The Visitor

Until he was 38, the impractical New Englander with the tart tongue and the unruly hair seemed doomed to fail at whatever he tried. An indifferent student at Dartmouth and Harvard, he spent a miserable time as a mill hand, flubbed at newspaper work, barely eked out a living on a rocky farm in New Hampshire. When, in 1912, his wife casually remarked that she would like to "live under thatch," Robert Frost moved himself and his family to England. There he gathered together some poems he had written in his spare time, labeled them A Boy's Will and sent them off to a publisher. To his own amazement, he found himself suddenly famous.

Last week Poet Frost, 83, was back in England to be showered with honors by the country that first recognized him. Early this month he donned the red and grey robes of a doctor of letters at Oxford, last week put on the crimson robes of a doctor of letters at Cambridge. This week he flies off to Ireland to pick up another Litt.D., from the University of Dublin. For an American to receive both Oxford and Cambridge degrees in the same year is rare enough, but seldom has one made more of a hit with the English than Robert Frost.

Death to Taxes. White-haired and craggy-faced, the poet traveled across the country, reading his poems and dropping asides on everything from death to taxes. "I would much rather," he told a delighted audience at Cambridge, "receive a degree from a university than an education." To newsmen he confided, "Now, I was looking into the new Oxford dictionary, and there on one page were the 800 words of Basic English and a couple of rules of grammar. That's all anybody needs. It shows there's not much sense in getting an education, doesn't it?"

On his political convictions he said, "I never dared to be a radical when young, for fear it would make me a conservative when old." As for rhyme and meter in poetry, "I would as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down." Explaining his lecturing technique, "I have three accents: one kind of Harvardish that I don't use, one back country where I live --Vermontish, and then the one in which I am talking to you now."

Easy for Eliot. "I never know," he complained on another occasion, "what to write on my income-tax form. It is easy for Eliot. He is the head of a publishing house, and all he has to say is 'Publisher.' But I have to think about what I can call myself. First I called myself a farmer. Then I called myself a teacher. But finally I was old enough to say 'Retired.' " Said Agnostic Frost to agaitered bishop who insisted that one day the old poet would "see the light": "Oh, I see the light. I just don't pay much attention to it."

For all these irreverencies, the trip meant much to Frost. "One of my big adventures," he called it. "A sort of rounding out, a turning back to the past where I had the joy of first publication."

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