A fictional sketch of a poet reading

 Here’s a second thought on Tobias Wolff’s Old School.

The story is about a boy at a prep school. Early on, the poet Robert Frost, a friend of the headmaster, comes to the school to read. Here’s the passage where the boy describes the occasion:

Frost was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows, but now and then I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting. He knew these poems by heart yet continued to make a show of reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light.

His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. It removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes cunning, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being.

The next time someone asks me why anyone should read fiction, I’ll mention that passage.

Fiction can do many things, including showing us what a remarkable personality is like. That beautiful passage makes me wish I’d known Frost.