Several speeches and a discussion with poet Robert Frost, recordings of which were left forgotten in a college library, will be published for the first time.

Frost gave many lectures at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, an Ivy League school, from the 1940s through the 1960s.

Poet Robert Frost, shown in New York in 1954, gave dozens of speeches at Darthmouth College in New Hampshire. They were largely forgotten until now.
(Marty Lederhandler/Associated Press)

Frost's lectures, part of a "great issues" series, were recorded on reel-to-reel tapes and small plastic discs known as flexographs. The college promised not to release the recordings in the series as long as the speakers were alive.

Frost died in 1963 after winning four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, and then the recordings were mostly forgotten.

Now, thanks to a former student who came across the recordings of Frost's talks, about a dozen lectures are being transcribed and published.

One of the first to be published will be an Oct. 23, 1947, speech at the college, which included a candid question-and-answer session.

The journal Literary Imagination has revealed it will publish a transcript of the entire lecture and exchange in its next edition, later in February.

"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"Previously unpublished lectures would drive scholars crazy in and of themselves, but in addition to that, we're getting him in discussion.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."

James Sitar came across the lectures as a Dartmouth undergraduate studying the poet, author of The Road Not Taken and The Gift Outright.

"I knew that the library there had a lot of very rare materials and manuscripts. I started looking through them, and I noticed that they had these recordings," Sitar recalled.

"I only transcribed a few, and then I wrote a very bad paper, a critical assessment on the insights these performances have," said Sitar, who spent eight years off and on transcribing Frost's appearances at the college.

Advises students to 'stay stubborn'

The lecture recordings reveal Frost's unorthodox delivery, in which he rambled and would go off on a tangent and then start reading poems out loud.

Some of his musings include how to view the world: "Now there's two ways to take the world that are safe. One is as a joke, take it humorously. Learn to take a joke and so learn to take the world by the help of jokes."

And in another lecture, he advises his young audience: "Stay stubborn, if nothing else. Don't let 'em tell you too much.... That doesn't mean you have to be nasty."

Sitar said the transcriptions will shed light on the iconic literary figure.

"Scholars talk about Frost having this sort of Yankee mask, where he presents himself to be some persona of this farmer. But you don't really get that from these. You get a different look at how he conceives of himself as a public figure."

With files from the Associated Press