Literary Imagination Advance Access originally published online on February 16, 2008
Literary Imagination 2008 10(1):1-14; doi:10.1093/litimag/imm127
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
"Sometimes It Seems As If": A Talk by Robert Frost October 23, 19471
*E-mail: james.sitar@gmail.com
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Perhaps because he was a Dartmouth dropout, Robert Frost indulged in returning often to his alma mater to give special lectures or—as some have grown accustomed to calling them—"talks." There he had a loyal audience of students, locals, and good friends, and he felt comfortable enough to speak from his gut. Long after he held the Ticknor fellow position in the mid-to-late-1940s, Frost would continue to perform as part of the Great Issues course, a mandatory class for Dartmouth seniors. These students had required readings on current events from books, magazines, and newspapers. The course met weekly with guest lectures delivered by historians, economists, statesmen, journalists, and this one famous poet. Nowhere else—not even at other colleges with which Frost had long-term affiliations—was he consistently asked to address current events or speak in an academic class setting. The mandatory nature of the course ensures that at least some students in