Dickinson, Frost and Wilbur '42 in Amherst Today
Due to overwhelming demand, the college will repeat its popular Amherst Today program on “Three Amherst Poets: Dickinson, Frost, Wilbur ’42” from Sept. 14-16, 2006. (A March 2006 session on the same topic is sold out.) Faculty for the program include William H. Pritchard ’53, the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, and David Sofield, the Samuel Williston Professor of English.
Amherst Today programs bring alumni, parents and friends back to campus to participate in an enriching educational experience.
“Emily Dickinson, whose father and brother helped found and sustain the college for 70 years, lived all of her life in Amherst,” this course’s description notes. “Robert Frost was 42 when he started his long (and rarely uncomplicated) association with the college, and Richard Wilbur ’42 was a student at the college for the customary four years.” Amherst—the town and the college—changed considerably between Dickinson’s era and Wilbur’s. But, the course description says, “the three poets were marked, like every writer, by their reading, by where and when they lived, by those around them. We will look carefully at the work of these preeminent American lyric poets, each a master of language, wit, paradox and the local in their respective half-centuries.”
Alumni, parents and friends interested in enrolling in this new Amherst Today course should contact Bill Vickery ’57 at (413) 542-2382 or wmvickery@amherst.edu. Additional information is also available on the Amherst Today Webpage.