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Wrote Frost to Untermeyer: "Cast your eye back over my family's luck and perhaps you'll wonder if I haven't had pretty near enough?" But he stoically refused to make literary capital of his losses. "You shouldn't wax literary about what you've been through," he wrote in 1933. "It must be kept way down under the surface where the great griefs belong."
Last Talk. "Poets die in different ways," Frost told Untermeyer in 1947, when he was 73. "Most of them do not die into the grave but into business as you almost did, or into criticism as so many of them are doing nowadays." Frost refused to do either. He had just brought out a book of poems, his 22nd, when he died of combined pulmonary embolism and pneumonia at 89. He had not changed his character, either.
Untermeyer journeyed to Boston to see him in the hospital the day before he died. "We talked for over an hour," he writes in a final affectionate note. "Robert did most of the talking."