This article was written by Charles Maynard
Robert Frost, four time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is said by some to have been the most widely read and continually anthologized American poet of the Twentieth Century. He won Pulitzers for New Hampshire (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942). No other American poet has received that number of Pulitzer Prizes for their poetry or received such a high number of accolades from universities and foundations. When T.S. Eliot introduced Robert Frost to an English audience in 1957, he said of him, "Mr. Frost is one of the good poets, and I might say, perhaps the most eminent, the most distinguished, . . . Anglo-American poet now living." It has been over four decades since his death in 1963 at age 89, and Robert Frost remains one of America's leading 20th-Century poets.
Although Frost is most often associated with the New England region, it is also known that he had deep and abiding associations with Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. "I like Michigan people and I like Michigan," he once wrote to a friend. In 1921 he accepted a $5,000 fellowship and became the University's first Poet-in-Residence. After a brief return to New England in 1923, he came back to Michigan again for two years beginning in 1924 after receiving an appointment with the title Fellow in Letters. Frost had no official teaching obligations during his tenure at the University of Michigan and was fond of referring to himself as "Michigan's idle fellow." As he described it, his role was "to do my work and radiate poetic atmosphere for the University." In fact, however, he'd never been busier. During his stay in Ann Arbor, Frost was in constant motion attending receptions, lecturing, and meeting with student groups. He also helped arrange a series of poetry readings by some outstanding American poets including Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, and Amy Lowell.
In the 1920s Frost was to become a well-known figure in Southeast Michigan and his activities received extensive media coverage. A local drug store in downtown Ann Arbor even created an ice cream treat in his name. This frozen dairy dessert was dipped in milk chocolate and marketed as Frost-Bite. Not to be outdone, a nearby bookstore promoted Frost's writings as Frost-Bark Very Little Worse than his Bite.
Frost himself was inclined to down-play this notoriety. When the President of the Univesity, Marion Burton, suggested to Frost that he was as popular as the celebrated football coach, Hurry-up Yost, Frost responded by proposing that they test the soundness of this idea by scheduling a poetry reading that would coincide with an upcoming football match. He then cautioned President Burton if you come to my poetry reading, you will be the only one there, because I shall be at the football game.
During his years in Michigan Robert Frost accomplished some of his finest writing. He was most easily able to conjure up his creative spirit when he could manage to find time for cultivated leisure and spacious reflection. One such occasion was in the late winter of 1926 when his wife Elinor had returned to New England to attend to their daughter Marjorie who had been hospitalized with pneumonia. Afflicted himself with the flu and feeling somewhat abandoned, Frost withdrew to the comfort and solace of his handsome Greek revival house on Pontiac Trail. There he tried to ward off the late winter chill, along with his low spirits, by kindling a roaring fireplace blaze with branches from a fallen black walnut tree, lazing on the couch, and devoting himself to writing for three undisturbed and restful days. One gratifying result of this retreat was a delicate and poignant poem entitled Spring Pools. In a conversation with Edward Latham some years later, Frost recalled the circumstance: "I lived out on Pontiac Road then. One night I sat alone by my open fireplace and wrote Spring Pools. It was a very pleasant experience, and I remember it clearly, although I don't remember the writing of many of my other poems."
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