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##### January 30, 1963 OBITUARY ## Robert Frost Dies at 88; Kennedy Leads in Tribute ##### Special to The New York Times NEW YORK. A private funeral service, to be attended by members of the family, will be held for Mr. Frost tomorrow. Burial will be in the family plot in Old Bennington, Vt. On Sunday, Feb. 17, at 2 P.M. a public memorial service will be held at Amherst College, Amherst, Mass. The Frost family suggested that instead of flowers contributions may be made to a Robert Frost fund to establish special chairs for high school teachers. A number of such chairs have already been created in the poet's name, and the project was one in which he was deeply interested. Contributions should be sent to Mr. Frost's publisher, A. C. Edwards of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 383 Madison Avenue, New York 17, N.Y. Remarkable In Many Ways Robert Frost was beyond doubt the only American poet to play a touching personal role at a Presidential inauguration; to report a casual remark of a Soviet dictator that stung officials in Washington, and to twit the Russians about the barrier to Berlin by reading to them, on their own ground, his celebrated poem about another kind of wall. But it would be much more to the point to say he was also without question the only poet to win four Pulitzer Prizes and, in his ninth decade, to symbolize the rough-hewn individuality of the American creative spirit more than any other man. Finally, it might have been even more appropriate to link his uniqueness to his breathtaking sense of exactitude in the use of metaphors based on direct observations. "I don't like to write anything I don't see," he told an interviewer in Cambridge, Mass., two days before his 88th birthday. Thus he recorded timelessly (by matching the sharpest observation with the most exact word) how the swimming buck pushed the "crumpled" water; how the wagon's wheels "freshly sliced" the April mire; how the ice crystals from the frozen birch snapped off and went "avalanching" on the snowy crust. And to show that this phase of his gift did not blur with age, there was in his last book, published in 1962 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, a piece called "Pod of the Milkweed." It told of the butterflies clustered on the blossoms so avidly that "They knocked the dyestuff off each others' wings." He had seen the particular butterflies, most of them Monarchs, just outside his "boating" home at Ripton, Vt., a few years before. Inauguration Incident The incident of Jan. 20, 1961--when John F. Kennedy took the oath as President--was perhaps the most dramatic of Mr. Frost's "public" life. Invited to write a poem for the occasion, he rose to read it. But the blur of the sun and the edge of the wind hampered him; his brief plight was so moving that a photograph of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson watching him won a prize because of the deep apprehension in their faces. But Frost was not daunted. Aware of the problem, he simply put aside the new poem and recited from memory an old favorite, "The Gift Outright," dating to the nineteen-thirties. It fit the circumstances as snugly as a glove. Later he took the unread "new" poem, which had been called "The Preface," expanded it from 42 to 77 lines, retitled it "For John F. Kennedy: His Inaugural"--and presented it to the President in March, 1962. Later that year, Mr. Frost accompanied Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the Interior, on a visit to Moscow. A first encounter with Soviet children, studying English, did not encourage the poet. He recognized the problem posed by the language; it was painfully ironic, because he had said years before that poetry was what was "lost in translation." And in Moscow, his first hearers clearly did not understand well in English. But a few days later, he read "Mending Wall" at a Moscow literary evening. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the poem begins. The Russians may not have got the subsequent nuances. But the idea quickly spread that the choice of the poem was not unrelated to the wall partitioning Berlin. On Sept. 7, the poet had a long talk with Premier Khrushchev. He described the Soviet leader as "no fathead"; as smart, big and "not a coward." "He's not afraid of us and we're not afraid of him," he added. Subsequently, Frost reported that Mr. Khrushchev had said the United States was "too liberal to fight." It was this remark that caused a considerable stir in Washington. Thus in the late years of his life, Frost moved among the mighty. He was a public personage to thousands of persons who had never read his works. But to countless others, loyal and loving to the point of idolatry, he remained not only a poet but the poet of his day. During the first years of the Kennedy Administration, Frost was unquestionably a kind of celebrity- poet around Washington. His face was seen smiling in the background--and frequently the foreground--of news photographs from the Capitol, and quite often he appeared in public with Democratic politicians. President Kennedy, when asked why he had requested that Frost speak at the inauguration, praised the "courage, the towering skill and daring" of his fellow New Englander. Among the many things that both shared was the high esteem of a poet's place in American society. "There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, 'Don't teach my boy poetry, he's going to run for Congress,'" President Kennedy said. "I've never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart. I think politicians and poets share at least one thing, and that is their greatness depends upon the courage with which they face the challenges of life." Echoes the Poet's Cry He was echoing a cry that Frost had long made--the higher role of the poet in business society. In fact, in 1960, Mr. Frost had urged Congress to declare poets the equal of big business, and received a standing ovation from spectators when he supported a bill to create a National Academy of Culture. "I have long thought of something like this," Mr. Frost told a Senate education subcommittee. "Everyone comes down to Washington to get equal with someone else. I want our poets to be declared equal to--what shall I say?--the scientists. No, to big business." Many years before, but several years after he had achieved recognition for his work, Frost had slouched characteristically before an audience of young writers gathered under Bread Loaf Mountains at Middlebury, Vt. He said: "Every artist must have two fears--the fear of God and the fear of man--fear of God that his creation will ultimately be found unworthy and the fear of man that he will be misunderstood by his fellows." These two fears were ever present in Robert Frost, with the result that his published verses were of the highest order and completely understood by thousands of Americans in whom they struck a ready response. To countless persons who had never seen New Hampshire birches in the snow or caressed a perfect ax he exemplified a great American tradition with his superb, almost angular verses written out of the New England scene. Not since Whittier in "Snowbound" had captured the penetrating chill of New England's brief December day had any American poet more exactly caught the atmosphere north of Boston or the thin philosophy of its fence-mending inhabitants. His pictures of an abandoned cord of wood warming "the frozen swamp as best it could