Those Who Favour Fire

A Poetry Tale about Robert Frost, told by Hello Doggo.

August, nineteen thirty-eight. Bread Loaf, the writers’ conference high in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Archibald MacLeish, prize-winning poet and loud supporter of President Roosevelt, is giving a reading in one of the cottages.

At the back sits Robert Frost. Sixty-four. Widowed that spring. And no admirer of MacLeish, or of Roosevelt.

What follows comes from the novelist Wallace Stegner, who was there and wrote about it years later, and from the retellings that followed. Frost’s friends have tended to play it down. So treat it as gossip. Eyewitness gossip, mind.

The way it’s told, Frost kept up a whispered commentary, loud enough to carry. Archie’s poems, he said, all had the same tune.

Then MacLeish reached one of his best-loved poems, You, Andrew Marvell. And somebody noticed smoke. Robert Frost had set some papers alight, and was busy beating out the flames and fanning away the smoke. An accident, naturally. Most of the room was happy to believe it.

Later, when MacLeish was asked to read from a play, Stegner says the barbs got sharper, until the critic Bernard DeVoto told Frost, for God’s sake, to let the man read.

DeVoto, it seems, had had enough. The two men fell out, and DeVoto is reported to have told him he was a good poet, but a bad man.

And Frost had already declared his position, years before. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire. Especially during somebody else’s reading.