The Rob I Knew - Musings on Robert Frost
Carl Burell reminisces about his old friend Robert Frost, sharing stories about Rob with the people of Derry, New Hampshire attending the Centennial Celebration of Derry in 1927.
This reenactment offers an inside look at the early years of Robert Frost through the eyes of Carl Burell, a childhood friend, farming mentor and hired hand on Frost’s first farm in Derry. Carl’s closeup view provides a unique perspective on Frost’s life among the people of Derry, whom he freely appropriated in much of his poetry. Carl reflects on the experience of personally appearing as hapless fodder in Frost’s successful conversion of the slow demise of the New England family farm into revered and fully monetized literature. Throughout, Carl offers oral interpretations of many of his favorite Frost poems, applying his own native sound of sense to the transcendent poetry of Robert Frost.
The author and voice of this podcast, a reticent but displaced New Hampshire native, is a lifelong devotee of Robert Frost poetry and is very pleased to be channeling Carl Burrell. You can reach him at carlburell1927 at gmail dot com.
Selected Bibliography
Chiasson, Dan. “Bet the Farm,” The New Yorker, February 2, 2014.
Dana, Mrs. William Star. How to Know the Wild Flowers. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons. 1904
Frost, Robert. Selected Letters. Edited by Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
----------------. The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and
Unabridged. Edited by Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston. 1969.
----------------. Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose. Edited by Edward Connery Latherm and
Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1972.
----------------. The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Edited by Robert Faggen. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
Holmes, Richard. (2014, July 18). The Hood Farm. Londonderry News.
http://www.londonderrynh.net/2014/07/the-hood-farm/74622
Lathem, E. Connery, et al.. Robert Frost, Farm-poultryman: the Story of Robert Frost's
Career As a Breeder And Fancier of Hens & the Texts of Eleven Long-forgotten
Prose Contributions by the Poet, Which Appeared In Two New England Poultry
Journals In 1903-05, During His Years of Farming At Derry, New Hampshire.
Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth Publications, 1963.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York. Henry Holt and Company. 1999.
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press. 1977.
-----------------. “Tough Enough to Live,” The New York Times, November 6, 1966.
Pritchard, William H. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University
Press. 1984.
Sanders, David. A Divided Poet: Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the Drama of
Disappearance. Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2011.
Stefanik, Jean. (n.d.). NH Native Orchid Project, The New Hampshire Orchid Society.
https://www.nhorchids.org/page-1579474
Thompson, Lawrence, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1966.
----------------. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938. Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1970.
Walsh, John Evangelist. Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost. New York:
GrovePress, 1988.
Zhou, Li. (2015, January 9). Orchidelirium, an Obsession with Orchids, Has Lasted for
Centuries. Smithsonian Magazine.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/
orchidelirium-obsession-orchids-lasted-centuries-180954060/
The Rob I Knew - Musings on Robert Frost
11 - Vindictiveness featuring “The Vanishing Red” by Robert Frost
Carl Burell speaks at the Derry Centennial Celebration of 1927, telling of Robert Frost’s unfounded fear of Native Americans and reading Frost's poem, The Vanishing Red.
The Vanishing Red
By Robert Frost
He is said to have been the last Red Man
In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed—
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher’s license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
“Whose business,—if I take it on myself,
Whose business—but why talk round the barn?—
When it’s just that I hold with getting a thing done with.”
You can’t get back and see it as he saw it.
It’s too long a story to go into now.
You’d have to have been there and lived it.
Then you wouldn’t have looked on it as just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.
Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red Man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling mill-stone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
From one who had no right to be heard from.
“Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel pit?”
He took him down below a cramping rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came up stairs alone—and gave that laugh,
And said something to a man with a meal-sack
That the man with the meal-sack didn’t catch—then.
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel pit all right.