Conversations with Robert Frost

The Bread Loaf Period

Peter Stanlis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138521278
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351525817
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

These core conversations between Peter Stanlis and Robert Frost occurred during 1939-1941. They are written in the much larger context of nearly a quarter century of friendship that ended only with the passing of Frost in 1963. These discussions provide a unique window of opportunity to appreciate the sources of Frost's philosophical visions, as well as his poetic interests. The discussions between Stanlis and Frost were held between six consecutive summers (1939-1944), when Stanlis was a student at the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English. These were augmented by additional exchanges at Bread Loaf in 1961-1962. These conversations provide original insights on important subjects common to both men. Frost insisted that it was impossible to make a complete or final unity out of the conflicts between spirit and matter. Ordinary empirical experience and rational discursive reason and logic could not harmonize basic conflicts. He held that the best method to ameliorate apparent contradictions in dualistic conflicts was through the "play" of metaphorical thinking and feeling. Metaphors included parables, allegories, fables, images, symbols, irony, and the forms and techniques of poetry such as rhyme, rhythm, assonance, dissonance, personifications, and connotations. These are the arsenal from which poets draw their insightful metaphors, but such metaphors are also the common property of every normal person. A poem is "a momentary stay against confusion," a form of revelation for "a clarification of life," but not a final, absolute answer to the mysteries and complexities in man's life on Earth. So too - at their best - are science, religion, philosophy, education, politics, and scholarship as a means of ameliorating human problems.

Robert Frost at Bread Loaf: 1939

I

At the end of my freshman year in June I remained in Middlebury and worked in the college library, packing several thousands of books in large wooden crates, to ship by truck to the Bread Loaf library for the reserve shelves for the summer school courses. Four other Middlebury students were also going to Bread Loaf: Edward Hayward, a native Vermonter, who had graduated and now ran the bookstore at Bread Loaf; Norman Hatfield, a senior English major, editor of the Middlebury College literary magazine; and Charley Sanford and Bob Maxwell, my classmates. Hayward had attended Bread Loaf every summer since 1935, and Hatfield had spent several summers at Bread Loaf. On June 21, a week before classes began, we all went up the Mountain to prepare the campus for the summer session. Ed Hayward and I spent a day unpacking books and placing them on the library shelves. Then I joined the other scholarship students, including some from Vanderbilt, Virginia, and Harvard, as a ground crew working under the direction of E. H. “Al” Henry. We worked with several Riptonites, Harold Whittemore, Milton Kirby, and a crew of boys led by Bishop McGill, to whip the Bread Loaf campus into shape. We cut the lawns, planted more bright flowers in the formal eighteenth-century garden in front of the Inn, rolled the three clay tennis courts and stapled down the tapes, opened all the cottage dormitories, did minor carpentry repairs on the porches, repaired and painted lawn chairs and cottage porch railings, piled firewood at each fireplace or stove in each cottage, and did miscellaneous other tasks. Dean Harry Owen was a fanatic for neatness, and when the Bread Loaf School opened on June 28, with words of greeting from President Moody, the whole campus gleamed in the sunlight.

Shortly after classes began, Harold Whittemore, Mrs. Homer Noble’s adopted son, told us that Robert Frost was staying in Rip-ton, having rented a small guest cottage across the road from Mrs. Noble and her sister, Miss Agnes Billings. Harold Whittemore had a small greenhouse nearby and provided fresh vegetables for the ladies and for Frost. The poet took his meals with Mrs. Noble and Miss Billings, and often had dinner with Theodore (Ted) and Kathleen (Kay) Morrison at the Homer Noble farm, about a mile west from the Bread Loaf campus, which they had rented for the summer. But Frost spent most of his day in Ripton and slept in his cottage there. Late one day after work, Ed Hayward and Norm Hatfield went to Ripton to visit Frost and arranged for a group of Bread Loaf students to return for a talk the next evening. Like everyone else who had spoken about Frost to me, they held him in high esteem and stressed his unusual brilliance as a conversationalist. Apart from such comments and slight reading about Frost’s life and literary career, I knew very little about Frost’s personal life and character. I had heard that his wife Elinor had died fifteen months before (March 20, 1938), that he had barely survived “a nervous breakdown,” that he had behaved very badly during the previous summer, interrupting a poetry reading by Archibald MacLeish, but that with the help of his Harvard friends, and particularly the Morrisons, he was beginning to build a new life. During the summer of 1938 Kay Morrison had helped Frost restore good order in his life by becoming his secretary, answering his voluminous mail, scheduling his poetry readings around the nation, and supervising many practical details in his life. Kay had given permission for the visit by the students, with instructions not to stay past midnight.

