Mischief in "The Road Not Taken"On December 16, 1916, he received a warm letter from Meiklejohn, looking forward to his presence in Amherst and saying that that morning in chapel he had read aloud "The Road Not Taken" "and then told the boys of your coming. They applauded vigorously and were evidently very delighted by the prospect." Alexander Meiklejohn was an exceptionally noble educator whose principles and moral tone toward things can be illustrated most briefly and clearly by some statements in his essay "What is College." This, his inaugural address as president of Amherst, was printed for a time as an introduction to the college catalog. What college was, or should have been - what Meiklejohn hoped to transform in Amherst - was a place to be considered "liberal", that is, "essentially intellectual": "College is not first and foremost a place of the body, nor of feelings, nor of the will, it is first and foremost a place of the mind." Introducing "the boys" to intellectual life conducted for its own sake would save them from meanness and narrow-mindedness, would save them from being one of what Meiklejohn called "the others": There are those among us who will find so much satisfaction in innumerable banal and vulgar entertainments of a rude people who have no time for the joys of the mind. There are those who are so locked in a circle of small pleasures that they have never dreamed of the fun of reading, conversing, investigating and reflecting. A liberal education would save children from stupidity, its purpose would be to draw from it "reality-loving American boy" something like "intellectual enthusiasm." But this could not be achieved, Meiklejohn added, without a radical reversal of the curriculum: "I would like to see every freshman immediately immersed in the problems of philosophy," he said enthusiastically. Now, five years after his speech, he was bringing to Amherst someone outside the usual academic orbit, a poet who lacked even a college degree. But despite - or perhaps because of - this lack, the poet had escaped banality, he was an original mind who knew how to live according to ideas. In fact he had written, among other poems, "The Road Not Taken", which was given a place of honor in the recently published Mountain Interval not only as the first poem, but also printed in italics, as if to also make it a preface. and a motto for the poems that followed.