Page 106 – LIFE

Robert Frost: Revisiting Sites That Inspired His Verse

August 11, 2021March 25, 2014 by

Even in America, where poetry is largely looked upon as an elitist indulgence rather than a cultural force to be reckoned with, Robert Frost’s works—or parts of his works—are familiar to vast numbers of people. They might not know that the words were first penned by the Bard of New England, but men and women who haven’t cracked a volume of poetry in decades still recognize Frost’s most memorable lines and, above all, his inimitable images:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

— From “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

— From “Mending Wall”

Then there’s the famously short, sharp “Fire and Ice,” first published in December 1920:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his poetry—one of a very small handful of writers to have won so many—and remains, a full half-century after his death in 1963, one of the most celebrated and popular American literary voices of the 20th century. Here, LIFE.com pays tribute to the man (b. March 26, 1874, in San Francisco) and the artist with a series of photos made by Howard Sochurek in England in 1957.

When 83-year-old Robert Frost went to England this summer [LIFE told its readers] it was officially to receive that country’s highest scholastic acclaim, honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. Unofficially, it was a fine opportunity for the famous American poet to “round off his life,” as he put it, and revisit the peaceful haunts of Gloucestershire where he had lived as a younger man. In 1912, unknown as a poet in the U.S., Frost had begun a two-and-a-half-year sojourn in England and his first two books, “A Boy’s Will” and “North of Boston”, were published by an English firm. Accompanying him on his nostalgic return was LIFE’s Howard Sochurek, who caught the poet reminiscing in scenes that inspired at least eight of his later works. Back in the U.S. now, Frost regards his trip as “one of the biggest adventures of my life.”

Frost’s life was marked by enormous loss: only two of his and his wife Elinor’s six children outlived him. Elinor died in 1938. Frost himself suffered from depression, as did several other members of his family. And yet he left behind a body of work as clear-eyed and as uplifting as that of any American writer before him, or since.

In an English field where ‘Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought’ (from ‘My Butterfly’), Frost recalled another day.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“In ‘the thick old thatch, Where summer birds had been given hatch” (from ‘The Thatch’), Frost looked from the cottage in Dymock where his friend, poet Wilfrid Gibson, lived in 1914.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Malvern Hills, in England, where Robert Frost once lived.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frost, who once wrote, ‘I never heard of a house that throve . . . where the chimney started above the stove,’ examined the stove of his old kitchen at Little Iddens, Gloucestershire

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Malvern Hills, England, where Robert Frost once lived.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Nature lover Frost, who once farmed “a pasture where the boulders lie/As touching as a basket full of eggs,” stooped suddenly in this English pasture to grasp a stone and throw it.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Past the tree which could have been model for his line “Tree at my window, window tree . . . ,” Frost gazed sadly in the direction of the cottage, now in ruins, where he wrote it.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Malvern Hills, where Robert Frost once lived.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robert Frost in 1957, during a visit to the English countryside where he once lived.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Robert Frost in an English meadow, 1957.

Howard Sochurek The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Here Are Two Rabbits That Walked Around on Their Front Feet

August 11, 2021March 25, 2014 by

In November 1946, LIFE magazine introduced its readers to a pair of furry British acrobats named Junior and Mr. Walker — rabbits residing in Barking, outside of London. Asked why the two bunnies made their way through the world upended, padding about on their forefeet — instead of hopping on all fours, like virtually all other Leporidae — their owner, a butcher named Reginald Freeman, explained that they had been doing it since they were born.

“Mr. Walker, the elder rabbit,” LIFE wrote, “started off on his forefeet. Junior, a female, at first experimented with the more conventional four-legged method but after watching Mr. Walker for a while switched to his two-legged style.”

That’s all well and good. But still, why did they do it? Why did they act in this strange — albeit fascinating — un-rabbitlike manner?

“Mr. Freeman asked a veterinarian about all this,” the article concluded, “and was told the rabbits’ spinal muscles were underdeveloped and they walked on two legs because it was easier.”

Whether the critters’ spinal muscles were undeveloped because they moved through the world upside-down, or because both were born with underdeveloped back muscles (a highly unlikely coincidence), LIFE neglected to clarify.

Finally: It’s worth noting that the photographs of Mr. Walker and Junior (and Mr. Freeman, of course) were made by George Rodger, one the 20th century’s greatest photojournalists and a founding member of Magnum Photos. Which just goes to show — a good photographer really can shoot anything.

