Robert Frost Stone House Museum

Dedication, September 29, 2002

Comments of Peter Gilbert,

Keynote Speaker

(Photo by Tyler Resch)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you very much. I am delighted to salute this new museum at its opening. The place matters because of the man, and the museum is yet another manifestation of the compelling and enduring power and genius of Robert Frost’s poetry – and, I would add, his talks.

 

I would like to talk about two points this afternoon, two very related points: first, the depth and importance of Robert Frost’s connections with Vermont. Second, I want to emphasize how the respite he felt here enabled him to go out into the country and the world and be the public figure - the public symbol of poetry, the arts, and their role in American culture.

 

Frost's connections with Vermont were numerous, deep, and lengthy. There was not only the Stone House, but also at what he called Gully Gulch, the house he bought near here after he gave the Stone House to his son, Carol, and his daughter-in-law Lillian; there was his Homer Noble Farm in Ripton, his strong connections to Breadloaf, and, less well-known, two houses he owned in the little village of Concord Corners, which is not too far from St. Johnsbury. Frost was a Vermont resident when he died, and, of course, he is buried nearby, in Bennington.

 

There was an article in a magazine recently entitled, “Who owns Robert Frost.” It pointed out just how many states and colleges seek to lay claim to a piece of him: Robert Frost, the consummate New Englander who was born in San Francisco and who wintered in Florida. The San Franciscan who moved as a child not to rural northern New England, but to the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. The sometimes farmer who started work trimming the wicks on the lamps in the Lawrence mills. The man who celebrated the State of New Hampshire in his poem “New Hampshire,” but concludes that poem with what I consider one of the delightfully ironic lines he ever wrote, “At present I am living in Vermont.” (A poem, I would add, he wrote at his kitchen table in this house, apparently in one all-night session.)

 

I wonder whether, if Mr. Frost were here today, he might very well have recalled with a laugh, as he often did, the couplet from a poem by Thomas Seward:

Seven cities claimed blind Homer, being dead,
Through which the living Homer begged his bread. . . .

 

The fact that many people claim Frost is, of course, a tribute to him. And despite the fact that he lived in a number of places during his long life, Frost’s connections to Vermont were particularly important to him. It was here that he returned repeatedly from being in residence at the University of Michigan and Amherst College, here that he refreshed and renewed himself after hectic travel or stress, here that he “built soil” so that he could continue to go about his more public work. The importance of this haven and its needed respite should not be underestimated, for Frost was, throughout his life, but particularly in the twenties and thirties, prone to illness, flu, coughs, and fevers that often interfered with his schedule and work. Frost wrote, “Arlington, Shaftsbury, Rupert, Sunderland, Manchester, Dorset, Rutland: the towns all round us are named after courtiers of Charles the Second. It looks as if some gunpowder plot had blown them up at a ball and scattered them over our map.”

 

When Robert Frost bought this house in 1920, it had a leaky roof, and no furnace, no running water, no bathroom. He and family moved here in fits and starts over several months. Frost wrote to a friend that fall, “I have moved a good part of the way to a stone house on a hill at South Shaftsbury in southern Vermont on the New York side near the historic town of Bennington where if I have any money left after repairing the roof in the spring I mean to plant a new Garden of Eden with a thousand apple trees of some unforbidden variety.”

 

Indeed it was because he wanted a better place to farm and especially to grow apples that he moved from Franconia, New Hampshire to South Shaftsbury. In short, the summers were too short and winters too unstable for Franconia to be much good for apples. Frost in July and August were not unknown. Frost wrote, "A hundred miles further south and out of the higher peaks as we shall be, we think we ought to be safer.”

 

It was concern for his apple trees in Franconia that produced, probably in 1919, the poem “Good-by and Keep Cold.” In that poem the narrator speaks to his apple trees, saying goodby to them for the winter, and expressing his hope that they stay cold and free from an unseasonable warm spell that would cause them to bud out too early.

 

Biographer Lawrence Thompson notes (II, 560) that Frost sent a copy of the poem, "Goodby and Keep Cold" to a friend in Amherst, to confirm whether the pomological facts were correct. The friend sent the letter on to the Chairman of the Pomology Department at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, who told him that while the fruit facts were accurate, the metrical treatment of some of the lines was faulty, and that he had therefore taken the liberty of improving upon them. Rather than being angry, Frost found the story amusing, and often told the story before saying the poem in public.

 

 

Frost even describes his move from Franconia to South Shaftsbury as a transplanting. “I’ve been sick,” he wrote to Louis Untermeyer in October of 1920. “The trouble seems to be that I wasn’t taken up carefully enough in Franconia nor replanted soon enough in South Shaftsbury. It has been a bad job of transplanting."

 

The fact that the place is rural is key to what Frost found so profoundly important about Vermont. “Poetry is more often of the country than of the city,” he told an interviewer in 1931. “Poetry . . .stands as a reminder of rural life – as a resource, as a recourse. It might be taken as a symbol of a man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion – written first for the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use. Just so the race lives best to itself – first to itself, storing strength in the more individual life of the country, of the farm – then going to market and socializing in the industrial city. . . .I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks. . . . The farm is a base of operations – a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there.”