The next evening toward sunset, loaded down with half a dozen bottles of ginger ale, a large bag of ice, and packages of ginger snaps, Norm Hatfield, Bob Maxwell, two other students, and I walked to Ripton to visit Robert Frost. The poet, aged sixty-five, greeted us warmly at his cottage door. In a quiet and gentle manner, as we filed into the cottage living room, he shook hands and asked each of us his name and where he was from. Frost settled down in an old rocking chair near the center of the room, with his back to a wall. He had just moved to Ripton for the summer from Shaftsbury, Vermont, and there were books, magazines, and unanswered letters or papers piled on a table, and additional books on the floor. We sat in a semi-circle around the poet.

In physical appearance Frost was a rugged man’s man, with white unruly hair covering a large, well-shaped massive head set on broad shoulders. His thick shaggy eyebrows hid the frequent twinkle in his deep-set pale blue eyes. His eyes were his most expressive feature. They appeared intelligent, friendly, yet a bit quizzical, sensitive, and crinkled at the corners with crowsfeet. His face was tanned by the sun, and slightly mottled, with wrinkles running across his brow and around his mouth, deepening when he laughed or spoke with animation. His hands were large and sun-tanned, like a laborer’s, and moved about slightly as he talked. His dress was very casual. He wore light tan trousers and a short-sleeved, open-collared shirt. His voice was deep and throaty, slightly gravelly and gruff, and inflected with a salt-tinged New England accent. His manner was most informal, relaxed, artless, sociable, warm-hearted, and touched by good humor.

Frost soon established a good rapport with each of us, and as a group, for a spirited conversation. The same effort to charm a large audience that I was to witness many times in public readings of his poetry was evident here for the first time in his appeal to his audience of five young students of literature. He first asked each of us in turn which teachers we were going to study with at Bread Loaf and what we thought we would get from our courses. I told him I was taking Donald Davidson’s course in modern poetry and hoped for the opportunity to read and talk about modern poetry. I was also auditing Perry Miller’s course in “Social and Intellectual Back grounds of American Literature,” to learn more about Puritanism; and Mrs. Andre Morize’s course in Elizabethan music, because I liked madrigals. Frost praised Davidson as “a very good man” and an excellent teacher and writer.

He asked each of us to say which poem he first liked beyond nursery rhymes. He appeared pleased with my reply, Robert Herrick’s “Corinna’s Going A-Maying.” He then asked each of us to say a poem he liked. Hatfield quoted parts of A. E. Housman’s “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff,” but shortly became annoyed with himself when he got bogged down in the middle of the poem. I quoted Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” Frost remarked that Kipling had especially praised the lines:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!

These lines, said Frost, together with Keats’s lines from “Ode to a Nightingale”

The same that ofttimes hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

were considered by Kipling to be the essence of Romanticism. Frost said the lines have a strange beautiful unearthiness about them.

Frost then remarked how lucky we were to be “Harry Owen’s boys,” going to Bread Loaf, where literature was treated as literature, and not as a handmaid to something else—to linguistics, or sociology, or as mere raw material to study for “busy work scholarship.” He said too many schools, especially graduate schools, took all the fun out of reading literature, by insisting upon a scientific approach to it. Fie acknowledged that scholarship has its value, and he respected it as a way of establishing facts, but it wasn’t every thing or even the most important thing for literature. In its humane treatment of literature Bread Loaf provided a healthy alternative to much current scientific scholarship. The teachers at Bread Loaf, such as Perry Miller, whom he knew at Harvard, and Donald David son, whom he had met at Vanderbilt and come to know well at Bread Loaf, were excellent scholars and writers, but they wore their learning lightly at Bread Loaf. During only six weeks, and in the relaxed atmosphere of the Mountain, teachers at Bread Loaf had to concentrate on literature as literature; they did not have enough time to spoil literature by demanding “research” from their students. It was a case of virtue by default, although most of the faculty were sympathetic with the policy of Harry Owen to escape from conventional graduate studies back into the true spirit of poetry. Bread Loaf teachers, Frost remarked, were more creative than critical and more critical than scholarly. We would get a good education by their presence, as much by talks outside class as by class lectures. Frost said the word creative was often abused, by being applied to a mere dilettantish interest in reading or writing literature, but so were criticism and scholarship abused, and never more so than when taken most seriously by professional educators. In approaching poetry he preferred the word amateur in its literal meaning, a true lover of poetry. A student should never lose his “amateur standing” in literature. Frost also praised Bread Loaf for treating both American literature and creative writing with far more respect than other schools did.

