LATE FROST: WITTY, WISE & YOUNG

"Most of my ideas occur in verse," Robert Frost once said. "But I have always had some turning up in talk that I feared I might never use because I was too lazy to write prose.'' The poet's new biography,* by Critic Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, is little more than an affectionate scrapbook, patiently assembled by an old friend. It is filled with familiar and unfamiliar poems, letters, reviews of his books. pages from old notebooks and Christmas cards. But above all, it contains a steady flow of the talk that Frost, 86, feared might go to waste. Largely taken from conversations, partly from conversational letters and notes, the words show a strong, witty, wise, gently ironic man, even in old age remarkably without an old man's garrulity and sentimentality, looking at poetry and life with a youthful, unwilted spirit.

sb "Know what the difference is between me and T.S. Eliot? I play euchre. He plays Eucharist. We both play." sb "There are two groups: those who do good and those who do well. The second are the artists." sb Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net." sb "All a poet needs is samples, enough success to know what money is like. Enough to know what women are like. I believe in what the Greeks call synecdoche: the philosophy of the part for the whole; skirting the hem of the goddess." sb "A poem is never planned beforehand. Many, many poems of mine have been written in one stroke. Some have trouble in one spot and I may never get them right. But I always write with the hope that I shall come on something like a woman's last word." sb "I'd as soon make love in Lovers' Lane as write for the little magazines." sb "Don't hold an idea too long, don't idle along with it or it may be too well done for a poem." sb "My great complaint of education is that it is so loaded with material you never move in the spirit again. You've got to get into it but no more than you can swing and sing." sb "Learning should come in an offhand, cavalier fashion. An artist, especially, should be able to go right through college with one brain tied behind him." sb "I'm blessed if I don't believe sometimes that the whole subject of English was better neglected and left outside the curriculum. School is for boning and not for luxuriating. We don't want much school even when we are young--that is to say. we want a great deal more of life than of school. And there is no use in this attempt to make school an image of life. It should be thought of as a thing that belongs to the alphabet and notation. And both are nonsense unless they mix well with experience. Literature--I don't know where literature comes in, if it comes in at all. It is ever so much more of life anyway than of school." sb "Being taught poems reduces them to the rank of mere information." sb "Science measures height, but can't measure worth. Science will never know." sb "Everything is research for the sake of erudition. No one is taught to value himself for nice perception and cultivated taste. Knowledge knowledge. Why literature is the next thing to religion in which as you know . . . an ounce of faith is worth all the theology ever written. Sight and insight, give us those." sb "What we do in college is to get over our little-mindedness. Education--to get it you have to hang around till you catch on." sb To his students at Michigan: "Don't write for A's. Athletics are more terribly real than anything else in education because they are for keeps, for blood, and that is the way I want you to write." sb The most important thing to know about a college student is "the sort of work for which he will neglect his studies." sb "Most teaching is mere correcting mistakes just as most loving is mere folly." sb "I kept farm, so to speak, for nearly ten years, but less as a farmer than as a fugitive from the world that seemed to me to 'disallow' me. It was all instinctive, but I can see now that I went away to save myself and fix myself before I measured my strength against all creation." sb "Two fears should follow us through life. There is the fear that we shan't prove worthy in the eyes of someone who knows us at least as well as we know ourselves. That is the fear of God. And there is the fear of Man--the fear that men won't understand us and we shall be cut off from them." sb "It is a coarse brutal world, unendurably coarse and brutal, for anyone who hasn't the least dash of coarseness or brutality in his own nature to enjoy it with." sb "I discovered from Bellamy that socialism is everybody looking after Number Two. My criticism was the same then as now; just as conservative. It's harder to look after Number Two than Number One, for how do you know what Number Two wants?" sb "I'd hesitate to abolish poverty myself. Too much good has come of it. If it's going to be abolished, let Mrs. Roosevelt do it." sb "When I get to the next world they'll ask me: 'Did you live modern?' I'll answer 'a little' and go on to say: I flew a little, went on TV a little,' and then someone will ask me 'Did you smoke the right cigarette?' and I'll say I don't know about that.' Misery loves company and if we go together, it'll be a grand affair. We'd say to each other after we got there: 'Wasn't that somep'n?' "

* Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence; Holt, Rinehart & Winston (451 pp.; $6).

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