"To Otto as of Old": The Letters of Robert Frost and Otto Manthey-Zorn, Part 1

Abstract

THE letters written by Robert Frost to Otto Manthey-Zorn, his friend and colleague at Amherst College, are among the more substantial and engaging clusters of correspondence that were not represented by Lawrance Thompson in Selected Letters of Robert Frost.' Although they rarely turn with any directness to matters of poetry, Frost's letters to his friend, accompaniment to a lifetime of close and convivial talk, open expansively upon his varied avocations as a devoted dabbler in rural real estate, as a teacher and philosopher, and as an observer of the contemporary political scene-academic, national, and international. Testimony to a friendship that weathered Frost's comings and goings at Amherst and survived fully intact all but the most severe crisis of his life-the death of Elinor Frost in 1938 and the decision he made in its wake to sever his relations with Amherst yet again-the correspondence between Frost and MantheyZorn as a whole provides a revealing glimpse into the life and times of the poet. In an interview with Frost's biographer Elizabeth Sergeant in 1956, Otto and Ethel Manthey-Zorn recalled the circumstances under which they first met the Frosts in 1917. As a battered old car stopped at a modest faculty house sublet for the family, Ethel watched from her window next door a gypsy band-