A Case for Jefferson by Robert Frost

A Case for Jefferson

by Robert Frost

Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens:
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.

1947

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To Frost, the real “anti-intellectuals” were the self-sufficient rationalists, brimming with undoubting confidence that revolutionary ideology would solve the social and economic problems of humanity. It is highly ironical that critics such as Rolfe Humphries, who knew nothing of Frost’s in-depth knowledge of the political traditions of Western philosophy, should identify him with the pedestrian mind of Calvin Coolidge. Thus the Marxist and liberal critics of Frost made the identical crude error regarding his cultural and political philosophy that Ezra Pound, Lionel Trilling, and other literary critics made regarding his poetry.

(Peter Stanlis, 2012)