Narrator Daniel Toomey, who researched and wrote this podcast for the Brattleboro Words Trail, discusses Pulitzer winning poet and playwright Robert Frost's (1874 – 1963) influence and philosophical imprint on Marlboro College. 'The Road Not Taken' is read by William Edelglass, a Philosophy Professor at Marlboro for the last 12 years of its existence (who also provides a more complete reflection on the college and its impact in a longer podcast accompanying this 'bonus' podcast). Edelglass also quotes from Frost poems 'Kitty Hawk' and 'Directive', and the piece ends with a line from that last poem: 'Here are hour waters and your watering place / drink and be whole again / beyond confusion.' Toomey, who also taught at Marlboro College, describes college founder Walter Hendricks devotion to Frost and how he brought him into its 'act of creation'. In the years subsequent to its opening in 1947, Frost spent considerable time on the new Marlboro College campus, visiting the Hendricks family, talking to students informally as a visiting associate in teaching, as Hendricks called his unpaid position, and participating in the 1948 inauguration graduation, as well as the 1950 graduation during which he received from Marlboro his 22nd honorary degree. Frost's democratic and characteristically American ideal of the shoestring start pointed toward a grander notion, carrying echoes from his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henri Bergson and William James that was at the heart of much of his thinking, forming something out of nothing, making an immaterial idea substantive, convinced that the act of creation itself is the central purpose of our existence.
Research, Script and Narration: Dan Toomey. Voice of Frost and reading 'The Road Not Taken' is William Edelglass. Editors and recordings: Lissa Weinmann, Donna Blackney. Mastering by Dave Snyder, Guilford Sound. Music used: ‘A Place Beyond Belief’ by Sander Kalmeijer (storyblocks.com), ‘Horses’ by Pictures of the Floating World’ (freemusicarchive.org), ‘Cove Instrumental’ by Chad Crouch (freemusicarchive.org). Photograph is Walter Hendricks with Robert Frost on Marlboro College campus, photographer unknown, part of Marlboro College archives.
Robert Frost Marlboro College; "An Act of Creation', Transcript
HOST: Welcome to the Brattleboro Words Trail.
NARRATOR Dan Toomey: The white clapboard buildings. A kind of Puritan integrity. The fields. The Apple Orchard. The hills in the mountains beyond. The story of Robert Frost and Marlboro College begins in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1916. In December of that year, Amherst College President Alexander Meiklejohn read Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" to the assembled student body. The poem had been published in his third book of verse, Mountain Interval, only two weeks before. Walter Hendrix, who would start Marlboro College 30 years later, was among the students, no doubt hearing it for the first time.
VOICE OF ROBERT FROST William Edelglass reading 'The Road Not Taken' [00:01:26] Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry, I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth, then took the other as just as fair and having perhaps the better claim because it was grassy and wanted wear, though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same, and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black. Oh I kept the first for another day. Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
NARRATOR[00:02:24] Upon completing his reading of the poem, Meiklejohn announced that its author would be joining the faculty in the spring semester. The students applauded. Walter Hendrick's journey on less traveled roads was about to begin.
Frost started teaching at Amherst in January of that year. He was assigned to senior poetry seminar titled Poetry, Writing and Poetry Appreciation. And among his students would be Walter Hendricks. Frost's class met one night a week in an upstairs room of a fraternity house. While time and place of the class weren't unorthodox enough, what happened during those meetings was also anything but ordinary - free ranging discussion on poetry, writing and all matters literary. While the class was supposed to end at 10 o'clock, most students elected to stay on until midnight or later, after which some even walked their teacher home. It was Hendricks’ experience in this class, along with ideas that he absorbed in discussion about education with Robert Frost in later years, that laid the early foundation of much of Marlboro College's educational philosophy.
After his graduation that spring, Walter Hendricks entered the army, becoming a flying instructor in the aviation sector of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Discharged in February of 1919, he traveled to New Hampshire and lived with the Frosts throughout early spring. While he would eventually make a career in higher education as a teacher and administrator, marry and raise a family back in Chicago, the hills and mountains of northern New England continued to entice him as a place of the imagination and spirit. This in no small part due to Robert Frost.
The pull was strong enough that he would buy property in Marlboro, where he and his family would make their summer home from the early 1930s until the opening of the college in the fall of 1947. At the end of the Second World War, Hendricks took a leave of absence from his position at the Illinois Institute of Technology to become chair of the English Department of Biarritz American University, a provisional school for demobilized American servicemen and women in the European Theater of Operations. During his time in France, he participated in the creation of BAU, an experience that showed him how essential resourcefulness and ingenuity were to learning, an ideal wholly compatible with Frost's conviction that:
VOICE OF FROST [00:05:15] excessive planning deadened innovation and depersonalized the whole process of learning
NARRATOR[00:05:22] At Biarritz, Hendricks had tasted the excitement that comes from creating a school with little save commitment and resolve. And he had been vitalized by it. In the winter of 1946, his work done in Europe, Walter Hendrix shipped back to the United States, resigned his academic post in Chicago and moved his family to their Marlboro farmhouse. He visited Robert Frost that summer in order to share his plans for beginning a new liberal arts college. Frost remarked that he had always wanted to start a school himself. Then, according to Hendrix, he stated.
VOICE OF FROST[00:05:59] Now you've gone and done it for me, Walter.
NARRATOR [00:06:03] In that so much of what would become Marlboro would be grounded in Frost's ideals or at least consistent with them, Walter Hendricks had indeed done it for him. In the years subsequent to its opening in 1947, Frost spent considerable time on the new campus, visiting the Hendricks family, talking to students informally as a visiting associate in teaching, as Hendricks called his unpaid position, and participating in the 1948 inauguration graduation, as well as the 1950 graduation during which he received from Marlboro his 22nd honorary degree. Frost's democratic and characteristically American ideal of the shoestring start pointed toward a grander notion, carrying echoes from his reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henri Bergson and William James that was at the heart of much of his thinking, forming something out of nothing, making an immaterial idea substantive. The very act of creation itself is the central purpose of our existence. Lines from his late poem "Kitty Hawk" express it in this way:
VOICE OF FROST [00:07:21] God's own descent into flesh was meant as a demonstration that the Supreme Merit lay and risking spirit and substantiation,
Narrator: [00:07:32] Taking the risk to believe a thing into existence - a poem, a life's work, a college - was, in Frost's view, the making of metaphor. An attempt to say matter in terms of spirit or spirit in terms of matter. A bold striving toward the ultimate final unity, however unattainable it may be. Marlboro College was an exquisite example.
Frost wrote "Directive" among the greatest works of his canon, at about the time of Marlboro's founding. While it is not about Marlboro in any specific way, its final lines offer assurance for those searching for a place from which to draw strength and nourishment, a place where in your heart you know that you have found home.
VOICE OF FROST [00:08:20] Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again. Beyond confusion.
Speaker 1 [00:08:44] Explore more at brattleborowords.org.