Peter Stanlis sometimes seemed stiff and formal; and he was, because he practiced his whole life the arts of a gentleman.  This required a certain reserve, but one that never covered heavily the kindness of his Christian nature.  Part of being a true gentleman is to understate one’s sense of humor, at least partially, but I remember the light in Peter’s eyes as he read this to Hillsdale students: “Frost remarked that he had once read a long passage of Whitman to some students who said they admired his poetry and asked whether they thought that was good poetry.  After they said they thought it was, he told them he had read every other line.”

There was a wickedness in his delivery that was particularly satisfying.  Peter borrowed from Frost and repeated it several times to different audiences, not always to their delight.

Although for most of his career he was known as a scholar of Edmund Burke, it was as a passionate and devoted student of Robert Frost that others of us knew him best.  Peter worked for over 60 years on Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher (ISI Books, 2007), and the world can be forever thankful that he was given the wits and the stamina to complete it.  I have spent my entire adult life in the company of scholars, but I have never known one more devoted to his subject than Peter was to Frost.

I met Peter first at meetings of the Philadelphia Society in the late 1970’s, when he and many of his near-contemporaries (Russell Kirk, Stephen Tonsor, Leonard Liggio, Vic Milione, Henry Regnery, among others) were so kind to their slightly younger colleagues.  His admiration for Fulton Sheen, which I shared, gave me an early reason to seek out his own work, which was every bit as good on Burke as the great Kirk’s.  He later told me that he heard me say to someone that my favorite poet was Robert Frost, whom I had been reading since the age of nine.

In 1992 Peter invited Frost lovers and skeptics to a Liberty Fund seminar, “Liberty in the Poetry and Prose of Robert Frost.”  Ordered liberty, of course, was the theme, but what made the seminar a life-changing experience for several of us was Peter’s insistence on the deeply spiritual nature of Frost’s poetry.  When one skeptic tried to reduce Frost to a New England storyteller, Peter said, “Frost once told me [at Bread Loaf in 1939] that there was a farmer about to kill a snake in his barn, and his neighbor says to him, don’t kill the snake, it controls rats and other varmints, and the farmer says, I don’t need no help from no snake.”

Even Lesley Lee Francis, Frost’s granddaughter, admitted that Peter found mysteries in her grandfather’s poetry that nobody else had seen.  Peter didn’t need no help from no snake.

In 1994, mostly because of that seminar, my colleague Daniel James Sundahl (himself a fine poet) and I decided to teach a course on Frost, with and against his times, for a small number of Hillsdale College students.  We invited Peter to spend a week with us.  I never saw him so animated, so alive with Socratic intention, so happy to be teaching what he loved best.  He not only loved Frost’s language (the “sound of sense”) but had an argument that connected Frost to the great traditions of the Western world.  “Dualism,” he said, is the essence of Frost’s ideas.  Good and evil, spirit and matter, particularity and wholeness—pairs of principles that account for “his view of God, man, and nature.”  Dualism “permeates much that he said about science, religion, art and poetry, society and politics, and education; and, finally, . . . provides the characteristic qualities in his brilliant and witty conversation.”

Frost’s mind, in other words, was Aristotelian and Augustinian, putting him squarely in the center of the Great Tradition that Frost’s generation so busily tried to destroy.  This was Peter’s great project, one of restoration, and he took such joy in it that even his mask of reserve was often removed.  He was moved to be a conversationalist as he unfolded a Frost few people had ever heard.  We will miss this Christian gentleman, even as we wonder at those last years of creativity and fulfillment.