A Sesquicentennial Celebration of poet Robert Frost’s birth is coming to San Diego on Wednesday, March 20, through Sunday, March 24 at our San Diego Central Library, 330 Park Blvd, downtown and at UCSD Park and Market in East Village. Dozens of America’s most acclaimed poets will attend, and so can you, free of charge. For schedule and registration, go to robertfrostsociety.org/150 years.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is widely recognized as the premier American poet of the twentieth century. He viewed poetry as performance and was in great demand as a reader of his work. In one of his asides, he remarked, “I said to an audience the other day, ‘How many of you don’t know “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?’ There was only one person in two or three thousand there who raised his hand — shamelessly.”

I’m guessing that many of you readers can quote some lines from the likes of “Stopping by Woods” (arguably the best-known poem in the American canon), “The Road Not Taken,” or “Mending Wall.”

From its very beginnings, the life of Robert Lee Frost was a succession of paradoxes. The man who became the quintessential voice of New England was born in San Francisco and named after a Civil War general. It was not until he turned 11 that his family moved to Massachusetts, the land of nine generations of his forebears.

In 1912, Frost left for England, where his poetry was acclaimed, and he returned home to find himself famous. It was a fame that was to last for almost a half century, during which time Robert Frost was awarded countless honorary degrees, prizes, and citations, most notably four Pulitzer Prizes. President John F. Kennedy‘s 1961 inauguration marked the first time a poet participated in the official ceremonies at the Capitol. That poet was Robert Frost, who, on that gusty and blindingly bright day, recited his poem “The Gift Outright.”

As well as an artistic presence, Frost became a physical presence, a rare phenomenon in American poetry. His craggy Yankee face, bushy eyebrows, sharp blue eyes, jutting jaw, and rumpled, leonine mane flashed in the mind’s eye of poetry lovers. He looked just like a man who walked trails, cut wood, picked apples, mended stone walls, and, atop a horse, stopped to look at woods on snowy evenings. And he had that wintry last name.

But these images are too simple, too superficial, too sweet. They belie what Frost once called his “uncatchability.” John Ciardi, poet, critic, and friend of Frost’s, objected to such stereotypes: “Robert Frost is no lollipop. No man makes it into the dimensions of a Robert Frost on simple sweetness. There is not that much combustion in sugar.”

Frost’s base was always life in Northern New England, and no one else has ever captured more vividly the essence of that corner of our country. Rising from that setting, Frost’s poems are simple yet profound, plain in language but deep in thought, rustic and local in tone but universal in vision. In his own words, his poems were each “a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.” While some mistakenly label him a regional poet, his only boundaries are the trackless reaches of the human condition.

Here are some of Robert Frost’s insights into how poetry works its magic:

• Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.
• Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.
• A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. For me, the initial delight is the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.
• All poetry begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, or a lovesickness. It is never the thought to begin with, It finds the thought, and then the thought finds the words.
• My poems — and I should suppose everybody’s poems — are set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy, I have had the habit of leaving my blocks, carts, chairs, and suchlike ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.

***

On Thursday, March 21, starting at 2 pm, I’ll be presenting “Fascinating Facts About Our Presidents” in the Scripps-Miramar Library Community Room, 10301 Scripps Lake Drive. 858 538 8158. Parking is available nearby. Admission is free and worth every penny. I’d love to meet you there.