 

That, of course, is what the humanities help us do. Whether it be literature, history, philosophy, or an understanding of religion or art – the humanities are the tools that help us be self-conscious, that help us understand ourselves as individuals and as social beings, and that helps us make sense of human experience. All of the humanities offer us, like a poem, what Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.”

 

And so, the rural life Frost quite consciously and deliberately sought and found here in South Shaftsbury is integral to his poetry and to the tension between his withdrawing into himself and his being out, barding around, sharing himself in person or through his writing. I can’t help but think of his poem "Into My Own" and these the lines that you know from “Birches”:

I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return.

You find in his most famous poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the same draw of the comparative solitude of the country and the elastic pull-back of the village, the need to return to the interactions, the obligations or "promises," of the city. "Stopping by Woods" was written here the morning after the all-night session that produced the poem “New Hampshire.” Frost recalled, “Having finished ‘New Hampshire,’ I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn’t disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o’clock went back in and wrote the piece about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had an hallucination.” Middlebury Professor and Frost biographer Jay Parini calls “Stopping by Woods” “the perfection of Frost’s art in the straight lyric mode.” Frost himself thought it his “best bid for remembrance.” (Parini, 212.)

 

Biographer Lawrance Thompson tells us that early in his time here, Frost and his son, Carol, bought a Jersey cow, and brought over the family’s stepping mare, Beaut, from Franconia. They cleared brush and, at the advice of John and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, planted 1000 red pine seedlings, in the expectation that they would be a labor-free cash crop down the road a few years. (It was through Dorothy Canfield Fisher that the Frosts moved here). They planted hundreds of apple seedlings. And a neighbor built them a beehive with one side made of glass so that, when it was placed on the ledge of the living room window, the Frosts could enjoy watching the bees in the hive. He sprayed the orchards, hoed the vegetable garden, split wood, cared for newly hatched chicks, and the like. (II, 189)

 

Later, after Frost gave this house to Carol and Lillian, he helped Carol with the farm work, including doing errands in town. J. J. Lankes, the woodcut artist who was staying part of one summer at Gully Gulch in North Bennington, relates a story of his going with Frost into Bennington to deliver an order of sweet peas to the Catamount Inn. The man at the Inn bruskly told Frost that he was not to enter through the front door, but to use the delivery entrance. Lankes commented, “I’ll bet that particular hostelry never had a guest nearly as important as Frost enter the main gate.”

 

It was from here that Frost and family set out to hike the new and nearly completed Long Trail. They set out on August 15, 1922, Frost botanizing along the way (which I know from personal experience is not only a source of pleasure, but also a good way for an older hiker to set a more manageable pace without being called on it by the young Turks). Alas, Frost’s boots didn’t fit well, and he abandoned the hike. He rejoined his party at Middlebury Gap, but his feet gave him fits again, and he dropped out for good. The expedition, then, was not entirely successful for him, for he didn't achieve the feat of feet he hoped to achieve. But it does speak of Frost’s love of Vermont's mountains, its flora, its wild and desert places.

 

Three years after Frost moved here, in June of 1923, the University of Vermont awarded him an honorary degree, an honor that Thompson reports he found even more gratifying than the honorary degrees he had been awarded from Amherst and Michigan, because, he felt, there were strings attached to those. (Thompson, 227). His life-long publisher, Henry Holt, served as Frost’s host at his summer residence when Frost was in Burlington for the ceremony.

 

Later, when he was named Poet Laureat of Vermont, he was also especially gratified. I would point to his four-line poem entitled, “On Being Chosen Poet of Vermont”:

Breathes there a bard who isn’t moved
When he finds his verse is understood
And not entirely disapproved
By his country and his neighborhood?

My second point, then, is that the refuge that the Stone House provided for him during those years, when he was so much on the road, gave this physically fragile man the stamina he needed to become the national figure – even symbol – of the humanities and poetry that he became. And if my own seven generations of Vermont chauvinism (in Bennington County at that!) weren’t enough, it is that symbolic role that makes me so very pleased to speak today as the head of the Vermont Humanities Council. As a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Humanities Council provides humanities programming to Vermonters of all backgrounds and from across the state. It picks up, one might say, where Frost left off. Last year the Council sponsored 2,650 events in 167 Vermont towns. We run a speakers bureau, lectures and conferences, and reading and discussion series (so that one is not simply reading books alone, but rather discussing the texts with others, and thereby facilitating the “communing of minds” that Frost thought was the best way to learn). We provide grants to museums, schools, libraries, historical societies, and other organizations in support of compelling humanities projects. And we run numerous humanities-based literacy programs, including programs in prisons, summer humanities day camps for at-risk middle schoolers, programs with Adult Basic Education students, training programs for child care providers, and major community-based literacy initiatives called Creating Community of Readers. Our budget is about $1.1 million a year, with about 40% coming from the National Endowment for the Humanities, fifteen percent from the State of Vermont, and nearly half raised through fundraising from individuals, businesses, and foundations.