The great evil was the necessity of giving grades, credits, and degrees. Young talents should be free to disport themselves without too close supervision, particularly if the supervision was only to correct errors. A teacher’s chief value was as an example to a student. He could teach by his example the superiority of leisurely ease and fruitful idleness over mere “thoroughness” and conscientious “busy-work routines.” He could teach by his original expression of ideas the value of ideas in fresh relationships, not only in literature but in life. In the classroom, poetry comes to be too separated from daily life.

Frost mentioned that he had recently quit Amherst College, after being on the faculty there for years, partly because its structure tended to make the machinery of the college into an end. There were good liberal arts men in all the schools where he had been, at Michigan, Amherst, and Harvard, but there was also too much pedantry. Frost showed something like contempt toward the air of intellectual superiority assumed by learned pedants in having acquired some specialized knowledge through scholarship. He contended that to make subjects departmental, or specialized through one major interest, was contrary to the true spirit of humane learning. The very word professor was a kind of built-in affectation. Compared with religious prophets and with explorers, Frost joked, many professors had “little to profess,” often nothing original of their own. They merely dispensed knowledge at second hand, about the original work of other writers, as book reviewers did. Even in what they considered “original research,” or scholarship, they were merely “the first to be second.” They were like the country boy who went to the city and picked up the current jokes and returned home and was the first to tell the jokes to other country boys.

Someone mentioned that he had read an article on Frost in an academic journal, in which the poet was called an “anti-intellectual.” Frost asked: “What does that mean?” He objected that abstract “labels,” such as being called “pro” or “anti” anything, were meaningless categories, without any substance. He asked, did anyone ever go around calling himself “pro-intellectual”? What he objected to was better called “pedantry,” which was the “pseudo-intellectual” learning of educated fools who pretended to more wisdom than their specialized academic knowledge could support to any practical end in life. At this point in the discussion, amidst much pouring out of ginger ale into glasses with ice, I remembered and quoted an appropriate couplet from Pope about learned dunces:

The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head.

(“An Essay on Criticism,” III, 612-13)

Frost nodded in agreement and asked me to repeat the lines. Someone asked whether the couplet was from the Dunciad. I said I thought it was from “An Essay on Criticism.” Frost remarked that the Dunciad was a good guess, that there were many such lines in Pope’s satire. He added that Pope was exactly right, that he recognized it was foolish to read poetry merely to acquire knowledge—even knowledge of the poetry. It showed ignorance of poetry as literary art to treat it as a source of knowledge, even though, as art, poetry provided knowledge of life stripped to form. History and science could more properly be read for knowledge as information, but poetry should be read for pleasure and insight, for a sense of form, for understanding and wisdom. Poetry involved knowledge of our total nature as man, and not only of our intellect, and there fore it went beyond rational knowledge. Frost denied that he was “anti-intellectual,” but admitted that he was an “anti-rationalist.” He rejected the assumption that man’s reason alone provided the final source, or test, or end of human knowledge. Furthermore, he asserted that reason could not legitimately claim to be the arbiter of what went beyond rational knowledge, such as religion, poetry, and the mysteries of life.

This was the first time I had encountered the distinction between an “intellectual” and a “rationalist,” and I was fascinated by Frost’s quick follow-up statement that there was no contradiction between being a profoundly intellectual skeptic about the claims of pure reason as the original or ultimate source of knowledge and truth, and having a deep respect for human reason as an instrument for truth. But reason was only one of many vehicles for finding truth. And it was as subject to error as any other instrument. Indeed, often people with very superficial intelligence had the most exalted faith in human reason. As “rationalists,” with unbounded faith in their own reason, they were not intelligent enough, or skeptical enough, to understand the limitations of human reason, and condemned as “anti-intellectual” men of far greater intelligence whose skepticism about reason aided the understanding and acceptance of its limitations. Frost clearly favored the full use of the power of the human mind in probing any subject—science, history, politics, education, literature, and even religion—but with a full awareness of where reason was competent and where it was limited. I thought he had neatly turned the table on the critic who had called him “anti-intellectual.”

Norm Hatfield asked if Frost agreed with Wordsworth, who thought too much learning out of books deadened creative sensibility. Frost thought learning from books was good, but felt it should always be combined in good proportion with learning from life, which should enforce and invigorate each other. But it wasn’t a question of the quantity of book learning a writer absorbed; it was rather whether or not he could use it well in his work. Of course, no one could tell beforehand what might prove to be useful, and a poet should acquire much knowledge. Milton was a great poet with enormous learning, who didn’t flaunt his erudition. Frost quoted some lines from Comus to show how casually Milton assumed his learning. Milton was a learned, well-disciplined, Christian, Puritan poet. I added—as contrasted with Robert Herrick, who was a well-disciplined, epicurean, Christian, pagan poet. That seemed to tickle Frost’s fancy.

