The Associated Press reports that a poem by Robert Frost, about the tragic loss of a friend (poet Edward Thomas) in World War I, has been uncovered by a student reviewing Frost’s papers archived at the University of Virginia.

“War Thoughts at Home” will now be published in the next issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review:

And one says to the rest

We must just watch our chance

And escape one by one

Though the fight is no more done

Than the war is in France.

First-hand source material is the holy grail of the Internet and information security. Rather than all the citations and quotations (like the one provided above), which diminish in quality, meaning and integrity as they become more and more removed from the source, access to original source material is golden. If primary source material were available, we could have a far more rich and rewarding source to study and learn from. Imagine hanging an exact replica of a famous painting on your wall compared to the ability to print a precise copy of Frost’s handwritten poem.

I will never forget the time I was perusing some original papers in the British Archives and stumbled upon a note from the desk of Winston Churchill. The handwriting was unmistakable. The dark, rich strokes from his fountain pen made me stop and think about the amazing treasure trove of information locked away in the rows and rows of folders that the vast majority of people will never see.

I left the archives that day imagining giant racks of spinning optical media (maybe I liked the idea of a shiny surface) serving primary source material to everyone in the world as they sat liesurely at desks hundreds or thousands of miles away. This was the summer of 1994 and I saw the Internet as a place where the source could finally bubble up. Not editorials, not analysis, not books (although those are also important) but the raw source material. As it turns out, I myself found someone had published a book misquoting original Colonial Office and War Office memos (quite badly, in fact, if I remember correctly).

I also spent an evening in the basement of an old library and found actual leaflets distributed in Ethiopia by RAF planes in the early 1940s. I mentioned the leaflets in passing to another historian and he became excited and insisted I publish them so others could someday enjoy the information I uncovered.

He was right. That library was “rennovated” and I fear it may be impossible to find the original leaflets again. Sadly, today you are most likely to find my copy of the leaflet at the end of my master’s thesis hidden away in an obscure folder in an archive or buried in some university library, and Frost’s poem looks like it will be “published” and then filed rather than posted online…