 

Like the arts, the humanities have long relied on philanthropy for support, and the Vermont Humanities Council is no exception. I recall Frost’s comment that “Poetry has always been a beggar. Scholars have also been beggars, but they delegate their begging to the president of the college to do for them.”
Robert Frost was a modern leader in bringing the humanities to the general public. As you know, he spoke and said his poems to hundreds of standing room audiences throughout the country -- on college campuses, in synagogues, at the 92nd Street YMCA in New York, and elsewhere; “barding around,” he called it. He was perhaps the first poet in residence at an American university – first at the University of Michigan, and later, at Amherst College, Dartmouth College, as well as Breadloaf. And he always came back here.

 

Perhaps more than any other American, Robert Frost is an embodiment of the importance of the humanities and arts in public life. His singular stature is suggested by the fact that, in 1957 James Reston, Washington correspondent for the New York Times began one of his columns by writing, “Every time Robert Frost comes to town the Washington Monument stands up a little straighter.” (Can you name any person – let alone a poet – about whom that might be written today?) In 1958 Frost was named Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, and then honorary Consultant in the Humanities. In 1960 he testified in favor of the establishment of a National Academy of Culture because he wanted the country to recognize the arts, to acknowledge them, to “radiate a certain atmosphere over the country. That’s something,” he said, “to know that the arts are not slighted.” He didn’t want it to be a one-time initiative, but “ all the time—an atmosphere, a general favor.” About a dozen years later, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts were established.

 

Of course, in January of 1961, Frost was the first poet to be honored by speaking as part of a Presidential Inauguration. He telegraphed President-elect Kennedy, “If you can bear at your age the honor of being made president of the United States, I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor of taking some part in your inauguration. I may not be equal to it but I can accept it for my cause – the arts, poetry, now for the first time taken into the affairs of statesmen.”

 

Frost saw the Inaugural’s significance as the advent of a new Augustan age, “A golden age” that joins “poetry and power.” After the ceremony, he was criticized by some newspapers for using the word “power.” President Kennedy sent him a reassuring note on which he had scrawled, “Power all the way!”
Frost wrote a friend, “We are sure to be great in the world of power and wealth. . . . But someone who has time will have to take thought that we shall be remembered five thousand years from now for more than success in war and trade. Someone will have to feel that it would be the ultimate shame if we were to pass like Carthage (great in war and trade) and leave no trace in the spirit.” Real national greatness, for him, came from art and literature and language. Frost recognized that the nation is strengthened and enriched when the public is engaged in the humanities as key parts of civic and community life. That is what this museum (a physical place) and the Vermont Humanities Council (with its programmatic offerings across the entire state) do.

 

Frost traveled abroad -- to South America and Israel. He went to the Soviet Union on a State Department trip in August 1961, and met with key Soviet writers, including the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. These writers, as Jay Parini noted, were “sympathetic to the fiercely independent quality of [Frost’s] work, and they appreciated his humanism.” As F. D. Reeve wrote, “For them, Frost personified this tradition [of humanism],” perhaps even more than he did within American society. And despite being ill, he also met with Nikita Khrushchev, who came to his room for an historic visit with Frost sitting on the side of his bed.

 

Robert Frost wanted to connect the arts -- including literature, of course – with power. He wanted to connect the arts with people. As he wrote in this cottage, in his introduction to King Jasper (a posthumous collection of poems by E.A. Robinson), “The utmost ambition is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of, to lodge a few irreducible bits, where Robinson lodged more than his share.” Similarly, Frost said in 1955, “The most satisfying part is to write a poem. The next most satisfying is to have people read them. . . .and to see poems turn up in quotations, become part of people’s lives. Maybe turn up in a Presidential campaign.”

 

Well, Governor George W. Bush quoted Frost in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention in 2000. And, in a 1995 case concerning “separation of powers, a distinctively American political doctrine,” two Supreme Court Justices -- Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy -- debated in their opposing judicial opinions what the line “good fences make good neighbors” meant. Frost would have loved it.

Frost certainly did “lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.” Vermont is enriched by his art, as is our country and the world; the human voices in Frost’s poetry are the human voices of the twin states, and Frost’s life is part of Vermont’s heritage.

 

Frost said that poetry was “a way of grappling with life.” His poetry helps us grapple with our lives; it enriches and deepens our lives. One cannot read his poems and not be deepened by them. I am thinking of poems such as “Home Burial,” “ 'Out, Out -', ” “Reluctance,” “ To Earthward,” “The Draft Horse,” “Stopping by Woods,” “The Oven Bird,” “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” “Mowing,” and “The Death of the Hired Man.” We need this poetry – and all the humanities -- close at hand as we grapple with life, and not put away - treasured, but never used, like the fancy china or a book on the topmost shelf. This museum helps keep that heritage and the help it provides more toward the front of our minds, and as a result we are enriched as individuals and as a state.

 

Thank you.