Beating a Drum for Beloved Writer

Ask a hired man or a housekeeper or the watchman on his beat. This is hallowed ground.

The cemetery of the Old First Church in Old Bennington is where poet Robert Frost is buried.

Shivering in the early spring breeze, Carole Thompson and Lea Newman, a former aluminum saleswoman from New York City and a retired English professor from Bennington, read the epitaph on the coffin-sized granite slab: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Neither Thompson nor Newman has a quarrel with the man buried in this Protestant cemetery: this paradox who called himself an Old Testament Christian, but whom scholars consider an atheist.

These women have only passion for Vermont’s first poet laureate and his poetry.

Frost has been described as the Homer of New England, a cranky farmer and just possibly the quintessential 20th century poet. “Just like Frost did, I want to bring spirit into matter,” Thompson says.

The matter, if her transubstantiation succeeds, will be a new national group to celebrate Frost. The group wants to promote his poetry, not strictly as iambic feet and rhyming verse, but as snowy evenings, stone walls and pithy insight into human nature.

“We want to appeal to the average reader, to those attuned to his poetry--you know, Frost enthusiasts,” she says.

Thompson’s group is the Friends of Robert Frost, which came into official existence exactly 151 years after the poet was born. Though they gathered as a simple discussion group two years ago, the group this spring began the process of becoming an official nonprofit organization. They count Frost’s two granddaughters among supporters.

The group has set a goal: to democratize Frost by fostering a wider appreciation of him through a Web site and discussion groups at schools and libraries.

“Frost is so accessible,” says Newman, a scholar of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Newman is the author of a forthcoming book about the New England places and people who inspired Frost. “We want to make his presence more visible to the general reader.”

Thompson, however, is not a scholar. She sold aluminum in New York City for three decades. Like countless other high school students, she was turned off by Frost and by poetry in general. But after moving to southwestern Vermont, where Frost lived for 20 years, Thompson rediscovered his verse.

Now her passion for Frost has caused her to be elected the Friends’ first president, and she’s eager to promote Frost’s poetry.

“After being in aluminum for 30 years, he’s an easy sell,” she says.

Besides discussion groups, the Friends also intend to preserve or protect four homesteads north of Boston where Frost lived. A farm in Derry, N.H.--home to the poems “Mending Wall” and “Hyla Brook”--is a state historic park. A cabin in New Hampshire’s White Mountains--source of “Out, Out” and “The Gift Outright”--is owned by the town of Franconia.

But in South Shaftsbury, Vt., just north of Bennington, are two private homes where Frost moved his family in 1920: the Gulley, owned by writer Norman Lear, and the Stone House, which the group hopes to acquire as a museum.

Though Frost actually lived in some 40 places, Thompson says, the group is focusing only on homesteads that served as wellsprings for his poetry.

Frost appreciation groups already gather in several states. More formal groups, such as the Robert Frost Society, which has been around for 25 years, take an academic approach to his poetry. Even schools where Frost taught or lectured--Amherst, Harvard, Dartmouth, Middlebury--have vied for his legacy, claiming letters, writings or even his ashes.

Frost’s massive ego would have relished the clamor, says Jay Parini, a professor of English at Middlebury who is also the author of a 1999 biography of Frost.

“He would have loved it, first of all, that more and more people are in love with his poetry. And all the more if he could get people to argue about his poetry,,” he says.

The competition doesn’t deter the group’s founders. “The goal for us is to enrich the experience of his poetry,” says Newman.

Lesley Lee Francis, one of Frost’s grandchildren, says there is definitely a place for the nonacademic approach to his poetry.

“Academicians are out of touch beyond the academy, and that’s a problem,” says Francis, a professor of Romance languages and literature now retired in Arlington, Va.

This group, she says, may help “bridge the gap between the academic and the nonacademic world.”