British Rabbits, Junior and Mr. Walker

George Rodger The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

True Grit: Dust Bowl Survivors

December 30, 2019March 22, 2014 by

For some, the phrase “Dust Bowl” conjures a place: the Great Plains, but a Great Plains of abandoned homes, ruined lives, dead and dying crops and sand, sand, sand.

For others, the phrase denotes not a region but an era: the mid- to late-1930s in America, when countless farms were lost. Dust storms raced across thousands of miles of once-fertile land, so huge and unremitting that they often blotted out the sun. Millions of American men, women and children took to the road, leaving behind everything they knew and everything they’d built, heading west, seeking work, food, shelter, new lives, new hope.

These families, immortalized in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and in the unflinching photographs of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and others, were almost universally known as “Okies,” whether or not they actually hailed from the devastated state of Oklahoma. The great, ragged migration away from half-buried farms and toward California and other vague “promised lands” is one of the defining catastrophes of the Great Depression. To this day, the very term Okie conjures images of gaunt men, grim women and doomed children dressed in tattered clothes, traveling by foot or jalopy across a landscape that seems perpetually dry, flat and ruined.

But just as entire families in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, Nebraska and other states abandoned their homes in search of a new start, countless other farmers held their own, suffering through the very worst of the Dust Bowl years, battling for every ear of corn, every grain of wheat, every leaf of lettuce on farms they had worked, in some cases, for generations.

Here, LIFE.com offers a series of revealing photos by the great Alfred Eisenstaedt. These pictures don’t follow “Okies” as they leave their world behind. Instead, Eisenstaedt’s photos chronicle the hardscrabble existence of Oklahoma farmers who stayed: families who fought to keep their livelihoods and their homesteads during those lean, unforgiving years after the Dust Bowl according to the history books, at least came to an end.

—Photo gallery edited by Liz Ronk for LIFE.com.

Oklahoma farmer, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma farmer and his family, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma farming family, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Sagebush and sand surrounded Oklahoma farmer John Barnett’s house and farm buildings. There was no topsoil left on the 160 acres. He grew rye and fodder in sandy loam.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

In Oklahoma in 1942, agriculturists worked on the region’s catastrophic erosion problem.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Abandoned farm, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Harvesters hitchhiked to a wheat harvesting, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Farmer and sons, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma farm, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Farmer John Barnett and his sons worked their farm, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Farmer John Barnett’s wife, Venus, worked in her vegetable garden after a second planting, Oklahoma, 1942. A windstorm earlier in the year blew the first seedlings away.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

John Barnett fed livestock on his farm, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma farmer John Barnett’s daughter Delphaline, 17, wore bright-colored slacks around the farm. She and her two brothers went to a rural school where there were only four other pupils.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Farmer John Barnett and his family stuck to their land near Woodward. Their 21 dairy cattle yielded a scant seven gallons per milking. Mrs. Barnett took care of a vegetable garden that was always blowing away. The children, Delphaline, 17 (top), Lincoln, 11 (right), and Leonard, 9, did plenty of chores. On Sundays the Barnetts ate jack rabbit.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mrs. Venus Barnett and son Lincoln in their farmhouse, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt—Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An Oklahoma farming family, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Abandoned house, Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Oklahoma, 1942.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The Night MLK Was Murdered: A Photographer’s Story

January 2, 2020March 20, 2014 by

On April 4, 1968, LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva, on assignment in Alabama, learned that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The two men jumped into their car, raced the 200 miles to the scene of the assassination, and there to their astonishment found that they had unfettered access to the motel’s grounds; to nearby abandoned buildings from which the fatal rifle shot likely came; to Dr. King’s motel room; and to the bleak, blood-stained balcony where the civil rights leader had fallen, mortally wounded, hours earlier.

“I was astonished by how desolate it all was,” Groskinsky told LIFE. “Then again, everyone probably thought that the person who shot Dr. King might still be out there somewhere.”

For reasons that have been lost in the intervening decades, Groskinsky’s photographs from that eerily quiet night in Memphis taken at the site, and on the very day, of one of the signal events of the 20th century were not published in LIFE magazine, and the story behind them was not told. Until now.

[The new LIFE special edition, Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr., at Amazon.]

(Note: A slightly different version of this post appeared on an earlier version of LIFE.com.)

The Lorraine Motel, in the hours after Dr. King’s assassination, April 4, 1968.

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Will D. Campbell, a minister and activist alone on the Lorraine Motel balcony, gazed out into the night. “This picture was probably made as soon as we got there,” Groskinsky told LIFE.com. “When I saw him standing there, alone, I thought it looked as if he was just asking himself, My God, what has happened here?”

