![]() Yet under the camouflage there was always the Brahma crouching, a Whitman, a great-mannered bard. He tried to make himself a man of many ruses, subtle surprises, and weathered agility. “Great is the art/Great shall be the manners of the bard.” He knew better than anyone that his neighbors would find this manner boring and insufferable. “In May when sea winds pierced our solitudes-I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods.” Part of Frost was wary of Emerson. A few of their poems are almost interchangeable. Both had something of the same highly urbane yet homemade finish and something of the same knack for verbal discovery. The thinker and poet that most influenced him was Emerson. Can we believe him when he says he “took the road less travelled by”? He ran, I think, in no tracks except the ones he made for himself. A mutual friend of ours once said with pity, “It’s sad to see Frost storming about the country when he might have been an honest schoolteacher.”įrost had an insatiable yearning for crowds, circles of listeners, single listeners-and even for solitude. Yet there was a strain never in his life was he able to eat before a reading. ![]() Year after year after year, he was as great a drawing-card as Dylan Thomas was in his brief prime. I have heard him say mockingly that hell was a half-filled auditorium. ![]() ![]() He must have gotten consolation from being Robert Frost, from being the image of himself that he had perfected with such genius. After Frost’s wife died in the thirties, he stepped up the pace of his public readings. ![]()
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