Hey, Clemence! I appreciate that you got so much out of this. I am pretty obsessed with Robert Frost and his life, but look up Robert Frost’s 85th birthday celebration! The keynote speaker was a Columbia professor named Lionel Trilling who repeatedly called Robert Frost a “terrifying” poet. It is a terrific essay if you can get your hands on it and shaped how I saw Frost, not as a poet that just writes a lot of nice poems about the country and farming, but a poet who really scares us (in a good way) with the dark places he makes his poems go.

Trilling’s speech would be perceived as an insult by many, but was actually a compliment. He went to Frost and apologized and Robert Frost said “don’t apologize — you made my birthday party a surprise party.”