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 this that morning, in chapel, he had read aloud "The Road Not Taken," "and then announced your coming to the boys. They applauded vigorously and were visibly very delighted by the prospect." Alexander Meiklejohn was an exceptionally high educator whose principles and moral tone toward things can be illustrated most briefly and clearly by some statements in his essay "What the College Is." This speech, his inaugural address as president of Amherst, was printed for a time as an introduction to the college catalog. What the college was, or should be—what Meiklejohn hoped to make of Amherst—was a place to be considered "liberal," that is, "essentially intellectual": "The college is not primarily a place of the body, neither of feelings, nor even of will; it is above all a place of the spirit. Initiating "the boys" into the intellectual life led for its own sake would save them from pettiness and boredom, would prevent them from being part of what Meiklejohn called "the others": There are those among us who will find so much of things. satisfaction in the innumerable trivial and vulgar amusements of a crude people who have no time for the joys of the spirit. There are those who are so closely locked into a small circle of small pleasures that they have never dreamed of the pleasure of reading, of conversing, of investigating and thinking. A liberal education would save boys from stupidity, its aim being to learn lessons from it. reality-loving American boy” something like “intellectual enthusiasm”. But this result could not be achieved, Meiklejohn added, without a complete reversal of the curriculum: "I would like to see every first-year student plunged at once into the problems of philosophy," he said with enthusiasm. Now, five years after his speech, he was bringing to Amherst someone outside the usual academic orbit, a poet who didn't even have a college degree. But despite – or perhaps because of – this lack, the poet had escaped triviality, was an original mind who knew how to live through ideas. For he had written, among other poems, “The Road Not Taken,” featured in the Mountain Interval which has just appeared not only as his first poem, but also printed in italics, as if to also make a preface and a motto for the poems that followed.