Vermont Talk

Poet Robert Frost has always tried to write like a man talking. Frost himself talks like a poet, so that it is not always easy to tell whether he is quoting from his works or taking part in a conversation. An English friend once decided that his voice had "the body and tang of good draught cider," but to an Irishman hearing him read his verse it seemed that his words "were flung out from crags--they come to me like the barking of an eagle."

Listeners can now decide whether the Frostian voice is apple juice or eagle, or something better than either--a great, plain poet speaking in homely Vermont cadences. Last March, for the National Council of Teachers of English, 76-year-old Robert Frost recorded 40 minutes of his poetry, and last week the results were released in music shops. Of all the poets whose readings have been recorded (e.g., Vachel Lindsay, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot), it is Frost whose voice rings truest, and adds most to the meaning of the poems.

Listening to the records, many will feel like the Frost fan who once told the poet he never knew how to read Frost until he heard him talk. But as Frost reads Mending Wall, Two Tramps in Mud Time, The Death of the Hired Man, and 21 others, it becomes plain that, barring shyness, any Vermont hired hand would know how to read the poems right the first time.

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