Taking over as the Library of Congress' 1958-59 consultant in poetry in English, white-haired, high-shoed, 84-year-old Robert Frost called himself a "Poet in Waiting," demonstrated before newsmen that the west-running brook is still clear at the source. His job in Washington is to encourage the best American poets, and his problem is "how to select. Whom to favor? Not just somebody who says, 'You know me, Al.' " Allusive modern poetry that "doesn't come to some meaning is born dead. Nobody reads it. They write it only for each other." Good poetry is written in "fine, clear pictures." Abstract painting: "A man I know owns a painting of a head with three eyes which he considers priceless. Three eyes!" Ezra Pound's Cantos: "I don't say I'm not up to them; I say they're not up to me. Nobody ought to like them, but some do, and I let them. That's my tolerance." Working conditions for the creative mind: "If I had a beautiful studio, I'd never paint. I'd have ladies visiting."

Following close debate, the name of General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War and top-ranked Union officer in the 1860s, was returned to the membership rolls of the University of South Carolina's Clariosophic Society. The college debaters purged Scott when he stuck by the Union at the outset of the Civil War. A century later, some Clariosophomores still think Virginia's Scott was "a man with the blood of our predecessors dripping from his hands"; but the ayes had seen his glory coming.

Married nearly nine years, Gary Grant and Betsy Drake decided to separate. "We have had, and shall always have, a deep love and respect for each other," they proclaimed, "but--alas--our marriage [Grant's third, her first] has not brought the happiness we expected."

Behind great smoky glasses and a slim umbrella, Greta Garbo landed at Idlewild, home from a visit to Europe. A reporter asked: "What brings you to New York?" Said Garbo before disappearing: "I live here."

Before the opening of her trial for reckless driving, 23-year-old French Novelist Franc,oise Sagan chugalugged a quick beer on the steps of the Palace of Justice in suburban Corbeil. The conscience of the go-hoyden-go set, she likes speeds around 100 m.p.h. Hurtling along near Corbeil in 1957, her Aston-Martin dived into a field and turned over, nearly killing the novelist and three friends.

Visiting in London, the early cinema's Mary Pickford, 65, stopped for a visit at the Kensington home of her slim, well-tailored, onetime stepson: Douglas Fairbanks Jr., 48.

The text of Canon Collins' sermon was "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," but the throng in London's St. Paul's Cathedral had come to hear another voice. Too big for his brown suit, Baritone Paul Robeson began with pix Crossing Over Jordan, sent a series of wild melodies booming through the cathedral in the first recital of secular songs in the history of St. Paul's. Afterward, many of the congregation of 4,000 pressed around the American Negro to thank him. "What a great occasion," said Canon Collins. "He gave his voice to the glory of God." Communist Robeson smiled benignly.

On a world-circling trip, Dr. and Mrs. Lin Yutang stopped off in Hong Kong, where the philosopher-novelist (The Importance of Living, Moment in Peking) told newsmen that "unless we have the courage to face Communism and change from the defensive to the offensive, there's nothing to prevent Communism from becoming the world's victor." Then, flying to Formosa, Dr. Lin stood on Chinese soil for the first time in 14 years, said there should be no cut in the size of the garrisons on beleaguered Quemoy and Matsu.

"From the old Ojibway scholar--Ernest Hemingway," wrote the author himself, inscribing a first-edition copy of The Torrents of Spring to Dr. Don Carlos Guffey, the obstetrician who twice officiated as Hemingway became a Papa. In one of two copies of The Sun Also Rises (1926), Hemingway noted for Dr. Guffey that "the first draft of this book was commenced on my birthday--July 21 in Madrid and it was finished September 6 of the same year--in Paris," and, in the other, that the novel is a "little treatise on promiscuity including a Few Jokes and much valuable travel information." Last week Bibliophile Guffey's library was up for auction, and his collection of Hemingway brought $19,805. Main item: the major portion of the handwritten manuscript of Death in the Afternoon, for which Manhattan's House of Books, Ltd. paid $13,000--one of the highest sums ever given for a manuscript by a living author.

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