Photo: biography.com
The four-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Robert Frost, paid multiple visits to San Antonio. He spent the winter here from December 1936 until late March 1937, taking up residence at a home close to Trinity University. The Frost family spent Christmas Day at the St. Anthony Hotel, where Robert Frost and his wife Elinor hosted a big dinner for 10 family members who had joined them in San Antonio for the festive season.
During this stopover, he was interviewed by Frank Rosengren at a reception and signing held in his honor at “Rosengren’s Books” in the Milam building on Tuesday March 23rd, 1937. The reception also served the purpose as an early birthday celebration for the famous poet, who was to turn 63 only three days later.
Photo: Robert Frost in Rosengren’s Books 1937…courtesy sacurrent.com
During the interview, Frost was quoted in the “San Antonio Light” newspaper as saying, “ A poem must have some wildness in it, but the new poets have isolated wildness and have nothing else.”
He went on. “Gertrude Stein for instance is very brilliant, but if the truth were said, her poems have done their work when they have thrown light on a subject. Poetry is in a state of experimentation now, which neither helps or hinders it. As in geometry, we try to figure in a good many ways, so we are experimenting now.”
He concluded with, “Poetry hasn’t any trend. Today it is intellectual.”
He then signed books for the group who came to see him.
Photo: natesanders.com
The Amherst College professor left San Antonio later that week for Boston, where he was honored at the annual Poetry Society dinner. Later that year he was awarded his 3rd Pulitzer Prize.
Sadly, his wife Elinor passed away the next year.
Before he left “Rosengren’s Books”, Robert Frost left a photograph of himself, signed, “Wishing to be remembered in the best of bookstores.”
Photo: Freeman’s Auctions
Additional stories:
- Robert Frost was christened Robert Lee Frost. His parents named him after Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
- Soon after he arrived in San Antonio, Robert Frost wrote to a friend and said, “Almost nobody knows we are here. One newspaper man did find me at the hotel – I don’t know how. But I shook him off with a vague promise of an interview when I should be settled.”
- Camille Rosengren, the daughter-in-law of the “Rosengren Books” founders, and the last owner of the bookstore when it was situated at 223 Losoya Street, where Dick’s Last Resort is now located, was a god-daughter of San Antonio’s famous conjoined twins, Violet and Daisy Hilton.
Photo: Camille Rosengren….sacurrent.com
You can read about the fascinating life of the twins and their association with the Alamo City in a previous story here on “Memories of San Antonio”
Photo: Violet and Daisy Hilton….Science Source
According to the biopic “Bound by Flesh”….Camille Rosengren recalled visiting the home of the twins, located on Vance Jackson, when she was a young child. She recalled,” I remember them sitting on one of the benches near the gate. They were sweet, they looked normal, except when they got up and walked. I was fascinated, but wasn’t overwhelmed. I knew them on and off, and would go to see them at the circus”
..Camille Rosengren from “Bound by Flesh”…..Leslie Zemeckis ( 2012 )
Credits:
mysapl.org
“Rosengren’s Books: An Oasis for Mind and Spirit”…Mary Carolyn George
“The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3 1929 – 1936”
San Antonio Light newspaper
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Memories of San Antonio 