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Civilization is all right, but I prefer to be one of its discontents. Except that’s getting to be a bit modish, isn’t it.

I am very blessed to share a community with other men in the act of writing, and it is their respect and belief that I am also much aware of. I cannot outrage the community of my own identity.

You never wrote me so long a letter, so full of the small details of your life. It is characteristic of you that it took an interest in a fellow creature, an artist, to bring the best out of you. But the luminous simplicity of your style comes over from your poetry into your letters and makes you very close to me.

The man who, I believe, was half drunk, replied only by all the oaths and abuse in which the Italian language is so rich. He ended by saying, “If I liked I could draw my sabre and cut you all to pieces, but as it is, I only arrest you,” and he called out to the guards at the gate arrestategli.

But here the drama is so simple. Search for food. Guard yourself or be food for something else. A few ants. A few flies.

My tantalized spirit here
Blandly reposes,
Forgetting, or never
Regretting, its roses —

However, there is a local acquaintance with $3,000,000 who had not an ulcer to his name and therefore was looked down upon by other millionaires. He was very glad to take out a five-year lease on my fugitive ulcer and give it a good home.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society—things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all in changed, sometimes rather suddenly.

I live among inconveniences that are no longer discomforts. I know where I stand with god and the world. I am a dull but not unkindly vegetable.

Here, Robert Frost writes editor and poet Nathan Haskell Dole on his (Frost’s) birthday. He reflects on his transition into middle-age and recounts a dream he had about Ellis Island. The Frost family passed through the port in 1915, when … Continued