"I'm not a big fan of the poetry, I'll be the first to admit. It carries a perception of a curmudgeonly nature poetry talking about hard-working white folks. And the lines from the Kennedy inaugural poem 'The land was ours before we were the land's' makes my skin crawl from a 1990s perspective, with the attitude it implies about Native Americans."

Uh oh. Was this some sort of Oedipal heresy? The campus was experiencing a Robert Frost renaissance thanks to incoming President Lee Bollinger's comments about Michigan's bond with the great poet and his quotations of lines Frost probably wrote in Ann Arbor (see accompanying story). And the campus was excited to learn from a local newspaper that the poet's closest living male relative, a great-grandson also named Robert Frost, was on the U-M faculty.

But now the great-grandson, Bob Frost, 44, a visiting associate professor of history, seemed to be trashing his ancestor's work. It soon became clear, however, that his criticism of an aspect of Robert Frost's poetry did not flow from any hostile feelings toward his great-grandfather as a poet or a man.

Bob Frost's father, William Prescott Frost, worked on construction projects for the Department of Defense; Bob considers Washington, DC, his home town even though he grew up in several cities and went through junior and senior high in Panama City, Florida.

"My father stayed away from his grandfather's poetry," Frost said. "My father's father, my grandfather Carol Frost, committed suicide in 1938, so my father was pretty much raised by my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. But Dad kept his distance from farming and poetry. He went into engineering."

Biographers of Robert Frost focus on tensions between an irascible poet and his family members, friends, lovers and other writers, and Bob Frost suggests that his father wanted a more private life.

"But the differences between Dad and my great-grandfather were not as great as Dad would think," said Frost, who specializes in the history of technology. "They had a lot in common in the way they did their work. When he talked about his composition, my great-grandfather talked about the unity a poem can build from its sense of sound. He had a tremendous attentiveness to poetic design. It's very Anglo-Saxon, no-nonsense poetry—parsimonious with words, not verbose. It's purpose is to convey meaning. My dad designed the same way. He thought the purpose of architectural design was to perform a function, usually in some overt way, but sometimes in subtle ways. There is a commonality between the two."

Bob Frost came to U-M from the State University of New York - Albany a bit over a year ago when his wife, Margaret Hedstrom, received an associate professorship with the School of Information. He last saw his great-grandfather in 1962, when the poet was 87 and a year from death.

"He came to Washington for my 10th birthday," Frost recalled. "He always stayed at the Mayflower. I can remember that he talked about life in general, and that he was a big Red Sox fan. The year before, we'd tossed a baseball together, and we were well-matched. He didn't overpower me, but he was accurate. People think of him as being rather glum and crotchety, but he was really a lot of fun. My dad never thought his grandfather was sullen or morose. But they were both very Vermont types. There was a sort of tactless flatness about the way they interacted. An economy of words. Very Yankee."

Frost studies different styles of engineering, specializing in 20th-century French technology. "I learned the Yankee style of design that my dad implemented," he said. "It's a system in which the engineer feels his role is to come up with the best design, and culture plays no part in it. My dad designed everything from household furniture to submersible vehicles to various gizmos for the Navy, and the commonality was everything had the same kind of Spartan, ascetic, hyper-functionalist approach: the simpler something is, the better, even if it's a deceptive simplicity and actually gives off myriad sorts of reflections."

Frost fears that the nations of Western Europe and the North Atlantic basin, despite differences in their technical cultures, have forged a common industrial culture so powerful that it is weakening, if not eliminating, cultural techniques and styles of other societies. "Western capitalist values are designed into the North Atlantic approach to doing technology," he said, "and these technologies seal in the predominance of Westernism as a cultural and political project. So this notion of Spartan elegance of design is carrying the day. You see it very clearly in shipbuilding; from the Early Middle Ages you can see it spread to Asia via Arab traders."

Important differences still exist within the Western hierarchy, however. "Thanks to their strong Cartesian tradition," Frost said, "French engineers are particularly good at designing conceptually gorgeous integrated systems. The best example is their power grid. I was stunned when I saw it. It comes out of their rationalist philosophical tradition. Their engineering training is highly mathematical—heaven forbid they should actually have to touch metal! Or look at their Metro system. Once you learn a few axioms, it's impossible to get lost in it. New York's subway, on the other hand, has no fundamental logic. There's no way to figure it out. Here, it's shoot-from-the-hip local and regional development that then gets wired together in a progressively bigger mess."

Frost did not acquire his interest in technology directly from his father. In fact, intellectually their relationship was something of an inversion of the one between his father and Robert Frost: "I'd been studying social policy and poverty research at Wisconsin, but became active in the anti-nuclear power movement. I realized that I could understand the mechanical and technical issues quite well, and decided I could study technology. Dad resented it for the same reason we have the science wars now: he didn't like someone from outside presuming to tell scientists and engineers what they were doing."