The Poet Laureate

"Came within an ace of dying. Pneumonia. They call it the old man's friend --it takes you easy. But they gave me tons of penicillin. I said to my doctor, 'What do you call penicillin if it's the enemy of the old man's friend?' I never thought it was the end, but I thought if I died it would help sell my books. You know, when you come close to death, you feel awestruck. It's not fear" As he talked last week in South Miami, Robert Frost walked slowly and carefully.

He did not yet quite trust his aging body after it's bout with the pneumonia that had nearly killed him the month before.

His hearing was uncertain, and the shock of hair that tumbled down his forehead and over one eye was as white as the first snow of December. Last month he was 88. But the familiar slightly husky tone still rang in the old man's voice as he talked about his recent sickness and his new slim volume of poems, In the Clearing, his first collection of new work to be published in 15 years.

Half & Half. Gradually, over the last three decades, Robert Frost has abandoned the subject matter that made him famous -- woods softly filling with snow, the birches and stone walls of New Eng land, the brook in the back pasture, the tang in autumn air at apple-picking time -- and he no longer attempts the lyric intensity of his earlier works. Increasingly, he is content with sententious verse written with the negligent, remembered skill of a master craftsman. The old man is fascinated by the adventuring spirit of man. Many of his poems are half wisdom and half whimsy, and Frost often seems to be sharing a sly, private joke with God. In fact, one couplet in In the Clearing offers God a bargain: Forgive, 0 Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

Frost is plainly delighted with his new role among men since he recited his "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration. "President Kennedy gave me a kind of status that nobody ever had before," he says.

"It's been a new world for me. People come up to me in dining rooms. Of course, I think it's a little bit presumptuous to come across a dining room floor with a menu card and ask me to autograph it, but the people do it kindly." The ancient poet laureate of the New Frontier feels at home with the Kennedy Administration. "But I'm not a liberal.

There's some nonsense in liberalism. It's often bigoted, narrow-minded. I'm a sort of tough Democrat." Old Foxy Grandpa. Frost has always been one of the hardiest barnstormers in the academic world, but his pace has quickened to a sprint since the inauguration. He has taped radio interviews and allowed himself to be filmed for a movie documentary. He went to Israel for ten days as the guest of Hebrew University.

"They tried to get me to look at the scenery, but I was difficult and everybody was a little afraid of me" Last May, at the prompting of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall ("Udall is poetry-struck"), Frost spoke his mind and recited his poems before a black-tie audience of official Washington. He went up to Boston University to get an honorary degree--his 41st or so. No one knows the total for sure, and the task of keeping track has been scrambled by two admiring seamstresses who whipped up a nice quilt for him out of a flock of his multihued academic hoods.

Like any experienced campaigner, Robert Frost has developed a few standard routines; he quotes freely from his own best material, with and without attribution. But whether his stories are old or new, Frost relishes his role as a kind of foxy grandpa of letters, can still hold nearly any audience when he settles back and lets his monologue flow. "They asked me out to Chicago University one year to talk," he says, ";and they told me they didn't like my poetry but they liked to hear me go on against modern teaching.

I've always had the nerve to say what I had to say, and I never worried about losing a job by saying what I wanted to say. Lost ten of them. I would get these jobs at a university where the president would bring me in and not really know why. Then the new president would come in and wonder what the hell I was doing there, and I couldn't tell him." Professional at Work. Frost lives much of the year on his farm at Ripton, Vt., where he is looked after by Mrs. Kathleen Morrison, his longtime secretary, who is the wife of Harvard professor Theodore Morrison. As a compromise with nature and old age, he spends his winters in South Miami. There Frost has disturbed the mango, palmetto and avocado trees on a five-acre tract of land only enough to build two small green and white cottages --one for himself and the other for guests.

Frost putters around the land, clipping fronds from the palm trees, raking pine needles to mulch the smaller plants.

Up at 7:30 every morning. Frost still labors at the profession of poetry. Many of his poems in In the Clearing have been worked over for years--early versions of one called "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation" had run through Frost's mind for years. "I don't pretend to be unhappy about what I write," says Frost."I'm not one of those who say 'I wouldn't write if I didn't have a family to support.' None of that nonsense for me. I write, and that's that."

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