Robert Frost and the pedagogical path less traveled

I had reason to identify with Frost. He was a late bloomer with unresolved childhood issues who worked at a newspaper before he taught college. Having grown up reading and reciting his poetry, I wanted to explore his pedagogy as the 150th anniversary of his birth — March 26 — approached this year. It turns out the poet who famously compared free verse to “playing tennis with the net down” wasn’t such a stickler for structure in the classroom, preferring to serve lessons without a game plan.

Not only did he refuse to quiz students with “questions I myself can answer,” but if students in his poetry class at Harvard University didn’t pipe up, he was prepared to “keep silent, or even lie down on the desk.” One examination day at Amherst, he simply handed out blue books to students along with this sparse instruction: “Do something appropriate to this course which will please and interest me.” Then he left the room.

“He is a firm believer in the ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ theory of education,” according to an interview published in The Boston Sunday Globe in 1924, which noted the nontraditional prof was sometimes “frowned upon in academic circles. What claim to teaching ability can be made by a man who frequently doesn’t show up for his classes, who allows his students in the classroom to write letters, play cards, or whisper while he’s reading poetry? And yet out of each class you’ll find a certain group who swear by Mr. Frost as they’ve never sworn by any teacher before.”

Although he had no undergraduate degree, Frost secured teaching positions at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Middlebury College, Yale University, Columbia University, and Harvard and unapologetically departed from the custom of quizzing and lecturing that dominated higher ed, dismissing much of it as “busy work.”

So how did he teach?

“Well, I can’t say that you can call it teaching,” Frost said in 1923, as he was preparing to return to the faculty at Amherst. “I don’t teach. I don’t know how. I talk and I have the boys talk.”

Nor did he want students critically analyzing authors or their works. “Youth, I believe, should not analyze its enjoyments,” he said. “It should live.”

He did like to read his verses aloud in class. “Why bother with the other fellow’s?” he quipped. “I know my own so much better.”

Poring over old interviews, I learned Frost’s unconventional approach to education may have stretched back to his school days. Frost briefly attended Dartmouth College and Harvard. “While my marks were always good, I somehow felt that I was wasting time,” he explained to a reporter, “and so I left college.”

Maybe that’s why the poet — who would go on to be awarded dozens of honorary degrees — had his doubts about the significance of higher ed. “He once said to me not to let the Harvard in me get to be too important,” President John F. Kennedy remembered.

Frost called poetry “the first form of understanding” and wrote such well-known works as “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” ”The Road Not Taken,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” depicting the bucolic New England landscape, with its birch trees and snow-white stars. Noting how the planets revolve around the sun in a marvel of “attraction and repulsion,” he once suggested the same concept applies to poetry. “We have all sorts of ways to hold people,” he once told a reporter. “Hold them and hold them off.”

It’s not so surprising a sentiment from the poet who seemingly embraced a little distance, who taught us that “good fences make good neighbors.” Frost could hold off people seeking hidden meanings behind his verses, critics probing the poet’s descriptions of hemlock trees and dark woods and roads not taken.

And he could hold off the press.

Perhaps it was that same astronomical notion of attraction and repulsion he applied when crafting wry responses to questions about his teaching tactics. Perusing old interviews, I couldn’t help but feel for journalists trying to get a straight answer out of Frost.

“My greatest inspiration, when I was a student, was a man whose classes I never attended,” he told a reporter in 1925. “The book that influenced me most was ‘Piers Plowman,’ yet I never read it. When I realized how much the book had influenced me I felt I should read it. But after considering it I decided against reading it.”

Still, his clever yet cryptic replies made for engaging headlines, like this crackerjack in the 1941 New York World-Telegram: “Frost Owes Success to Not Swallowing Nails.”

In fairness, reporters did seem oddly preoccupied with crafting ornate descriptions of Frost’s appearance — shoulders “like a Notre Dame tackle,” “the hands of a man used to . . . guiding a plow,” and the “powerfully sculptured head” that looked “hewn from New England granite” — capped by tousled hair “as white as a wintry roof top in Vermont.” But he laughed off any resemblance to another Pulitzer Prize winner.

“The newspapers are always comparing my hair with Carl Sandburg’s,” Frost was quoted in The Washington Post in 1961. “That’s absurd. Carl has a hairdo, and I cut my own.”

It was his keen wit that made him a hit on the college poetry circuit, where he’d “bard around” campus, as he called it, reading verses to packed lecture halls. Frost liked “to have a big audience for my talks, to have a few turned away.” But lecturing week after week to the same group of students was different.

“Three days in the week, 35 weeks in the year is at least three times as much as I have it in me to lecture on any subject anyway,” he told The Christian Science Monitor. “No, I am an indifferent teacher as teachers go. . . . It must be that what I stand for does my work.”

Frost’s work highlighted the beauty and hardiness of rural New England. The land, he said, was in his bones, and he tried his hand at farming to make ends meet before publishing a successful book of poetry on the cusp of 40. Not sure whether to put “teacher” or “farmer” on his income tax returns, he once joked he’d planned to put “resigned — and then, in parentheses, ‘to everything.’” His father died when he was 11, he outlived a wife and four of his six children, and he purportedly contemplated suicide in the Great Dismal Swamp in the American South.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” he once said, calling poetry “a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.”

“But of course, any psychiatrist will tell you that so is making a basket, or making a horseshoe, or giving anything form,” he explained.

Form couldn’t be forced, according to Frost, in or out of the classroom.

“Do you know the story about how the bear is born?” he once asked a reporter. “The bear is born shapeless, says the story, and the mother licks it into shape. That’s the way it is with some people’s writing. But no good piece is worried into shape.”

As for students in his free-form classes, Frost said he wasn’t so much interested in their writing as he was in their thinking.

“I heard a good one the other day,” he told The Denver Post, when he was embarking on a stint at the University of Colorado.

“The question which was asked was, ‘Are poets born or made?’” he recalled. “The answer is that, ‘Most people can’t bear poets.’”

Rebecca Taylor is a writer in New York. Follow her on X @ProfessorTaylor.