Still, the kind of Frost fan who has “The Road Not Taken” crocheted into his tea cozy could be in for a shock. The book starts with a 12-year-old Frost’s love letter to his childhood sweetheart and ends with Frost touring his third and best book, Mountain Interval. And to further discredit Thompson’s pernicious book, Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen have teamed with Harvard University Press to publish the complete Letters of Robert Frost, a four-volume compendium of all of the poet’s correspondence, the first volume of which is available now. Like most biographies, Thompson’s has proven to be more about its author than its subject (Thompson harboured an obsessive envy of Frost, and the two men both pined for Frost’s secretary after the death of Frost’s wife). The next issue of NP Posted will soon be in your inbox. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. America could accept vers libre from Ezra Pound, the fascist reactionary who offered the advice to “make it new,” howling madly about European Jewry’s influence on international banking, but if that birch-swinging sonneteer Robert Frost turned out to have dissuaded his son from pursuing a career in poetry, that, my friends, was a bridge too far indeed.Ī welcome email is on its way. Reviewing the biography in the New York Times, Helen Vendler famously called Frost “a monster of egotism.” It’s hard not to think that the neglect Frost’s poetry suffered during the ’70s and ’80s, when his brand of deftly unadorned formalism fell into disrepute, had Thompson’s biography to blame. Thompson’s biography was devastating to this distorted conception of Frost as a morally simple rural saint, depicting him instead as an ambitious careerist, an occasionally neglectful husband and a skeptical father whose coolness to his son Carol’s literary ambitions led, Thompson shamefully suggests, to Carol’s suicide (Thompson has no qualms blaming Frost for the premature deaths of four of the poet’s six children, including his three-year-old of cholera). This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Manage Print Subscription / Tax Receipt.
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