How the Weather Was by Kahn Roger;

Author:Kahn, Roger;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SPORTS & RECREATION/Baseball/Essays & Writings
Publisher: Diversion Publishing Corp.
Published: 2012-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Encountering Frost

I

To find Robert Frost, the great poet who wrote so fondly of New Hampshire, one drove deep into the Green Mountains of Vermont. The paradox amused Mr. Frost. It made his green eyes twinkle and moved him to soft laughter. Beyond his eighty-fifth birthday, Frost wore the seasons lightly and humor ran strong and young within him.

If America anointed Poets Laureate, Robert Frost, of course, would have been chosen. His poems won him four Pulitzer prizes, a special Congressional medal and, more important, earned for him and the craft of poetry the admiration of millions who found Pound, Stevens, Eliot, obscure and puzzling.

“I never like to read anyone who seems to be saying, ‘Let’s see you understand this, you damn fool,’ “ Frost said. “I haven’t any of that spirit and I don’t like to be treated with that spirit.” The spirit Frost did possess, scholarly, independent, questioning, sage, reached out, a golden beacon across an uncertain land.

What sort of talk did one hear on paying Frost a visit? Talk about poetry, to be sure; good talk that stirred the mind. But more than that, one heard about scores of other things: Fidel Castro’s revolution and John Thomas’ high jumping; the feel of farming and the sight of beatniks; loneliness and love and religion and Russia, and how important it is for a man to know how to live poor. Somewhat sadly, too, one heard about the Boston Red Sox. Frost rooted for the Red Sox, but cheerlessly. He felt that they played baseball in the manner of Boston gentlemen and, although Frost appreciated Boston gentlemen in their place, he did not feel that their place is on a ball field. “Spike ‘em as you go around the bases,” he suggested.

Frost was not a poet by accident, and much of what one heard came in phrases which, like his poems, were vivid and exciting. It was not surprising to find here such sure command of English, but what may surprise you is the freshness with which the patriarchal Frost looked at the world. He once wrote:

I never dared be radical when young

For fear it would make me conservative when old.

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