Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus: Excerpts from His Talks, 1949-1962

by Robert Frost, David M. Shribman (Introduction), Edward Connery Lathem (Editor)

“Frost was the first American who could be honestly reckoned a master-poet by world standards.”―Robert Graves 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. 9 photos

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

228 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

Reviews

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Dartmouth is my chief college,” [Frost] told an interviewer in 1960, “the first one I ran away from. I ran away from Harvard later, but Dartmouth first.”

This book contains a little over a decade’s worth of Frost’s speeches on campuses, and there are some real gems in it. This is fascinating because it is such a product of its time - Frost talks about post-WWII and the Soviet Union in between his musings on writing, and this is a much more political book than I expected. (I wasn’t expecting politics at all.) Frost is engaging here: his speeches can feel conversational and laconic, but he’s also unafraid to take a stand, and something about that combination of tones makes him seem approachable.

But it’s always a bad sign to me when people come back from college, after two or three months, correcting their family about everything - pronunciation and all that - bad sign, getting educated too easily.

I found myself laughing, and I wasn’t expecting that, either.

He does talk about poetry!

Then, another thing poetry is... it’s the dawning on you of an idea; the freshness caught of an idea dawning on you... Poetry has that freshness forever, of having caught the feeling that goes with an idea just as it comes over you.

And:

Poetry is that that evaporates from both prose and verse when it’s translated. All this translated stuff is short of being poetry. It’s lost its poetry in being translated.

And:

I can remember in that poem the first sense I had of the nicety of the words... that I couldn’t myself say differently. That is to say, I couldn’t translate it even into other English...

If I know anything about writing, or about reading either, it’s that if you have an idea so complete that it’s already in phrases and everything - partly in phrases - you are in danger of being a translator when you write.

He’s not exactly concise when he’s speaking, which is another thing that surprised me. I would never characterize his poetry as “meandering”, for example. But here he tends toward repetition.

And it’s interesting to see over the course of how many years and speeches he developed his ideas on rhyming poetry and metaphor - and liberal arts and science and socialism and civilization - and especially education:

...and it never occurred to me for years and years. And I’m so selfish in my nature, in my ego, that I’m glad I waited all those years to find it out for myself and never had it pointed out to me by a teacher...

And that’s so in my own poems. Somebody says to me, “I see what you mean, but just what are you driving at?” ...and I don’t want to have to tell that. And I think everybody’d be selfish enough to want to see that for himself.

And I look at a lot of our teaching as a kind of trespass on a lofty selfishness that young people ought to have.

He may meander, but he’s never boring.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone whose thoughts about Robert Frost as a poet are decidedly mixed to adverse, I am pleasantly surprised that there is so much of value in his talks to college students.  I suppose a great deal of my enjoyment comes from the fact that the author shows himself to be interested in conversation.  Even where one disagrees with him (and there is plenty to disagree with him about), the author's focus on having a conversation rather than turning the talks into merely sermons of his worldview makes it a lot easier to take.  Approach and framing matter a great deal here, and the author's occasional misquotations of poems only adds to the charm of the author being somewhat more human.  Indeed, the essential humanity of the author makes this book far more enjoyable to read than many of the author's early poetry, and almost makes it worthwhile to consider if the later poems of Frost are worth exploring at all since I've read the same early ones over and over again thanks to the wonder of marketing.  Almost.  At any rate, these discussions are worth reading if you care what Frost has to say about various aspects of writing and life.

The slightly less than 200 pages of material in this book consist of a variety of transcribed talks given by Robert Frost to college students, mostly at Dartmouth, during the course of his old age.  The earliest of them start in the period after the end of World War II and show someone trying to deal with the political changes as a result of the Cold War, hinting at some kind of "higher treachery" by having a loyalty above that of a nation, although Frost is wise enough not to discuss this in greater specificity given the treachery of so many of the people who had served in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations on behalf of the Soviets.  In other talks the author talks about the lack of need for anxiety about the liberal arts, as well as the author's taste in fooling, the importance of uncertainty and falling in love at first sight, matters like generalizations and walking and the importance of poetry in life.  Most of the talks relate to the author's thinking and writing, or the writing of others (like Milton and Emerson) that one would expect would be of importance to the scions of Puritan New Englanders.  

I don't think that there is very much within these pages that could be considered by anyone as life changing information.  Frost's talks are often pleasant and genial, they are sometimes rambling, and he tends to return to the same few poems of his to read over and over again, but given the lack of geniality in much of Frost's body of work when it comes to his poetry, the geniality of his talks is enough to make this an enjoyable read.  It is almost endearing when the author talks about the fact that he is a Democrat and "tried out" socialism (whatever that means) or comments on the sudden turnabout of American policy concerning Soviet communism.  It is endearing when the author wishes aloud that he were honest, reminding the reader (and the listener) that he was not an obvious or particularly honest person whatever his wishes, and that his writing was full of artifice.  The introduction to the book tries to undercut the importance of the work as a whole in demeaning the way that someone reading a conversation misses much of what happened in the author's nonverbal communication, but the text provided is sufficient to convey that Frost was pleasant and enjoyable in conversation.  Too bad his poetry wasn't better in this regard.

[Amy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can’t understand how this was published... it’s all a lot of blathering nonsense. Strange.

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

These read like transcriptions instead of prepared essays -- it's weird to read such uncontrolled prose from Robert.Frost. I also don't love the way the speeches are cut into excerpts but look, Frost says a million charming things. Here is my favorite on falling in love with books and elections:

Suppose I said to you, "what are you getting an education for?" Some of you would just say you're getting it because other people get it, all that can. But I'm going to tell you what you're getting it for, in a word.

You're getting it so that you can come somewhere near falling right when you fall in love at sight -- whether with a poem, with an ambition, with a party, a cause or a hero -- when you get to that age of falling.

I think particularly of poems. The only good reader is the reader who has got where he can safely read at sight and fall in love at sight.

- Frost, speaking at Occidental College on the morning of November 3, 1960, less than a week before the election day that would draw the Kennedy/Nixon presidential contest to its close.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I pick up any books I can get on Frost, short of books of straight poetry. I have a "complete works" book of his poetry, so the only poetry books I pick up are illustrated ones that catch my eye. I picked up Robert Frost Speaking on Campus at a Half-Priced Books in Reynoldsburg, Ohio Thanksgiving weekend. Frost died six years before I was born but I would've loved to hear him speak, especially knowing he not only spoke in my birthplace, Ann Arbor, but was Poet in Residence at the University of Michigan. Unfortunately, reading his talks (particularly excerpts from his talks) isn't nearly as satisfying. It's hard to pick up on somebody's tone and rhythm in the written word if you've never heard them speak before or know them intimately. I highlighted some nice words and phrases and thoughts but overall found the book a bit dull.

[Therese L. Broderick · Rating 4 out of 5]

With no pomposity, Frost speaks his mind about poetry, science, religion, art, politics, education, and more. Wise, amusing, heartwarming, and brave, these short individual essays are as pertinent today as they were sixty years ago. If you think you know the man from his poems, think again. Recommended for poets and non-poets alike. (P.S. The comprehensive index to this book is exceptionally handy. Applause for the indexer.)

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

An American icon talks "plainly" about poetry, prose, education, politics and, of course, America, and the essence of relationships, associations, metaphors . Some of it a little obscure, I think, in part, because you " had to be there" to hear him--and the poems he read (not reproduced).

[Ed Patterson]

Awesome!~another read in the forecasrt. What we know now, was known then as a warning of truth.