Prior to reading this book, my impressions of Jefferson were fairly standard-issue: the Declaration of Independence, Sally Hemings and Jefferson’s troublesome non-legacy on the matter of slavery, followed by the architecture of Monticello and the University of Virginia, his broad-ranging Enlightenment interests, the Louisiana Purchase, Louis and Clark, the nickel, the two-dollar bill, the whole third-president thing, France. I’m not enough of a historian to really “review” this book, but I do have some things to say about what I learned from it and about Hitchens as a biographer. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, both for what I learned about Jefferson and for the pleasures of reading Hitchens. This is a post about Christopher Hitchens’ short biography of Thomas Jefferson. Certainly not William Henry, of skinny-dipping-in-the-cesspool fame maybe Benjamin? Even he would have been ancient history by the time Frost wrote this poem.īut this is not a post about Frost – or about Larkin, or even about the HAMILTON SOUNDTRACK, at least insofar as any post I write this month can avoid being in some small way about said soundtrack. A few days ago, these two threads of thought merged, and I began searching my memory for the remaining lines to a short, little-known Frost poem from the nether regions of his Collected that starts “Harrison loves his country too / But wants it all made over new.” I think at first I confused “Harrison” for “Hamilton,” but I fixed that error quickly and started wondering which Harrison the poem was about. At the same time – because in another cavity of my mind I am forever seventeen – I have also been spending an inordinate amount of time with the HAMILTON SOUNDTRACK lately. Along with Philip Larkin, Frost is the poet that best captures for me the slow but orderly forward motion of time. Robert Frost has been much on my mind lately – probably because my birthday is approaching.
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