Education: Frosty Beer

“They used to sprinkle beer from a watering can on the sidewalks outside the barroom to bring in the young. The smell tempted them inside. That’s the way it should be with literature and poetry in college.”

That is the way Poet Robert Lee Frost, sitting in the new Ralph Waldo Emerson Chair of Poetry,* talked to some 40 reverently attentive students at Harvard University last week. No newcomer to Harvard or to teaching, Robert Frost was successively English Professor at Amherst, and Poet in Residence at the University of Michigan; at Harvard for three years gave the popular Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures. Harvard hopes he will sit in the Emerson Chair for at least two years.

Never a formal man, Robert Frost is at his most informal on the Thursday nights when he slouches crosslegged, drawling away for a couple of hours in the shadowy, comfortable Upper Common Room at Harvard’s Adams House. A master poet, he takes a poet’s license in teaching. His half-year course is labeled “Poetry,” but Frost gives himself a wide range. Some of his class find plenty to worry about in such Frost-bites as: “Don’t Work — Worry” —or: “I save my scorn for the people who say what everyone else says. If you repeat a thing three times, it isn’t true any more.” Nobody ever flunks Teacher Frost’s “course.” “Don’t write for A’s” says he, “write for keeps, for blood. Writing for A’s is just practice. . . . Athletics are more terribly real than anything else in education. It’s because athletics are for blood, for keeps. Studies are done just for practice.”

* Named at his request for his favorite poet.