We drifted into a discussion of what is a Puritan. Frost defined a Puritan as one who was willing to put moral bounds on what he wanted, including not only pleasures of the senses, such as “wine, women, and song,” but also such things as political power. To Frost a Puritan was essentially an ascetic regarding pleasure and power. Puritanism was as much a practice of restraint through temperament as a recognition of and abiding by right moral principles.

I asserted that I understood Puritanism in quite a different way, as essentially Calvinist in morality and religion, and therefore not so much ascetic as anti-aesthetic. Monks in monastaries or religious orders were ascetic, and took vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but they were not “Puritan” in religious worship, because the aesthetic element in their liturgy was paramount. The Mass was an attempt to teach the good through a dramatization of the true and beautiful in Christ’s life, passion, and death. The Calvinist reformers in Scotland and England were called “Puritan” because they “purified” Christianity by eliminating the aesthetic from worship. Their object was to be totally good, and they assumed that the good and the beautiful were antithetical and could not be reconciled. They believed the aesthetic originated in sense appeals, which were evil because the senses gave sensual pleasure, which led to de sire, which led to temptation, and on to sin and damnation. Unlike Roman Catholics and High Church Anglicans, the Puritans re garded art not as auxiliary to worship, not as a stepping stone to the contemplation of God, but as a stumbling block which came be tween men and God. Therefore, the Puritans sought to avoid damnation by destroying the beautiful; they had invoked Biblical passages against the worship of idols and graven images to justify their destruction of art objects in churches and cathedrals.

My remarks were a summary of what I had argued in my fresh man English course with Harry Owen and with Norm Hatfield at a meeting of the English Club. On one occasion I had gone on to argue an aesthetic theory of “art for art’s sake,” and in favor of a theory of “pure poetry” through the perfection of form and technique, totally apart from considerations of particular content or themes. The themes of art did not have to be moral. Hatfield had interpreted my theory as denying a place for morality in literary art, which he claimed showed in the poetry I had written, and he had dubbed me “the immoral bard.” He repeated his phrase, as we argued heatedly. Frost listened to our exchange with great interest.

There was much historical truth in what I said, Frost commented, for he had seen in St. Andrews, Scotland, the destruction wrought to the cathedral by the Calvinist reformers. But he objected that my understanding of Puritanism was too narrowly historical and sectarian. In his view there were ‘“puritans” in every age and in every religious sect. It was not something begun by Calvin or limited to Protestants. Jews and Catholics were more likely to be “puritans” than Protestants were. The opposite of Puritanism was self-indulgent epicureanism and undisciplined selfishness. That involved a moral difference, not just a difference in aesthetics. Calvinism had created a special kind of Puritan, and Frost admitted that many modern people identified the word with thin-lipped, glint-eyed “kill joys.” He also objected that the Calvinist Puritans were lacking in an aesthetic sense. There was beauty in their world, but it was centered in nature and the Bible, or in simple art, rather than in the complex and ornate art of Rome and Canterbury. I referred to a comment by G. K. Chesterton on this point, that the Puritans thought it was better to worship God in a plain barn than in a magnificent Gothic cathedral. They preferred direct sunlight to light filtered through stained glass windows. Frost responded that the New England meeting house had an architectural appeal of its own; it was more than a whitewashed barn topped with a steeple. I recalled the appeal of the Middlebury College chapel and agreed.

Prudence dictated that I should have deferred to Frost’s greater authority, but with the rash impetuosity of youth I plunged forward with a new argument. I conceded that Frost was right about “puritan” traits being found in all sects, but as the enemies of Calvinist Puritanism had noted, there was such a thing as selective self-denial of sinful pleasures. I quoted Samuel Butler’s couplet against the Calvinist Puritans of his era, that they were inclined to

Compound for sins they are inclined to
By damning those they have no mind to. . . .

(Hudibras, I, 213-14)

And on the matter of moral self-denial in seeking and using political power, I asked was Milton’s chief, Oliver Cromwell, a Pur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• A Prelude to Bread Loaf: 1937-1939
• Robert Frost at Bread Loaf: 1939
• Robert Frost at Bread Loaf: 1940
• Robert Frost at Bread Loaf: 1941