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Outside of room 306, Theatrice Bailey, the brother of the Lorraine Motel’s owner, cleaned blood from the balcony. “There was no friction with the people there at the Lorraine,” Groskinsky recalled, “even though here was this white man with a camera on the o friction with the people there at the Lorraine,” Groskinsky recalled, “even though here was this white man with a camera on the scene.”

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Theatrice Bailey attempted to clean blood from the balcony, hours after the 6 PM shooting of Dr. King. “I don’t know if there were official people around taking notes and pictures and things like that,” Groskinsky told LIFE.com. “Nobody was there when we were there. But the fact that the blood was still on the floor, and this man was actually putting it in a jar … well, when you see a picture like that, God, it feels invasive.”

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The back of a photograph taken by LIFE photographer Henry Groskinsky on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tenn.

Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The building on the left was the abandoned building from which Groskinsky took several of his photographs on the night of April 4. “It was a little scary crawling into the building, because who knew who was going to be there? Who doesn’t want you to be there? The atmosphere was very dark, very creepy.”

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Colleagues gathered on the balcony outside the Lorraine Motel’s room 306, just a few feet from where Dr. King was shot, April 4, 1968.

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s neatly packed, monogrammed briefcase in his room at the Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, with his brush, his pajamas, a can of shaving cream and his book, Strength to Love, visible in the pocket.

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Stunned, silent members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Dr. King’s room at the Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, including Andrew Young (far left, under the table lamp) and civil rights leader and Dr. King’s colleague, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in the middle on the far bed. “I was very discreet,” Groskinsky recalled. “I shot just enough to document what was going on. There, almost in the center of the picture, in the mirror, you can see my reflection. I took a couple of pictures and just kind of backed off.”

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Ralph Abernathy and Will D. Campbell, a long-time friend and civil rights activist, embraced in Dr. King’s room. “I was documenting a momentous event,” Groskinsky told LIFE.com, “and I thought that at any time I was going to be asked to leave, so I did what I could as quickly as I could.”

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A photo taken through tree branches by Henry Groskinsky from a derelict building across the street from the Lorraine Motel, April 4, 1968, very close to where the shot that killed Dr. King likely came from.

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

An airplane that was dispatched by the U.S. government to retrieve Dr. King’s body and return it to Atlanta, Ga., waited on the tarmac in Memphis, Tenn., the day after MLK’s assassination.

Henry Groskinsky/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

The cover of the April 12, 1968, issue of LIFE magazine.

Fred Ward/Life Magazine

After Hiroshima: Portraits of Survivors

November 6, 2020March 20, 2014 by

On July 16, 1945, the Atomic Age was born when a device with an explosive “yield” roughly equal to 20 kilotons of TNT was detonated in the desert of southeastern New Mexico. The explosion was so inconceivably violent, so fearsome, that one witness to the event, the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, famously claimed that a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture, ran unbidden through his head: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Less than a month later, American forces dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing tens of thousands of men, women and children in an instant; condemning thousands more to slow, agonizing deaths from burns and radiation sickness in the months and years to come; and, in the eyes of most historians, both Western and Asian, hastening the surrender of the Japanese and bringing about the end of the Second World War.

Here, LIFE.com presents a selection of photographs, most of which were never published in LIFE magazine, taken in Hiroshima after the war ended. In the landscape of a ruined city, and on the scarred skin and misshapen limbs of Japanese who survived the world’s first nuclear attack, photographer Carl Mydans discovered the legacy part nightmare, part surprising, wishful dream of those world-changing explosions.

As LIFE put it to the magazine’s readers in September 1947:

On August 6, two years to the day and the minute after the first atomic bomb devastated their city, the people of Hiroshima, Japan, gathered to mourn but, more surprising, to celebrate as well. A startled world read that Hiroshima, proclaiming itself the new world mecca for peace, had held a carnival. The people planted camphor tree, which is a symbol for long life, and they prayed, too. But then they paraded through the streets, listened to speeches and had fun. Hiroshima seemed to have risen from the dead. The people were putting their city back on the map. The spirit was that of a U.S. boom town in the late 1800s. Their motto: Look at us and forego war.

The only civilian correspondent covering the ceremonies, LIFE’s Carl Mydans, questioned the people and took pictures. He found that Hiroshima had made tremendous strides in recovery. A population reduced from 250,000 to 175,000 in one blinding flash had slowly grown back to 210,000. Of 60,000 houses destroyed 23,000 have been rebuilt. Stores with Western names have opened shop. There is a drive on to get tourist trade and a movement to package and export bits of fused rubble to the rest of the world.

