“You have freedom when you’re easy in your harness.”
Can somebody point me to the original source? Googling is no good because all I get are sites that stockpile collections of quotes. I’m looking for a reference I could use in a bibliography.
Huh. I tried the quote with various combinations of Frost, interview, publish, poem, source, and got the same mishmash you did. I’m pretty astonished that none of them source the quote.
I used “interview” because I found this: “News summaries 10 May 54” which implied it might be from an interview.
As Frank found, I can source it to a 1954 newspaper article. But amazingly, Google Books can’t call it up easily in any Frost Book.
Eight years later, I can point anyone who’s interested to this item that Garson O’Toole, the Quote Investigator, posted on 11 April 2015. As it says, many newspapers printed stories as a result of Frost’s 80th birthday news conference. I can point to one such story from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of 26 Mar 1954 (the site, newspapers.com, offers a free trial subscription, but even without one you can still use their search box to find where on the page the word “harness” appears, and your browser’s search function to find the same word twice in the OCR results—once above the “Poet Robert Frost Honored” headline and again in the story, where the quote occurs).
The Teeming Millions. Ever diligent.
Not so much. I frequently research the source of attributed quotes without citations. Googling the unsourced Frost quote led me to this site and I thought, “If anyone else finds it similarly in the future, they may as well benefit from what I’ve learned.”
The Teeming Millions are also watching each other very closely it seems! 