Robert Frost at UNC: ‘hard-headed, statesmanlike’

On  this day in 1943: The Charlotte Observer editorializes about poetry and war:

“One would hardly expect a poet to deliver himself of hard-headed statesmanlike utterances. A poet is often busy elsewhere. He’s gazing in the brook or at the stars, busy with sonnet, ballad and roundelay. But Robert Frost, an American poet, speaking at the University of North Carolina, dealt in common sense. He thinks Americans are expecting too many drastic changes in internationalism after the war.

” ‘Our concern right now is to win the war,’ he said. ‘Then the developments we hope for will come about naturally.’

“Many of the scientists, engineers and others who are supposed to deal only in realities might well ponder this. Instead they are dreaming of Utopia on a worldwide scale, starting the day after the war ends. The war, they think, will somehow win itself. It won’t.

“When America and her allies have defeated the devil nations, there will be time to rebuild the world, but that will have to come, as Mr. Frost says, naturally.”