You Dirty Old Bastard

For most of the last hundred years, Robert Frost has been recognized as a great poet, but almost immediately after the publication of his first collections, A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval, some critics found themselves defending Frost against the charges of popularity and triviality. Because so much of what Frost wrote is so – deceptively – accessible even to people who rarely or never found themselves reading poetry, and because critics were unaccustomed to pointing out what was – seemingly – obvious, they arrived at a generalized view that Frost was too easy and therefore not worth examining at any length. 

But, as Randall Jarrell insisted: 

Frost is one of the subtlest and saddest of poets; and no other living poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men. But anyone should know this after reading "Home Burial," "Two Witches," "A Servant to Servants," "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep," "Design," "Acquainted with the Night,” “Provide, Provide," "Desert Places," "Directive," "The Gift Outright," "An Old Man's Winter Night"; or guess at it after reading 

But now he brushed the shavings from his knee 

And stood the axe there on its horse's hoof, 

Erect, but not without its waves, as when 

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden ... 

I want to show another face of the multi-faceted Frost with which very few people, apparently, are acquainted. He showed it to an audience at a poetry conference in Washington, DC in October 1962, only a year and eight months after his appearance at JFK’s inauguration and, it turned out, only a few months before he died in January 1963. 

It’s one thing to think of Frost as an autumnal poet – a poet of decay and death. He certainly touched the subject enough times that it must not have hurt his fingers. His not minding the pain it caused was probably closer to the truth. At the poetry conference in Washington, the first lady, Jackie Kennedy, was conspicuously absent. It happened to be the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, and the imminence of nuclear war must’ve been on people’s minds. It certainly was on Frost’s, as his performance revealed to two witnesses of the event, W. D. Snodgrass and R. P. Blackmur. 

According to Snodgrass, who related the event in an essay for The Paris Review in 1994, Frost behaved somewhat uncharacteristically that night. He opened with a reading of Robinson Jeffers’s poem, “Shine, Perishing Republic", which is a kind of celebration of America’s decay. Jeffers was the antithesis of Frost’s humanism, but Frost was evidently in an apocalyptic mood that night. 

He went on to read, appropriately, his poem “October.” 

O hushed October morning mild, 

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; 

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, 

Should waste them all. 

The crows above the forest call; 

Tomorrow they may form and go. 

O hushed October morning mild, 

Begin the hours of this day slow. 

Make the day seem to us less brief. 

Hearts not averse to being beguiled, 

Beguile us in the way you know. 

Release one leaf at break of day; 

At noon release another leaf; 

One from our trees, one far away. 

Retard the sun with gentle mist; 

Enchant the land with amethyst. 

Slow, slow! 

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all, 

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost, 

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost— 

For the grapes’ sake along the wall. 

The somber note was advanced by Frost’s next choice, his poem “November.” 

We saw leaves go to glory, 

Then almost migratory 

Go part way down the lane, 

And then to end the story 

Get beaten down and pasted 

In one wild day of rain. 

We heard "'Tis Over" roaring. 

A year of leaves was wasted..... 

By denying and ignoring 

The waste of nations warring. 

According to Snodgrass, Frost was being deliberately topical at a moment in American history when it seemed as if the lights were about to be extinguished. And Frost was strangely pleased at it. Frost had always been mistaken for a Liberal, and certainly his appearance at JFK’s inauguration reinforced the misperception. But Frost was really an old, pre-New Deal Conservative (he was born in 1875), and only intimated his sympathies now and then in stray comments. Frost’s audience was Liberal, and he certainly must have been aware of it. But in October 1962, with the world teetering on the brink, Frost felt emboldened to show his hand – even if his audience were incapable of taking it in. They gave him three standing ovations. 

[Frost] went on to say that “every liberal I know of has a tendency when his enemy works up against him … to try to remember if he isn’t more in the wrong than the enemy … a liberal is a person who can’t take his own side in a fight.” As the evening went on, he came to be pumping himself up and down at the lectern like a rooster about to crow. Breaking into what seemed a laugh, he referred to that fearful crisis exultantly, “You didn’t want to just fade out, did you? Why not go out in a blaze of glory?” 

Nobody in the room caught the derisive tone of Frost’s remarks except R. P. Blackmur, sitting beside Snodgrass and, as the crowd cheered, was muttering, “You dirty old bastard! You rotten … ” 

“Of all the people in that packed hall,” Snodgrass concluded, “only Blackmur had recognized that Frost was not only triumphing over those in his audience he thought over-scrupulous in conflict, but laughing at the probability of that audience’s imminent death. Now he would not have to die alone; he had had his full career; they would not.” (1)

Ironically, a year later when President Kennedy delivered his eulogy of Frost at Amherst College, he mentioned the artist’s critical role: 

Strength takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us. 

Less than a month later, on November 22, JFK’s career was cut short in Dallas. Frost, perhaps, would’ve felt vindicated.

(1) Dabbling in Corruption