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Recollections of Robert Frost
 

MARK VAN DOREN
 

M'
 

■ Y FIRST meeting with Robert Frost must have been
more than forty years ago, for it preceded the pub¬
lication of his volume of verse New Hampshire
(1923), one poem in which he had just been writing. My brother
Carl, who never missed an opportunity to do me good, had taken
me to lunch with Frost, I do not remember where or on what day;
and Frost told both of us about this poem, "The Star-Splitter,"
in which a man burns down his house and uses the insurance to
buy a telescope with which to see the stars. I was not aware then
of how much the stars meant to Frost himself: they were to be
one of his lifelong preoccupations, and were to become the most
powerful theme perhaps in all his poetry.

At the moment I was more interested in something he said
about the way he wrote a poem, or rather, got ready to write it.
No notes, he insisted, nothing written down—oh, maybe a single
word on a small piece of paper, but even that should somehow get
displaced. It was only by writing the poem, slowly or swiftly as
the case might be, that he could discover what its subject was.
Not that he liked the word "subject" either. No, it was more like
"something on the chest that had to be got off," something unde¬
fined till the poem was there to define it. If a prose note could
have done this for him, a prose note would have been enough.
 

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