11 - In the Clearing

Summary

Fifteen years passed between the publication of the collections Steeple Bush and In the Clearing. Frost was now eighty-seven years old and had moved into the realm of national treasure and cultural icon. Despite his advanced age, he traveled and lectured extensively, with the assistance of his daughter Lesley and his secretary Kay Morrison. He became our nation's first and possibly only power broker poet! In 1958, he advocated to the United States Attorney General that treason charges against the mentally ill Ezra Pound be dropped; he was invited to the White House twice during President Eisenhower's terms; in 1960, he testified in front of a Senate subcommittee in favor of establishing a National Academy of Culture; in 1961, he recited his poetry at President John F. Kennedy's inauguration, and in 1962, traveled to the Soviet Union at the invitation of President Kennedy, where he “said” his poetry, lectured, and met with the Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Besides traveling to the Soviet Union, he also served as a de facto ambassador of the arts as he visited and lectured in South America, England, Ireland, Israel, and Greece. Along the way, he continued to receive honorary degrees and awards, including a gold medal for poetry from the United States Congress that was awarded to him by President Kennedy in 1962.

Knowing all this, it is perhaps surprising that he had the time or inclination to write the poems that appear in In the Clearing. But he did. And the collection is marvelously diverse, drawing upon the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of his long life. Frost reprises his role as teacher when he provides nature lessons in the poems “Pod of the Milkweed,” “Peril of Hope,” and “Our Doom to Bloom”; he teaches American history in “America is Hard to See”; and he provides us with his autobiography in verse in the long poem “Kitty Hawk” and the short poem “Auspex.”

Frost's understanding of cosmology and physics is on display in the poem “A Never Naught Song,” which summarizes the process of nuclear fusion by which chemical elements are synthesized in the stars. After the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb in 1949, the process of nuclear fusion was undoubtedly a common topic.