The College

Californian by birth, North Country man by choice and temper, America's unofficial Poet Laureate by acclamation, Robert Frost '96 would have been 100 years old on March 26.

Several colleges claimed him - Harvard, where he spent some time as an undergraduate, not long but longer than at Dartmouth; Amherst, where he went first as a faculty member; the University of Michigan, where he later taught; Middlebury, his Vermont neighbor in his later years - but it was at Dartmouth that he first matriculated in 1892.

Although he "ran away" from Dart- mouth because he was, as he told graduating seniors in 1955, "more interested education than anybody in the college at that time," he returned frequently over the years. His final visit, to deliver what was to be his last public address, was to the newly, opened Hopkins center in the fall of 1962, shortly before his death. He was a Tichnor Fellow from 1943 to 1946, a Visiting Lecturer in the Humanities the two years thereafter, and an annual visitor to "say" his poems. He was, when he died, the only man to have been awarded two honorary degrees by the College, the Litt.D. in 1933 and the LL.D. in 1955.

In the title poem of his volume NewHampshire, Frost refers to the state of his forebears' birth as having "One each of everything.... She had one Daniel Webster. He was all/The Daniel Webster ever was or shall be./ She had the Dart- mouth needed to produce him."

Robert Frost was the only Robert Frost ever was or shall be.