Contributed by Doug Ferguson
This month’s “Great American” is the poet Robert Frost. Those following this series based on outstanding people I have either met or experienced personally in my lifetime know that some are not well known, and others are very well known. Robert Frost is, of course, the latter.
Many years ago when I was an engineering student at Case Institute of Technology (now the engineering school at Case University in Cleveland, Ohio) we were honored with a day long visit from this Pulitzer Prize winning poet who later would be seen and heard by the nation on national television on a chilly January day as he was chosen to speak at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.
While certainly known as an outstanding American poet today, many are not aware that he spent a good deal of the later half of his life lecturing at colleges, mostly in the east, and actually had month long lecturing arrangements with Amherst College in Massachusetts and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Reading accounts of historians and others who knew him well, he apparently had a “love/hate” relation with science and it’s potential for detracting from the human spirit. Looking back all these years today, it seems he had a reason for wanting to come and talk to a bunch of young engineering students.
He arrived on campus Monday morning April 5, 1959, submitted to a press conference, and then spoke to a very large audience in our new gymnasium. Afterwards he then went to a reception at the student union attended by a smaller group of 50 or so students who gathered around him to ask questions in a relaxed atmosphere for a good two hours and, as our student newspaper The Case Tech reported, “—wound a spell with his colorful answers and remarks.”
Many of his answers were quite humorous, but were very subtle and provoked thought.
Again from the Case Tech:
Initially the poet claimed that “science is the great enterprise” and built his remarks around this theme. He reminded the people that we all are the scientists and this led him to the question of “Who are we?”
At the more informal reception meeting with students he was asked:
Are you shocked by ballistic missiles and rockets to the moon?
Frost: Who are scientists, but you and I? I suppose this will change our lives. We’ll all have a Sputnik for the Fourth of July. That would make a good song title. We’ll all have a Sputnik for the Fourth of July!
(The Soviet satellite Sputnik was fresh in everyone’s mind as it had been launched in 1957 and shocked the world as it’s first orbiting object placed there by man. Later that year after Frost’s visit, the first human-made object to touch the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 2, in September 1959.)
Do you realize that scientists will soon send rockets to the moon?
Frost: I have considered the idea of some poets that science can ruin the moon for lovers. All I can do is laugh at this until they get to the moon!
(Frost didn’t get to see men on the moon as he died in 1963 and the moon landing was in 1969)
Of course there were many other questions ranging from whether engineers need English and grammar to how good really are eastern colleges for which to each he gave an entertaining answer.
I wish I could find the exact quote, but I remember him making a point of saying that science was man’s great enterprise, but we should remember it is only a tool with which to understand the physical universe, while implying that it’s probably not the one to understand the spiritual one. It’s certainly a much needed lesson to be remembered today!
At the end he was asked:
Why do you avoid giving opinions?
Frost: I make my stand in books. I have no campaigns. I am merely interested in history and poetry. Perhaps this couplet will help you out:
It takes all kinds of in and outdoor schooling,
To understand my kind of fooling!
A great limerick from a Great American!
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Doug Ferguson is a retired engineer living in Palmer, AK who has had a life-long interest in nature, science, history and human behavior.