Robert Frost '96, Non-Graduate
TRUE to his own poem, Robert Frost has joined few gangs and many colleges. Harvard, Michigan, and Amherst all have claims on him (none could have honored him better than Amherst did at his Both birthday on March 26), but it was Dartmouth he joined first, and he has been part of Hanover a long time now. Only his birthday reminds us how long. He came early and left soon, but like flyway geese, and often at their seasons, he has been returning ever since.
Now his books and birthdays are front-page news, but what may well have been his first newspaper mention came byway of The Dartmouth: "Reise and R. L. Frost are freshman monitors" reported the issue of September 16, 1892, and within a month he was listed "among the initiates at the Theta Delta Chi fraternity banquet on October 21st." Whether that was a "gang" Robert Frost was rushed into joining against his later judgment, only he can tell; but his classmates of '96 still tell of his lugging stove wood upstairs to 23 Wentworth, his room in that freshman fall. He was studying Greek and Latin then, reading Plato and Homer and Horace that he can still quote. Typically, though, he never stayed to take term examinations, and by late January he had left college to teach in a Massachusetts grammar school.
He tried a little Harvard, too, but that was the end of his being a student. New Hampshire offered "the nearest boundary to escape across," and he turned north to Derry, Plymouth, Franconia; a young man with poems in his head, farming in his hands, and teaching in his talk.
When he came back to Dartmouth next, he came at the far-sighted invitation of Harold Rugg: he came as a poet. Here, after his years in England, he gave the first public reading of his poems in America, and he has continually returned to read again - as recently as last fall. His irreverent talk about teaching and his rough-read poems fill Webster Hall now, but even in 1924, reading before Mitre, "an undergraduate and faculty literary society," his audience "overflowed 103 Dartmouth."
By 1943, when he came temporarily home to Hanover as Ticknor Fellow in the Humanities, he found that it was necessary to limit his audience, at least in those Treasure Room seminars where he sat slumped and rumple-haired before fifteen V-12's and civilians. "A sort of poetic radiator," Robert Frost called himself, and surely none of those "Loose-Enders" who sat at his feet with Gillie, the border collie, can forget his catalytic effect. History, baseball, poems; he talked about them all with wisdom as infinite as his patience has always been for freshman writers. Always he had time for conference, for rough slow talk while November twilight darkened the elms outside his study in Baker's east wing. "Y'got to learn to live on insufficient evidence," he'd say to a gawky sophomore suffering to find his place among the infinities, "and that's how Y'got to go ahead and write." Not all such students understood his metaphors, but like the senior halfback who, in Great Issues this month, will find himself listening to Robert Frost for perhaps the first time, those who came to gape or scoff stayed to listen and learn.
A happy radical about how traditional subjects should be taught, Robert Frost's teaching-talk has been heresy to the more pompous professors on this, or any, faculty. But it is as a teacher of teachers that he has also left his hallmark on Dartmouth minds. His faculty friends are too many to name, but it is hard to think of him and Hanover without recalling those men who have shared his conversation late into many nights. One thinks of him trudging down over the hill for Vermont-talk with Ray Nash. Or how, returning to the Inn from Stearns Morse's house, those two Northcountrymen have walked back and forth (seeing each other home three or four times) with a whole midnight of talk. It is hard to forget him speaking to Sidney Cox's writing class, and reading a poem for that immeasurable teacher the last time of all.
Dartmouth remembers Robert Frost in many images, whether signing a book for a Nigerian student backstage in Webster, or being memorably introduced on that stage by President Dickey; whether standing awkwardly under the Chaliapin Frost portrait at the dedication of the Poetry Room, or simply standing planted on the campus watching a Softball game. And whatever a Dartmouth man's personal memory of Robert Frost, it is good to remember him as probably the only exfreshman who - never graduating from this or any college - returned to become one of Dartmouth's great teachers. To think of Robert Frost as a student is somehow to realize that there are no exams which can test his poet's wisdom, and it is surely right that the only degree the College could hold him long enough to grant was an honorary one. So, celebrating his birthday, is it surely time for Dartmouth to honor him again: as a sometime student, and as a part-time teacher who has always been a whole curriculum in himself.