The booster spirit of resurgent Hiroshima would warm the heart of any Rotarian. The imponderables in the phenomenon might baffle a philosopher. It was easy for cynical “experts” to note the traditional Japanese love of novelty, their commercialism and their ability to be led, either for good or evil. But then, no atomic bombs have fallen on the “experts.” Like other men who have watched postwar Hiroshima, Lieut. Colonel Thomas Cloward, chief of American Military Government stationed there, could only say, “We don’t know what is the truly motivating force. All we know is that something’s happened to these people. They want peace, and they want to play a part in that peace.”

Hiroshima, Japan 1947

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947, Atomic Bomb survivor

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947, Atomic Bomb survivors

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947, Atomic Bomb survivor

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947 peace festival

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1949, atomic bomb survivor

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima’s children patiently wait their turn for a complete and detailed physical examination in ABCC’s [Atom Bomb Casualty Commission] temporary laboratory clinic.

Carl Mydans (The LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1949, atomic bomb survivor

Carl Mydans (LIFE Picture Collection)

Hiroshima Japan 1947

Carl Mydans (LIFE Picture Collection)

Paris in 1963: Children at a Puppet Show, and More

December 17, 2019March 20, 2014 by

Forget the fabled rudeness of the Parisians. Forget the crowds of tourists who flock to the City of Light in the summer, making the city’s winding streets, echoing stone churches and public gardens all but unbearable. Forget that everything, everything, is more expensive in Paris than it has any right to be. Forget that entire neighborhoods sometimes smell, suddenly and inexplicably, of rotting garbage and then, as suddenly and as inexplicably, the stench vanishes. Forget that everybody smokes, everywhere, at all times, no matter what. Forget all of the worst aspects of the French capital and its denizens, and instead dwell for a moment on the Paris of everyone’s dreams.

Picture the book stalls, the fishermen and the artists with their easels along the Seine. Picture lovers walking the winding streets, drunk on one other, oblivious to everyone and everything but each other. Picture Sacré Cœur and Montmartre, the flower peddlers and the Champs-Elysees, the mansard roofs and the zinc bars, Sainte-Chapelle and the Marais. Picture the Paris, in other words, that inspired Hemingway to remark (according to his friend, the writer and raconteur A.E. Hotchner), “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Of all the pictures made of that Paris — the Paris of the last century, when the city was still largely depicted in beautiful black and white — perhaps none is more famous than Alfred Eisenstaedt’s unforgettable shot of kids at a Parisian puppet show, “Saint George and the Dragon,” at an outdoor theater in 1963. Capturing the thrill, the shock, the shared triumph-over-evil that the children feel at the very moment when St. George slays the mythical beast, Eisenstaedt’s picture feels as fresh as when it was made, more than 50 years ago. Here, the picture tells us, is an innocence that can remind even the most jaded of what it was once like to believe, to really believe, in the stories that unfold before our eyes onstage, or onscreen.

The master photographer himself, meanwhile, said of this very picture: “It took a long time to get the angle I liked. But the best picture is the one I took at the climax of the action. It carries all the excitement of the children screaming, ‘The dragon is slain!’ Very often this sort of thing is only a momentary vision. My brain does not register, only my eyes and finger react. Click.”

Here, LIFE.com celebrates Paris in the spring through the lens of Eisenstaedt’s iconic puppet-show picture—as well as a number of photographs of Parisians and their city that he made around the same time, but that never ran in LIFE magazine.

Children watched the story of “Saint George and the Dragon” at an outdoor puppet theater in Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisians at a sidewalk cafe, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A woman sat with her pet cheetah while having tea at a Bois de Boulogne cafe, Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

People enjoyed an afternoon on the banks of the Seine River, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisian rooftop scene, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisians enjoyed an amusement park ride, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A low angle of the Eiffel Tower, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Young Parisians enjoyed an impromptu outdoor concert on the banks of the Seine, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisian beatniks hung out on bank of the Seine, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Paris street scene, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Parisian girl dressed for her first communion, accompanied by family members, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

French children played on toy horse and buggy vehicles, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A little boy on merry-go-round at the Tuileries Gardens, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Children at play, Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisian children rode a merry-go-round in a playground, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisians, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisians played boule, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A young Parisian woman, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

This street performer drew a crowd, Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Parisian vendor, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A man examined stamps at stamp market on Avenue Matignon, Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Street artists at work, Paris, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

A Montmartre sidewalk artist and monkey entertained tourists in the Place du Terte near Sacre Coeur, 1963.

Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Pictures/Shutterstock