Frost As Student

Following is a letter which Robert Frost '96 wrote to Harold G. Rugg '06 many years ago in reply to the latter's request for information about the poet's undergraduate days at Dartmouth:

April 20, 1915

Dear Sir,

You are correctly informed: I was some part of a year at Hanover with the class of 1896. I lived in Wentworth (top floor, rear, side next to Dartmouth) in a room with a door that had the advantage of opening outward and so of being hard for marauding sophomores to force from the outside. I had to force it once myself from the inside when I was nailed and screwed in. My very dear friend was Preston Shirley (who was so individual that his memory should be still green with you) and he had a door opening inward that was forced so often that it became what you might call facile and opened if you looked at it. The only way to secure it against violation was to brace it from behind with the door off the coal closet. I made a common cause with Shirley and sometimes helped him hold the fort in his room till we fell out over a wooden washtub bathtub that we owned in partnership but that I was inclined to keep for myself more than my share of the time. I may say that we made up afterward over kerosene. One of us ran out of oil after the stores were closed at night and so far sacrificed his pride as to ask to borrow of the other.

I'm afraid I wasn't much of a college man in your sense of the word. I was getting past the point when I could show any great interest in any task not self-imposed. Much of what I enjoyed at Dartmouth was acting like an Indian in a college founded for Indians. I mean I liked the rushes a good deal, especially the one in which our class got the salting and afterwards fought it out with the sophomores across pews and everything (it was in the Old Chapel) with old cushions and even footstools for weapons—or rather fought it to a standstill with the dust of ages we raised.

For the rest I wrote a good deal and was off in such places as the Vale of Tempe and on the walk east of the town that I called the Five Mile Round. I wrote one of the poems I still care for at about that time. It is preserved in my first book, "A Boy's Will." I wrote while the ashes accumulated on the floor in front of my stove door and would have gone on accumulating to the room door if my mother hadn't sent a friend a hundred miles to shovel up and clean house for me

Very truly yours,