Retirement invites revision. So many earlier judgments were shaped by pulpit, podium, or polite considerations. Students’ opinions ricochet off their professors’. As an editor, representing my publications, I thought as I ought. We imagine we make up our minds, but our minds are made by our moment. Fashion dictates thought no less than clothes. It’s hard to think “outside the box” when one’s living in the box.

Liberated by retirement, we can think as we please. This isn’t quite true: none can escape the climate of opinion. Neither can we banish old biases and begin afresh. But I am less constrained by practicality or propriety than heretofore. If my opinions irk, chalk it up to dotage.

Gradually I’m returning to the colossi who shadowed my emerging maturity. Poets especially I’m curious about because back then I dreamed of being one. Oh, to be the next T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, etc. No one warned me the age of heroic poets had passed. (Quick – name three living poets. See what I mean?)

For a month now I’ve been marinating in Robert Frost. Frost is America’s most memorized poet. “Pasture Spring,” “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Birches,” “After Apple Picking,” “The Oven Bird,” “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “For Once, Then, Something,” and – my all-time favorite short story, “The Death of the Hired Man” – sing as irresistibly as melodies by Mozart or Schubert. No poetry feels more natural, inevitable, amiable. His diction’s as clean and casual as Thoreau’s – easy to make, you might think – until you try it.

Gotta love the guy – his best as good as I remember, better.

Then comes the yikes. His best glimmer in a mudslide. His lasting poems were mostly composed before he was known and those made after, by our rumpled, lovable American bard, are inert, dull, sing-song-y, insufferable.

I believe in reverence. I believe in truth. How to square the two?

Here’s where age helps out. For a student to diss Frost, what nerve! For a publisher to scold him, what a jerk! For an old guy to sigh wearily to another old guy, “You just lost it, friend” feels less culpable.

We resist smearing our icons – and should. Achievement merits honor. But we should resist canonization. No maker is admirable always. Saints are saints only sometimes. Even Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach had off days.

We mistake labeling anyone “a poet,” as if poetry were a craft. A superb shoemaker can be relied on to make superb shoes, but a poet can only get lucky. Yes, one requires skills, but skill in art achieves nothing without grace. This is acutely true of poetry and melody. Prose-producers and painters can produce a more or less predictable product, but a poet or composer, without the intervention of inspiration, labors in vain. It’s like falling in love, impossible to force or predict.

Did Robert Frost, for more than half his life playing the public role of “poet,” realize his gift had fled? Or, mercifully, did he persuade himself of his unabated genius? Athletes quit the field when they can no longer make the grade, but a poet can keep churning.

Frost achieved such magic so often, it saddened me there wasn’t more. It reminded me, too, how much we depend on accident – luck, divine grace, call it what you will – for our joy. In the words of the old hymn, “All we can do is nothing worth, unless God blesses the deed.”