Poet’s Christmas cards elaborate, now collected

HANOVER, N.H. — Take heart, holiday procrastinators: Famed poet Robert Frost once waited until July to get his Christmas cards in the mail.

Unlike most of the flimsy, forgettable cards of today, however, Frost’s cards arguably were worth the wait. For the last 28 years of his life, he teamed up with a boutique printer to send beautifully illustrated booklets featuring a different poem for each year.

Dartmouth College, which Frost briefly attended as a student and later returned as a lecturer, has collected more than 500 of the cards, including the first installment, which was sent without Frost’s knowledge.

In 1929, Joseph Blumenthal of the New York-based Spiral Press, who was setting type for one of Frost’s poetry collections, decided the poem “Christmas Trees” would make an attractive greeting card.

With permission from Frost’s publisher, he printed 275 copies, one of which eventually made its way to Frost. The poet liked it so much that he decided to collaborate with Blumenthal on cards starting in 1934. The resulting series lasted until 1962, the year before his death.

“It was one of the more fun things about him,” said Frost biographer Jay Parini, a professor at Vermont’s Middlebury College. He called the cards a “remarkable tradition” that’s carried out by other poets today.

Many of Frost’s cards feature woodcut illustrations evoking the New England landscape with which he was so deeply associated. Printed on heavy card stock, some ran to 10 or 15 pages.

The 1942 card included a hand-colored illustration of a country village and the poem “The Gift Outright,” whichFrost, who won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, later recited from memory at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

Many in the Dartmouth collection were sent to Frost’s close friend and editor Edward Lathem, whose nearly six decades of work at the Ivy League school included a long stint as head librarian.

In 1959, the card featured a previously unpublished poem called “A-Wishing Well,” and on Lathem’s copy, Frost inserted two handwritten lines in the poem.

Parini said that was not unusual for Frost, who often inscribed first editions of his books with little notes for his friends, or sometimes even complete, unpublished poems.

“He liked to personalize things,” he said.