The stairs not taken
Robert Frost’s bumpy elevator ride at Newcomb
When poet Robert Frost visited Grounds in 1960, it wasn’t his literary reputation that made headlines in Charlottesville—it was a “stubborn elevator” in Newcomb Hall. “Stops at Wrong Floors,” blared The Daily Progress on May 2, 1960: “Stubborn Elevator Delays Poet Frost.”
Frost had come to UVA to celebrate his friend Clifton Waller Barrett (Col 1920), a retired shipping executive. Barrett was donating 250,000 books and manuscripts from authors such as Washington Irving, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, along with the most comprehensive collection of Frost’s own works. They were being placed in the new Barrett Room inside then-Alderman Library.
As 300 invited guests eagerly waited for a luncheon with the distinguished poet on Newcomb’s second floor, Frost stepped into an elevator on the third floor with Barrett, President Edgar Shannon and others. What should have been a simple one-floor descent turned into an awkward comedy of errors, the newspaper reported.
The elevator went down to the first floor and then lurched back up, overshooting again before finally delivering the passengers to the second floor. Shannon, an English literature professor, joked: “It’s obvious this group is literary-minded—we’re not very mechanically inclined.”
The elevator wasn’t the only quirky moment reporters captured. The Richmond Times-Dispatch noted that Frost, then 86, returned a girl’s autograph book unsigned before taking it back. “Oh, I didn’t put my name,” he said. “But then, mine’s not important.”
When a fan asked whether Frost intentionally placed hidden meanings in his works, as some claimed, he said: “I didn’t put them in. They got them out.”
Frost, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and was known for his trickster wit and layered meanings, visited UVA several times to speak, including in 1929 and 1952, as well as in 1961, months after reciting “The Gift Outright” at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
But his 1960 visit was to honor Barrett, whose collection grew with continued donations to UVA until his death in 1991 and now resides at UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. When a reporter asked Frost if he agreed with Barrett’s assessment that he was the greatest living American poet, Frost replied: “Make that the greatest of English-speaking poets, and I’ll agree with you.”
