EDITORS: Robert Lee Frost’s 125th birth anniversary?He was born ANN ARBOR—Poet Robert Frost returns to the University of Michigan campus through a generous gift from his family archives. Donated by the poet’s great-grandson, Robert Frost II, the gift of books (many of them signed and dedicated to family members) and other memorabilia has made Michigan one of a “handful of significant repositories of Frost collections,” says Brenda L. Johnson, interim associate director of the University Library at U-M.

The poet originally came to Michigan through the efforts of Marion L. Burton, the University’s fifth president (1920-25). Chase S. Osborn, a former governor and U-M Regent, donated $5,000 to bring Frost to the campus as the University’s first fellow of the arts. The only administrative paperwork regarding the appointment was a handwritten note in pencil addressed to Shirley W. Smith, the University’s financial officer, who wrote “OK” and initialed it, said Robert M. Warner, dean emeritus of the U-M School of Information and former archivist of the United States.

Students in the 1920s were thrilled to have Frost on campus. Many of his activities involved staff members of “Whimsies,” a student-published literary magazine. In a letter written by one of those students to her family in Canada, Stella Brunt describes the poet as “very kind and unassuming.” Later she describes a session where Frost read and critiqued four of her verses as a “harrowing experience.” Local and Detroit media gave extensive coverage to Frost’s time in Ann Arbor, and a local ice cream parlor even sold chocolate-covered ice cream called a “Frost Bite.”

During his years on the U-M campus Frost wrote among other poems, “What Fifty Said,” “Spring Pools,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “The Nose Ring,” “A Winter Eden” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Though people generally think of Frost as a poet of space and place, he was “actually a man in motion,” says Robert Frost II. Born on the West Coast, Frost moved numerous times and lived in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Michigan. “He was quintessentially a 20th-century kind of person and not the quaint New England pastoralist some have imagined,” his great-grandson says.

Although Frost is most often associated with New England, “we now know he had deep and important associations with the University of Michigan,” says Lee C. Bollinger, U-M president.

The addition of the books, photographs, letters by Frost and family members, a bust of the poet, first-day-of-issue stamps, Christmas card poems by Frost, and other memorabilia enhances U-M’s Frost Collection, housed in the Special Collections Library. The donor has provided liberal access privileges to this primary source material by and about a “man whose works are complex and widely loved,” Johnson says.

An enthusiastic supporter of U-M’s Caf? Shapiro where students assemble for coffee and literary readings in the lobby of the Shapiro Library, Bollinger envisions a Robert Frost Poetry House on the campus, a comfortable place where students can read poetry to each other as well as to their teachers and guests.

Lee C. BollingerShapiro Library