How's this for poetic justice?When a group of more than two dozen young people broke into a former residence of poet Robert Frost (an old farmhouse in New England which belonged to Middlebury College) for a drinking party and trashed the place, the problem was to find an appropriate "punishment", The Burlington Free Press reports (found via The New York Times).
The Addison County state's attorney decided that instead of a jail term or community service, the offenders should go back to the classroom to study - the poetry of Robert Frost. And what poems more appropriate than The Road Not Taken and Out, Out? And who best to teach them than Jay Parini, a Middlebury College professor and Frost's biographer?
Parini of course underlined the relevance of the words to the offenders' own lives :
Believe me, if you're a teenager, you're always in the damned woods. Literally, you're in the woods -- probably too much you're in the woods. And metaphorically you're in the woods, in your life. Look at you here, in court diversion! If that isn't 'in the woods,' what the hell is 'in the woods'? You're in the woods!
