Wednesday, January 30, 2013

I missed this one, too …

… Robert Frost: Darkness or Light? : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)


It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness—pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited. Frost the poet seems like a quiet person, a loner. But, Holden reports, Frost the man would often “sit up late and talk, eating apples, gossiping about everyone and everything, a little maliciously sometimes but always brilliantly and soundly.” Frost liked long walks in the mountains, but he also liked “sea chanteys, sports, the theatre.” He liked “to talk and read about scientific achievements and exploration.” (In “A Visit to Camelot,” her wildly entertaining memoir of a White House dinner she attended in 1962, for that year’s Nobel laureates, Diana Trilling writes, “Out of the corner of my eye I had spotted Colonel John Glenn. He was talking to, of all people, Robert Frost, and there must have been six people huddled around them, trying to hear what they were saying.”)


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