Word: frosts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ezra Pound's cantos showed "scraps of minor classics in Greek and Latin, but not a single idea of his own." Archibald MacLeish was "a college-educated and practiced publicist trying hard to think." Frost's principal êete noire was Edgar Lee Masters, whose Spoon River Anthology made him a literary lion in the '20s. "His new book," Frost wrote waspishly, "proves my original suspicion, not that Masters is just dead but that he was never very much alive." H. L. Mencken he dismissed as "that non-fur-bearing skunk...
...versifier (and editor of an early rhyming dictionary) greeted Frost as a professional colleague and earned his ire. "Would he claim equality with me?" fumed Frost to Untermeyer, "more claimant than clement." With T. S. Eliot, Frost could not resist a further pun. "We both like to play," he wrote, "but I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist...
...Sunsuvbijches." Perennial letter topic for Frost was his running lover's quarrel with the world of education. It began when Frost withdrew in succession from Dartmouth and Harvard, and it tormented him through his later years of sporadic teaching in half a dozen schools and colleges, including Dartmouth and Harvard. "I could never forgive the sunsuvbijches' belief," he explained with pique to Untermeyer, "that they were leaving anybody behind who was not getting toward their degrees...
Later, as a visiting faculty member at Amherst, Frost was not deceived by the president's belief that there, at least, young men were being trained "to think" and not merely "to learn." "I soon discovered," he confides, "that by 'thinking' they meant stocking up on radical ideas." When one class admitted it did not care whether Frost returned the papers he had assigned so long as he gave them marks, the outraged poet tore the papers up and tossed them in a wastebasket...
Messing with the Masses. As friends should, Frost and Untermeyer came to have few illusions about each other. Both were aware of Frost's monomania and his overwhelming intolerance of anyone who dared to disagree with him. "Sometimes I can think of no blissfuller state," Frost wrote, "than being treated as if I was always right." A constant target of his letters was Untermeyer's leftish reformism. "When you can write poetry like 'Jerusalem Revisited'," Frost railed in 1930, "why will you continue to mess with the masses (or is it mass with the messes)?" Frost...