Attic. A late riser, Frost eats a breakfast of watered milk and a raw egg flavored with lemon. Afternoons, he walks the hills or potters around the farm (he is helping his tenant farmer, Stafford Dragon, build an extra room on the main house). Last week he was spending his evenings reading Catullus (in Latin), dipping into travel books ("they keep your imagination kind of stretched wide") or writing in his slow longhand. Frost writes nearly all his poems straight through at a sitting. "A poem can't be worried into existence," he says.
The poems he has been writing in the last few years are the gleanings of a lifetime-cluttered attic. Where once he had magical insights, he is content now to write mostly shrewd and quizzical "editorials." A Masque of Reason (1945) and A Masque of Mercy (1947) Frost calls "kind of religious quips." Nobody but Frost would call these sardonic and compassionate verse-dramas quips.
This week, Robert Frost will head west for Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, where poets, scholars and editors will gather to do him honor. They will swap ideas, discuss "The Poet and Reality," see a production of A Masque of Mercy, and pay their respects to their old friend.
How good a poet is Robert Frost? It is the kind of uncatchable, dragonfly question he might put out himself. And it is best answered in his own deceptively homely terms: he is good enough to have lodged a few pebbles where they'll be hard to dislodge.
At his lyrical best, Frost owns a discipline of manner, an immaculate matching of thought and image, a native American voice unsurpassed by any American poet since Walt Whitman. For all his scorn of technical talk, he is as artful a technician as U.S. poetry has known.
Other contemporary poets have had greater influence—T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden. Each, in various measure, has more accurately expressed the fashionable tumults and shoutings of their time. Many of those tumults Frost has simply ignored. But when the time itself has passed into history, it may appear that Robert Frost, quarrying away at the granite of his New England mind, has chosen the more durable material.
*All Frost's poetry by copyright permission of Henry Holt & Co.
*For years, Frost thought he was born in 1875, but a letter of his father's printed in a Harvard Class of 1872 report sets the date as 1874.
*The Frosts had six in all: two sons, four daughters. They lost their first son when he was three, one daughter soon after birth. -No kin to Harvard's professor of history, Samuel Eliot Morison.