APPENDIX C Robert Frost on Education

The following extracts are from a talk which Robert Frost gave at Wesleyan University in December, 1926. They were taken down in shorthand by a reporter for the New Student and thus preserve the exact verbal flavor of Frost’s conversation as well as the best direct statement of his educational aim that I have encountered.—G. B. M.

“The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have. That is much harder than anything else in the world to get—it’s the freedom of my material. You might define a school boy as one who could recite to you, if you started him talking, everything he read last night, in the order in which he read it. That’s a school boy. That’s just the opposite of what I mean by a free person. The person who has the freedom of his material is the person who puts two and two together, and the two and two are anywhere out of space and time, and brought together. One little thing mentioned, perhaps, reminds him of something he couldn’t have thought of for twenty years. That’s the kind of talk I’d rather give.

“I’d rather be perfectly free of my material—reach down here in time and off there in space, and here’s my two and two put together. Here’s my idea, my thought. That’s the freedom I’d like to give.

“It depends so much on the disconnection of things. There’s too much sequence and logic all the time, of reciting what we learned over night. There’s an attempt in the honor courses to get toward what I mean. I don’t know what the honor courses will do toward it.

“I think what I’m after is free meditation. I don’t think anybody gets to it when he’s in anybody’s company—only when his soul’s alone. I do it when I wake up in the morning, when I’m starting an idea, and restarting. Sleep is probably a symbol of the interruption, the disconnection that I want in life. Your whole life can be so logical that it seems to me like a ball of hairs in the stomach of an angora cat. It should be broken up and interrupted, and then be brought together by likeness, free likeness.

“You might ask me this question: how am I going to find time? I would so run a course by self-withdrawal. I would begin a course by being very present, and then slowly disappear. A sort of vanishing act. I’d rather melt away just as I stood there, and leave a fellow more and more alone, and let him feel deserted, like a baby in a room alone.

“I know a good story, with a man’s name. I don’t mind using names. A fellow named Conrad Aiken, one of our very best poets, though not one of our most read, was once told in school to interpret something from some French dramatist. He went home and got so much interested in doing it that he didn’t come back to class for three weeks, but by that time he had the whole play done in verse. He was sent to the office, on the matter of cuts. He ran away on that. He came back afterwards to please an uncle, he told me. We always pleased our uncles. Is that freedom to do more than you ought to? He’d done more than a man might be asked to do in his whole college course. If a man did that for me, I’d give him A in every course.”