It is as if that quality were kept out-frequently, but certainly not always-by some strangely generated sense of reserve.” In his poetry, Frost emphasized the part of himself that remained aloof and on the outside. There was, Holden writes, a “strength and vividness” to Frost in person, which you would be unaware of if you only knew his poems, as they lacked “the very quality which makes him most noticeable as a personality. He was talking to, of all people, Robert Frost, and there must have been six people huddled around them, trying to hear what they were saying.”) But, Holden reports, Frost the man would often “sit up late and talk, eating apples, gossiping about everyone and everything, a little maliciously sometimes but always brilliantly and soundly.” Frost liked long walks in the mountains, but he also liked “sea chanteys, sports, the theatre.” He liked “to talk and read about scientific achievements and exploration.” (In “ A Visit to Camelot,” her wildly entertaining memoir of a White House dinner she attended in 1962, for that year’s Nobel laureates, Diana Trilling writes, “Out of the corner of my eye I had spotted Colonel John Glenn. Frost the poet seems like a quiet person, a loner. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited. It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”-the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness-pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. Once when Father Frost was running for the office of something like tax-collector, Robert tagged around after him into all the saloons, helping to tack up election placards.” “Around election time, the boy’s father used to dress him up in fancy costume and make him ride on floats in political parades or pound along in some torchlight procession getting sparks in his hair.

“By the time Robert was born,” Holden writes, “the elder Frost was booming around San Francisco in a top hat, whooping up everything that was Democratic and belittling everything that wasn’t.” The young Robert Lee Frost grew up in politics William Frost wrote for the San Francisco Bulletin, where a political enemy once took a shot at him through the window. As Raymond Holden explained in his 1931 New Yorker Profile of Frost, Frost’s father, William, was “an ardent Democrat and States’ Rights man.” Father Frost had tried to enlist in the Civil War on the Southern side, but was rejected because he was too young. Though Frost is thought of as a contemplative New England poet, he was born in San Francisco, and named for the Confederate general Robert E. Fifty years ago today, the poet Robert Lee Frost died, at the age of eighty-eight.

Robert frost the woods poem