Drunken party at Robert Frost’s house?

I don’t know if this story is funny, sad, or a little bit of both. I saw this news story this morning on Yahoo! (Robert Frost home vandalized). The home of the iconic American poet Robert Frost was vandalized. Not by poet-hating, knife-wielding drunks, rather by a bunch of teenagers (not confirmed, but police suspect minors were involved). Here’s what was found:

Empty beer bottles and cans, plastic cups and cellophane apparently used to hold marijuana were also found, according to Hodsden. The vandals vomited in the living room and discharged two fire extinguishers inside the building, located on a dead-end road off Route 125.

Either these kids didn’t know it was Robert Frost’s house and just chose a deserted house at random, or they knew about the poet’s house and thought it would be fun to throw a party there. The third option is they didn’t even know who Robert Frost was (wouldn’t be surprising given the low status poetry has in the US). I’m betting on the "they knew about the poets house and thought it would be fun to throw a party" option.

Frost gets a bad rap, especially here in the US. He’s considered some folksy, backwoods poet who writes about nature. While that is somewhat true, his poems often go much deeper than people give him credit for.

Back in 2005 I took a poetry class and we studied a little of Frost. At first, we didn’t really take him seriously until we started to really dig into the text. We quickly discovered that even poems like "The Road Not Taken"  had a very dark undercurrent running through them. Kinda disturbing.

As a side note, I always get Robert Frost confused with Jack Frost. Even in college I would sometimes refer to the poet as Jack Frost, only to be laughed at by my professor and then chastised by my classmates for the rest of the semester (you know how cruel kids can be)!

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