The end. Almost.

So today was the last day of classes, which meant that it was the first day this semester that I could legitimately read something that I wasn't assigned without feeling guilty for neglecting my schoolwork. So of course I grabbed the nearest issue of Harper's, which featured, among other wonderful things, the transcript of a lecture Robert Frost gave in 1944.

I suppose a real idealist is a person who's gifted with the ability to miss what he hasn't seen, what he's never had. That would be the first definition of an idealist. And a poet's never that.

A poet's something else, isn't he? He's a person who dwells on what he has, gloats. Poetry is a kind of gloating, instead of a kind of idealizing. Dwelling on, dwelling in, indwelling.

. . .

Now, that's very great, and wouldn't it be strange if I claimed something greater for poetry? I used to be—I remember when I was—oh, sixteen, seventeen, when I came first into poetry and into the arts, I thought that everybody who could followed one of the arts. One of the arts, would naturally do that, I thought. I came along, and one night on a ship—where I had been, oh, sorta helping load and unload, knocking about, knocking about the world—a man, an older man, took an interest in me and got me to the rail and talked with me in the middle of the night, by the light of the moon, and got it out of me that I was interested in the arts. "Well, how interested?"

"Well," I said, "I write a little."

And he said, "Oh, that's a nice thing to do if you're not very well." And then he said, "I have a daughter, an invalid, and she writes."

And then I realized that he thought that everybody who could made money and everybody who couldn't make money went into the arts. And I saw that it was a beautiful standoff between us.