When Robert Frost was about 20, he wrote paragraphs for a newspaper in Massachusetts. Louis Untermeyer said the paragraphs, though in prose, “were really poetic eclogues, little pastoral pieces.” I would like to read Frost’s paragraphs about mending stone fences making wood piles.
Frost is a puzzle to me. I feel I should like him far more than I do. I think “The Black Cottage” is one of the most astonishing things written by an American. I’ve admired that poem for decades without ever really coming around to loving his other work.
When I was a boy in school, adults would sometimes tell me that I ought to be friends with a fellow who was interested in the same things I was. It usually worked out this way: Despite sharing interests, this fellow and I would find we just didn’t like each other that much. Even as children, we choose our own friends.
When Frost was approaching 85, he made a list of books that had meant the most to him:
• The Old Testament
• The Odyssey — Homer
• The poems of Catullus
• The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — Edward Gibbon
• Incidents of Travel in Yucatan — John C. Stevens
The only book on his list that might be on mine is The Odyssey — and if I could have only one of Homer’s poems it would be The Iliad.
• Sources: Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken, edited by Louis Untermeyer; New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1951. Untermeyer’s note on Frost’s paragraphs is on p. xiii.
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