with the slow smokeless burning of decay" or of how "two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference," with their Yankee economy of words, moved his readers nostalgically and filled the back pastures of their mind with memories of a shrewd and quiet way of life. 20 Years of Rejection Strangely enough, Frost spent 20 years writing his verses on stone walls and brown earth, blue butterflies and tall, slim trees without winning any recognition in America. When he sent them to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note: "We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse." It was not until "A Boy's Will" was published in England and Ezra Pound publicized it that Robert Frost was recognized as the indigenous American poet that he was. After that, the way was not so hard, and in the years that followed he was to win the Pulitzer Prize four times, be honored by many institutions of higher learning and find it possible for a poet, who would write of things that were "common in experience, uncommon in writing," to earn enough money so that he would not have to teach or farm or make shoes or write for newspapers--all things he had done in his early days. Raymond Holden, poet and critic, pointed out in a "profile" in The New Yorker magazine that there was more than the ordinary amount of paradox in the personality and career of Frost. Essentially a New England poet in a day when there were few poets in that region, he was born in San Francisco; fundamentally a Yankee, he was the son of an ardent Democrat whose belief in the Confederacy led him to name his son Robert Lee; a farmer in New Hampshire, he preferred to sit on a fence and watch others work; a teacher, he despised the rigors of the educational process as practiced in the institutions where he taught. Like many another Yankee individualist, Robert Frost was a rebel. So was his father, William Frost, who had run away from Amherst, Mass., to go West. His mother, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, emigrated to Philadelphia when she was a girl. His father died when Robert, who was born March 26, 1874, was about 11. The boy and his mother, the former Isabelle Moody, went to live at Lawrence, Mass., with William Prescott Frost, Robert's grandfather, who gave the boy a good schooling. Influenced by the poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert wanted to be a poet before he went to Dartmouth College, where he stayed only through the year 1892. In the next several years he worked as a bobbin boy in the Lawrence mills, was a shoemaker and for a short while a reporter for The Lawrence Sentinel. He attended Harvard in 1897-98, then became a farmer at Derry, N.H., and taught there. In 1905 he married Elinor White, also a teacher, by whom he had five children. In 1912 Mr. Frost sold the farm and the family went to England. He came home to find the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asking for poems. He sent along the very ones that had previously been rejected, and they were published. The Frosts went to Franconia, N.H., to live in a farm house Mr. Frost had bought for $1,000. His poetry brought him some money, and in 1916 he again became a teacher. He was a professor of English, then "poet in residence" for more than 20 years at Amherst College and he spent two years in a similar capacity at the University of Michigan. Later Frost lectured and taught at The New School in New York. In 1938 he retired temporarily as a teacher. Mrs. Frost died that year in Florida. Afterward, he taught intermittently at Harvard, Amherst and Dartmouth. Won Many Honors In 1916 Frost, who had then been a poet for 20 years, was made a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1930, of the American Academy. His books, "New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes And Gracenotes," won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1924. When his "Corrected Poems" were published in 1931, he again won that prize. The Pulitzer committee honored him a third time in 1937 for his book, "A Further Range," and again in 1943 for "A Witness Tree." Frost won many honorary degrees, from master of arts at Amherst in 1917 to doctor of humane letters at the University of Vermont in 1923, and others followed from Harvard, Yale and other institutions. The issuing in 1949 of "The Complete Poems of Robert Frost," a 642-page volume, was the signal for another series of broad critical appraisals studded with phrases like "lasting significance." The Limited Editions Club awarded Frost its Gold Medal, and in the following October poets, scholars and editors gathered to do him honor at the Kenyon College Conference. In Washington the Senate adopted a resolution to send him greetings on his 75th birthday. On that occasion he said that 20 acres of land for every man "would be the answer to all the world's problems" noting that life on the farm would show men "their burdens as well as their privileges." The only existing copy of Frost's first book, "Twilight and Other Poems," was auctioned here that December for $3,000, a price thought to be the highest paid for a work by a contemporary American author. "It had no success and deserved none," the poet commented. In later years, Frost, who once wrote: I bid you to a one-man revolution.--The only revolution that is coming, became interested in politics, and some of his later verses were on this theme. His lectures, at Harvard, where he was Charles Eliot Norton lecturer in 1936 and 1939, and elsewhere, were less about poetry and more about the moral values of life. But it was less to these than to his earlier works that readers turned for satisfaction; to such lines as these on the "Hired Man": Nothing to look backward to with pride Nothing to look forward to with hope . . . While critics heaped belated praise on his earthy, Yankee, birchbark-clear poems, there were also finely fashioned lyrics in which the man of the soil flashed fire with intellect. Such a poem was "Reluctance" with its nostalgic ending: Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than treason To go with the drift of things, to yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end of a love or a season? Or: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if I had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Even critics who found a harshness sometimes in his work credited Mr. Frost with being a great poet. They appreciated his philosophy of simplicity, perhaps more in later years than during the "renaissance" of American poetry in the nineteen-twenties. For they knew it was a part of Robert Frost, whose innate philosophy of unchangeableness he once expressed when he wrote: They would not find me changed from him they knew Only more sure of all I thought was true . . . . At an annual joint ceremonial in May 1950, of the American Academy and the National Institute, he read a poem entitled "How Hard It Is to Keep From Being King, When It's in You and in the Situation." Asked about his method of writing a poem, Frost said: "I have worried quite a number of them into existence, but any sneaking preference [I have had] remains for the ones I have carried through like the stroke of a racquet, club or headsman's ax." In an interview with Harvey Breit of The New York Times Book Review, he observed: "If poetry isn't understanding all, the whole word, then it isn't worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in."
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