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| The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1
ISBN: 9780674726505
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Frost Robert 1874–1963 -- Correspondence; Poets American -- 20th century -- Correspondence;
For all its bulk, comprehensiveness, and thorough scholarly apparatus, this collection of letters, second in a five-volume series, yields relatively slender insight into the technique behind Frost's enduringly beloved poems. Equally sparse on engagement with current events, the letters instead brim with Frost's affections for and rivalries with the literary lions of his day, a deep ambivalence toward the colleges where he earned most of his income, and an ongoing interest in poetry as an ideal and a practice. The bulk of the subject matter is mundane: polite responses to fan mail, much haggling over living situations and fees for speaking engagements, encouragement of protégés, and negotiations with his publishers, all delivered in an accomplished, subtle prose style thick with allusion, intelligence, and humor. With his closest friends, Frost is most revealing: philosophical, broad-minded, and wry, self-deprecating and ambitious, anxious about his family, and longing to withdraw from his exhausting public life to be a simple poet-farmer. A temperamental streak beneath the cultivated persona of the humble, mild-mannered raconteur keeps things lively for the reader. This second installment in an impressive project tracks the transformation of the hardworking craftsman into a monument of American letters. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Robert Frost, the quintessential poet of New England, was born in San Francisco in 1874. He was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Although he managed to support himself working solely as a poet for most of his life and holding various posts with a number of universities, as a young man he was employed as a bobbin boy in a mill, a cobbler, a schoolteacher, and a farmer. Frost, whose poetry focuses on natural images of New England, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times for: New Hampshire, Collected Poems, A Further Range, and A Witness Tree. His works are noted for combining characteristics of both romanticism and modernism. He also wrote A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval, and The Gift Outright, among others. Frost married Elinor Miriam White in 1895, and they had six children--Elliott, Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie, and Elinor Bettina. He died in Boston in 1963. (Bowker Author Biography) |
