By Michelle Cheung
An ensemble of Robert Frost's Christmas cards at the Poets House
You can still find trails of holiday magic in the Poets House where a small showcase of “Robert Frost’s Annual Christmas Cards: An Exhibition and Celebration” is on display. The poet’s Christmas chapbooks dating from 1929–1962 will be shown until January 16. The exhibit, drawn from the personal collection of Frank Platt, Vice President of the Poets House, and Ward Smith, a Frost collector, generously shares with us an intimate side of the great poet’s life. Platt, grandson of American architect Charles A. Platt, who met Frost while a student at Harvard in the early 1950s when the poet was in his late 70s. Soon after, Platt and his wife became blessed recipients of Frost’s ritual Christmas card giving. In Platt’s introduction to the collection, he said, “Even though Frost may have been the greatest living poet of his time, to me, the cards were tokens of affection and part of season’s twinkle.” Frost’s chapbooks were sent off as holiday greetings by a variety of people in his circle including Frost himself, his publisher, collectors, and friends. Initially printed in 1929 by master printer Joseph Blumenthal of The Spiral Press (who didn’t even send a copy to Frost), subsequent chapbooks were published collaboratively by Frost and Blumenthal almost yearly starting in 1934.
