Emerging from the depths of Rauner Special Collections library and into the hands of Frost aficionados everywhere, 20 lectures given by poet Robert Frost at the College between 1947 and 1966 will be published for the first time. The lectures, recently transcribed by James Sitar '01, were given by Frost as part of Dartmouth's Great Issues course.
The first lecture scheduled to be released, titled "Sometimes It Seems As If," will be published in the newest issue of Literary Imagination, a literary journal, which will go to print later this week.
The Great Issues course, which was mandatory for all seniors from 1947 to 1966, was a series of lectures and readings about current events. Frost's lectures are especially interesting, Sitar said, because he gave them in an era marked by the shadow of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the Red Scare and the Space Race.
"Frost addresses all of these events, and that's really where the charm of it comes from," Sitar said. "He has some really unique views on science and the Space Race, and he goes far beyond poetry."
The lectures reveal a side of Frost that is not immediately evident in his poetry, Sitar said.
"I think it changes our view of him as a public figure and a public intellectual," he said. "His interests went far beyond poetry and that's exhibited in his lectures. He talks about poetry, but he also talks quite a bit about politics, science and current events."
Peter Campion '98, an editor of Literary Imagination, said Frost was able to deliver more candid lectures to an audience of students than he would have been able to give to an older audience -- resulting in lectures that were both academic and personal.
"Even though he's addressing students in an intimate setting, he has a real philosophical bent," he said. "But that abstract intelligence is never separate from his human, earthy humor."
In "Sometimes It Seems As If," Frost discussed his interest in science before reading from his poem "Why Wait for Science."
"Then here's one of my efforts to antagonize science," Frost says. "When I go home from here -- this fall, this winter or later -- I'm going down to do two or three mischievous things at Massachusetts Institute of Technology."
Sitar first came across the lectures, recorded on acetate reel and housed in Rauner, when he was a sophomore taking Dartmouth professor Cynthia Huntington's English seminar on Frost.
"I just listened to one in Rauner, maybe 45 minutes long, and when I was listening to it, I knew that there was something really interesting there," Sitar said. "I just didn't know what to make of it at that point."
Approximately five years later, Sitar revisited the lectures as a Ph. D. candidate at Boston University and transcribed them for his dissertation. Until then, the lectures had not been transcribed and existed only in their recorded form.
"I was kind of surprised that nobody had thought to ask before," College Archivist Peter Carini told The Boston Globe.
While Sitar and Campion had crossed paths when they attended Dartmouth, Campion said they did not know each other well until he heard about Sitar's work through connections at Boston University.
"James did all of that work, listening to all those tapes," Campion said. "We're just thrilled to be publishing such an exciting piece of work."
The print edition of the journal has not yet been released, but the transcribed lecture has been accessible online since Feb. 16. Campion said reader responses have been overwhelmingly positive.
"It's so exciting to read someone who you think you know so well and then to hear him crack jokes or make funny critical comments about other writers," he said.
Sitar, who is currently an archive editor for the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, also said that Frost made a deep impression on alumni who met Frost while at the College.
"I just got a phone call out of the blue from this Dartmouth '57, who read about it in the Chicago Tribune," Sitar said. "He called me at work and said he wanted to talk about Frost with me because he had taken a class with him as a Dartmouth student."
Even though Campion graduated 10 years ago, he said the process of publishing Frost's lectures has allowed him to revisit his years at Dartmouth.
"For me, it's doing two things at once," he said. "It connects [me] to the history of the place at a time when I wasn't even born, but it also gives a kind of continuity. I think there's something in this piece which, strangely enough, is still true about Dartmouth, 60 years later."
Three more of Sitar's transcriptions -- Frost's lectures on "The Claims of Poetry," "The Most Dangerous Phrase in America" and "The Natural and Supernatural Bounds of Science" -- will be published in an upcoming issue of Fulcrum, an annual poetry journal.
