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"They tried to get me to look at the scenery, but I was difficult and everybody was a little afraid of me" Last May, at the prompting of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall ("Udall is poetry-struck"), Frost spoke his mind and recited his poems before a black-tie audience of official Washington. He went up to Boston University to get an honorary degree—his 41st or so. No one knows the total for sure, and the task of keeping track has been scrambled by two admiring seamstresses who whipped up a nice quilt for him out of a flock of his multihued academic hoods.
Like any experienced campaigner, Robert Frost has developed a few standard routines; he quotes freely from his own best material, with and without attribution. But whether his stories are old or new, Frost relishes his role as a kind of foxy grandpa of letters, can still hold nearly any audience when he settles back and lets his monologue flow. "They asked me out to Chicago University one year to talk," he says, ";and they told me they didn't like my poetry but they liked to hear me go on against modern teaching.
I've always had the nerve to say what I had to say, and I never worried about losing a job by saying what I wanted to say. Lost ten of them. I would get these jobs at a university where the president would bring me in and not really know why. Then the new president would come in and wonder what the hell I was doing there, and I couldn't tell him." Professional at Work. Frost lives much of the year on his farm at Ripton, Vt., where he is looked after by Mrs. Kathleen Morrison, his longtime secretary, who is the wife of Harvard professor Theodore Morrison. As a compromise with nature and old age, he spends his winters in South Miami. There Frost has disturbed the mango, palmetto and avocado trees on a five-acre tract of land only enough to build two small green and white cottages —one for himself and the other for guests.
Frost putters around the land, clipping fronds from the palm trees, raking pine needles to mulch the smaller plants.
Up at 7:30 every morning. Frost still labors at the profession of poetry. Many of his poems in In the Clearing have been worked over for years—early versions of one called "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation" had run through Frost's mind for years. "I don't pretend to be unhappy about what I write," says Frost."I'm not one of those who say 'I wouldn't write if I didn't have a family to support.' None of that nonsense for me. I write, and that's that."