The Home of Robert Frost

This, Frost’s first book of poems in fifteen years, may well become an international best-seller: his publishers have ordered an initial printing larger than that of many novels, and the critics have been vying with one another to praise it—and Frost’s sixty years of poetry writing—prominently and at length. There is in all this some delicious irony, as there was in his being asked to bestow the blessings of his poetry and presence on the Kennedy Administration’s New Frontier, and as there has been in his recent apotheosis here and abroad as the ideal manifestation of American character, as well as of American poetic genius.

It was not always like this. In the early thirties Frost turned his back upon the fevered social planning of the Roosevelt Administration and returned to his farm, suggesting that he would plow his crops under if the planners would do the same with their ideas. He remained adamant and vocal, and the critics found his next three volumes full of un-American callousness and (mirabile dictu) “social preachment.” He went on despite them, however, patiently learning how to say better and better what he wanted to say; while they more and more concluded that he was succumbing to the regressive small-mindedness lying in wait for all men of conservative temper, and was creating fake pastorals. He even resisted the appeal of a young Harvard graduate who journeyed to ask that he forego his evil ways and write something “truly American” at least. Now, in his late eighties, having changed not a whit, he has suddenly “arrived”; and critics and Presidents must make of the fact what they can.

VM

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Vincent Miller

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This, Frost’s first book of poems in fifteen years, may well become an international best-seller: his publishers have ordered an initial printing larger than that of many novels, and the critics have been vying with one another to praise it—and Frost’s sixty years of poetry writing—prominently and at length. There is in all this some delicious irony, as there was in his being asked to bestow the blessings of his poetry and presence on the Kennedy Administration’s New Frontier, and as there has been in his recent apotheosis here and abroad as the ideal manifestation of American character, as well as of American poetic genius.

It was not always like this. In the early thirties Frost turned his back upon the fevered social planning of the Roosevelt Administration and returned to his farm, suggesting that he would plow his crops under if the planners would do the same with their ideas. He remained adamant and vocal, and the critics found his next three volumes full of un-American callousness and (mirabile dictu) “social preachment.” He went on despite them, however, patiently learning how to say better and better what he wanted to say; while they more and more concluded that he was succumbing to the regressive small-mindedness lying in wait for all men of conservative temper, and was creating fake pastorals. He even resisted the appeal of a young Harvard graduate who journeyed to ask that he forego his evil ways and write something “truly American” at least. Now, in his late eighties, having changed not a whit, he has suddenly “arrived”; and critics and Presidents must make of the fact what they can.