10 - Frost’s Politics and the Cold War

Summary

Shortly before Robert Frost's death on January 29, 1963, County Government Magazine published in its December 1962 issue the poet's response to its request for his participation in a symposium on the theme “The Cold War Is Being Won.” His tone is less that of the disheartened cold warrior that he is sometimes taken to have been than of the resigned, though still optimistic, poet-diplomat he had become in the last ten years of his life.

I hate a cold war of sustained hate that finds no relief in blood letting but probably it should be regarded as a way of stalling till we find out whether there is really an issue big enough for a big show-down. We are given pause from the dread of the terribleness we feel capable of. I was sometimes like that as a boy with another boy I lived in antipathy with. It clouded my days. But here I am almost writing the article I was going to tell you I couldn't write. My limit seems to be verse and talk.

(CPPP, 901)