HANOVER, N.H. - Sixty years after poet Robert Frost sat down with Dartmouth College students for an off-the-record lecture, the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner's words to them are being published.
The transcript of the 1947 speech includes a candid question-and-answer session in which the poet suggests one way to take the world is "as a joke, take it humorously."
A transcript of the Oct. 23, 1947, speech -- one of dozens he gave at the college -- will be published later this month in the journal Literary Imagination. Transcripts of other lectures he gave at the Ivy League school in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s are also headed for print, thanks to a former undergrad who came across recordings of the talks and found out they'd never been heard beyond the campus.
The transcripts may not rise to the level of a newly discovered poem or manuscript in significance, but Frost lovers and scholars may learn a thing or two.
"It's like Frost unplugged," said Peter Campion, editor of the journal. "Previously unpublished lectures would drive scholars crazy in and of themselves, but in addition to that, we're getting him in discussion. He's sitting down with a bunch of 20-year-olds and trying to teach them. That involves anecdotes, stories, jokes, funny little disses on his contemporaries."
Frost, the author of "The Road Not Taken" and "The Gift Outright," died in 1963.
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