Ann Arbor — When you explore the University of Michigan’s campus on foot, you are retracing the steps of the poet Robert Frost. The university’s sixth president, Marion Leroy Burton, succeeded in luring Frost to Ann Arbor for year-long residencies on three different occasions. The first was in 1921 when Frost lived on Washtenaw Street in a house which you can now visit at Greenfield Village.
Ann Arbor and Michigan’s campus have changed a lot since 1921 when Frost lived there, but on foot is still the best way to see it. An avid walker, Frost’s perch on Washtenaw placed him between Michigan’s quad and the Huron River. His poem, “Acquainted with the Night,” was written while he lived in Ann Arbor and describes the old Washtenaw County Courthouse Clock:
“And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.”
The courthouse and clock tower that Frost saw no longer exist, but a new clock tower stands on campus, named after the U-M president who first brought the poet to Michigan. Art Deco Burton Memorial Tower looms over the quad, 200 feet tall, and holds one of the world’s largest carillons, which you can hear chime every 15 minutes.
Unlike Frost’s ambivalence in the poem, this clock sadly has proclaimed, at least once, that the time was indeed wrong. The tower saw tragedy in 1987 when U-M Regent Sarah Goddard Power ended her life by jumping from the eighth floor. When she jumped, she might have been looking at the Power Center, the new theatre her in-laws had recently built just a couple hundred feet from the tower.
Frost was U-M’s first Fellow in Creative Arts and received a generous stipend with very few strings attached. While not responsible for teaching any classes, Frost was a regular fixture at student and faculty meetings and held court in various faculty houses around Ann Arbor as streams of students came to admire him.
Something of an insomniac, Frost was known to prowl the streets of Ann Arbor late at night. His book, New Hampshire, was published in 1923 shortly after his year in Ann Arbor and includes his famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” We can’t know for sure, but it’s entirely possible that the snow and the woods which feature in the poem were inspired by one of his late night walks in Ann Arbor.
During his time on campus Frost’s celebrity reached such a pitch that a local drug store named an ice cream novelty after him. You might cross the quad and indulge in a “Frost-bite” on your way to a football game. Once Michigan’s president suggested that a poetry reading by Frost in Hill Auditorium might draw more of a crowd than a simultaneous football game. Frost doubted this very much because, as he said, he himself would skip the reading for the game.
While you’re out wandering campus, head over to the Nickles Arcade—not an arcade for video games, but the older, more dignified kind of arcade: an arched, covered passageway. Here, the cold concrete and glass give way to warm brick and stone, an inviting entrance, and little shops purveying simple, earthy pleasures like tobacco, coffee, and antiques. With construction of the Arcade concluding in 1918, I expect Robert Frost often traversed the passage on his long walks for a brief reprieve from Ann Arbor’s rain and snow.
The Arcade borders campus on its western edge. If you make your way east, you’ll eventually cross Washtenaw Avenue and might spot four ropes hanging from a metal structure near the sidewalks which connect nearby footbridges, dining halls, and dormitories. Just a little further east is a Tudor-style building with timbers embedded in plaster on the upper stories. And near the door to this piece of old England in Ann Arbor rests a massive tractor tire.
If the ropes and tire seem out of place, come by on a Monday morning before dawn and you’ll likely see midshipmen and cadets in camouflage and boots flipping the tire then sprinting off to climb the ropes. The building is called Observation Lodge and now serves as home to the University’s various military officer training programs.
Those programs first started in 1917 with World War I raging, and they continue to this day. I don’t know if Frost saw students drilling or training on his walks around campus and town, but I suspect he did.
As a young Marine, I was stationed a couple of years at the University of Michigan. Our home back then was called North Hall, and it had housed officer programs on campus since World War II. It was demolished several years ago, but in my time, from the old front steps in the early mornings, we would make our way on foot all around campus, the arboretum, and the Huron River valley. We often carried packs or logs and were usually gone by the time the sun rose.
“I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.”
Day or night, the best way to see the town, and to know it, is on foot. And because of those early mornings in rain or snow, I have the streets of Ann Arbor in common with Robert Frost.
Patrick Whalen, a former Marine, is founder and CEO of Iliad Athletics.
