Rehabilitating Robert Frost: The Unity of his Literary, Cultural, and Political Thought

by Peter J. Stanlis

Robert Frost

William H. Pritchard's book, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), is an important milestone in scholarship and criticism of Robert Frost—as a man and a poet—and provides a good occasion for a retrospective assessment of Frost's life and his enduring literary, cultural, and political significance to America. In a highly selective way, excluding much in Frost's life and poetry, Pritchard's book is at once both and neither biographical and critical. It deals most judiciously with some of the more important events in Frost's life, with his aesthetic and creative theories about language in imaginative literature and poetry, and with a few of Frost's concerns with liberal education and his conservative convictions in politics. Pritchard's primary concern is with Frost's achievement in poetry, which he considers apart from the poet's concern with cultural and political subjects. In this essay I shall review Frost's character as a man and achievement as a poet, in light of Pritchard's study, but unlike any previous writer on Frost I shall also explore the close connection between his character and art and his cultural and political thought.

The Legacies of Edmund Burke and Robert Frost

James E. Person, Jr. interviews Peter J. Stanlis

Peter Stanlis’s groundbreaking work, Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958), forever changed the way scholars view Burke's work. Mr. Stanlis (1919-2011) placed Burke firmly in the tradition of Western natural law reasoning. Mr. Stanlis has also published a number of essays and articles on Frost, including Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher (2007).

James Person: Paul Elmer More recorded that in 1913, while visiting a New York club, he happened to mention Edmund Burke's name; and a companion inquired, “Burke? He’s dead, is he not?” In a manner of speaking, just how dead is Edmund Burke?

Peter Stanlis: I think that for people who are alive, vital, and interested in what’s going on in the world, and who have some sense of history and how the past has shaped the present, Burke is very much alive. And he always will be, because he had so many perceptive things to say about the nature of man and civil society, and of civilization, politics, government, religion, and literature—and you name it! He was a very vital person in a broad cross-section of the humanities.

Quote of the Day: Robert Frost

For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true? 
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes. 
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
As I sit here, and often times, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
       ––Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage"

How to Teach IV: The Remarkable Mr. Frost

THIS IS A CHAPTER FROM SOMETHING WILLSON WANTS TO CALL "TEACHER."  IT'S CALLED "HOW TO TEACH IV" BECAUSE THERE ARE THREE OTHER CHAPTERS HE WANTS TO BURDEN YOU WITH.  THIS ONE HAPPENS TO BE HIS FAVORITE.  

by John Willson

Education by poetry is education by metaphor.
                    Robert Frost

    The older I get the more I am convinced that a young teacher can learn almost everything he needs to know about teaching by reading Robert Frost.

    He once said that “the three strands of my life” were “writing, teaching, and farming.”  He failed at the third, but if you listen to the testimony of the boys and men he taught he was almost as good a teacher as he was a poet.  I’ve been honored twice to teach about Frost with Prof. Dan Sundahl, himself a poet.  We did what once was called “team-teaching,” a failed thing most of the time.  In this case we had a plan that could not fail: We chose a writer who was both incredibly popular and who worked most of his life against the cultural grain, playing his poetry and prose off against the muddle of his times.  In our first attempt at this daring thing we brought in Peter Stanlis, a friend of Frost since his college days and the author, recently, of an astonishingly good book, Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher. Much of what I know about Frost as a teacher I learned from Dr. Stanlis, and want to acknowledge here my gratitude to him as well as to my friend Dr. Sundahl.

    In fact, to understand Frost as teacher, go to chapter 10 of Stanlis’s book, “Frost’s Philosophy of Education: The Poet as Teacher.”  What follows here are merely notes about what one teacher has learned from Frost.