1 FEBRUARY 1963, Page 7

Robert Frost When I last met Robert Frost he talked

to me, typically enough, about Stonewall Jackson. For there was nothing in him of the priggish self- Projection one sometimes finds in poets of public repute, which confines their talk to portentous oracular stuff about Life and the Human Soul. In old age his face had a sort of cheerful dignity. It was clear from his attitude, as from his poetry itself, that here was a fine poet who was totally unconcerned about `greatness,' immortality' and all the other vulgar distractions which worry lesser men of literature. He just wrote poems, and that was enough. His vigorous and direct feeling for life, unaffected by fashion, doctrine or formula, always reminded me of those verses of his in which, after speaking of himself and the world in terms of a gambler, late at night, on a losing streak, but still game, he ends.

It is nothing to me who runs the Dive. Let's have a look at another five.

STARBIJCK