ROBERT FROST & MARLBORO COLLEGE
A Brattleboro Words Trail Site
Robert Frost & Marlboro College:
Marlboro, VT
Robert Frost and Marlboro College
Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) was a poet and playwright and was awarded a Pultizer Prize for Poetry and the Congressional Gold Medal. 
The story of Robert Frost and Marlboro begins in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1917. Frost started teaching at Amherst College in January of that year. He was assigned a senior poetry seminar titled “Poetry Writing and Poetry Appreciation,” and among his students was a junior transfer student from Chicago named Walter Hendricks. The class met one night a week in an upstairs room of a fraternity house. If the time and place of the class weren’t unorthodox enough, what happened during those meetings was also anything but ordinary: free-ranging discussion on poetry, writing, and all matters literary. While the class was supposed to end at 10 o’clock, most students elected to stay on until midnight or later, after which some even walked their teacher home. It was Hendricks’ experience in this class, along with ideas that he absorbed in discussion about education with Robert Frost in later years, that laid the early foundation of much of Marlboro College’s educational philosophy.
— Contributed by Dan Toomey
Walter Hendricks and Robert Frost. Photo: Marlboro College
Toomey will offer a more in-depth view of Frost’s connections to Marlboro College as the project progresses. Toomey’s research and content will be used in conjunction with other sources in the final development of the Brattleboro Words Trail.
You can also view Toomey’s talk on Frost and mentorship here:
___________________________________________________________________
Previously, Brattleboro Area Middle School students under the tutelage of teacher Joe Rivers made a podcast about Lovecraft for the Brattleboro Historical Society’s ‘This Week in Brattleboro History’:
Student work, such as the BHS podcasts, will be incorporated into professionally produced audio for the ‘Brattleboro Words Trail’.
Site research in progress. Check back soon for more of the story.
On The Map
Marlboro College, Marlboro, Vt
Marlboro College
About the Research sites
The Brattleboro Words Project is working with the community to identify specific sites and themes significant to the study of words in Brattleboro and surrounding towns. Research Teams – classrooms/teachers, amateur historians, veterans, writers, artists and other community members — will produce audio segments and other work to be incorporated into audio walking, biking and driving tours tours.
