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Robert Frost’s poems have always had popular appeal – who hasn’t read “The Road Not Taken”? But a dark picture of the beloved poet as a monstrous megalomaniac emerged from Lawrance Thompson’s biography of Frost, following his death.
Now, a collection of all Robert Frost’s existing correspondence, The Letters of Robert Frost edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson and Robert Faggen, to be published by Harvard University Press in four volumes, is reportedly set to debunk the “monster myth” surrounding him. Volume 1 is out now and subsequent volumes will be released at two-year intervals.
Jennifer Schuessler interviewed Sheely for The New York Times, who said: “Frost has his moods, his enemies, the things that set him off. But mostly what you see is a generosity of spirit.” The 3 000 letters from about 100 archives and private collections reveal what Schuessler, after talking to various scholars, sums up as “a complex man who juggled uncommon fame with an uncommonly difficult private life (including four children who died before him, one a suicide)”.
Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely divided an afterlife as Robert Frost.
Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage, beloved by a public raised on poems of his like “Birches” and “The Road Not Taken.” But that image soon became shadowed by a darker one, stemming from a three-volume biography by his handpicked chronicler, Lawrance Thompson, who emerged from decades of assiduous note-taking with a portrait of the poet as a cruel, jealous megalomaniac — “a monster of egotism” who left behind “a wake of destroyed human lives,” as the critic Helen Vendler memorably put it on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in 1970.
Dan Chiasson takes a look at Frost’s letters in The New Yorker, focusing on the years he lived on the farm in Derry, but also the multiple times he moved during his life, without seeming to find a home – except “in metaphor”.
Chaisson also comments on the way Frost spoke to his correspondents “as to everyone, in ‘parables and in hints and in indirections,’ as he put it, ‘whether from diffidence or some other instinct’”. Frost did the same thing to his first biographer, Thompson, “spoon-feeding” him details, which the biographer – who had apparently grown to hate Frost – “vomited up”. This makes Frost’s official biography “one of the strangest books ever written”, says Chaisson.
hen Robert Frost, in his 1930 address “Education by Poetry,” spoke about the importance of being “at home in the metaphor,” he seemed to suggest how infrequently he had felt at home anywhere else. The New England landscape abounds with Frost sites: the Frost Farm, in Derry, New Hampshire, and the Frost Place, in Franconia, New Hampshire; the Robert Frost Stone House, in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, and the Homer Noble Farm, in Ripton, Vermont; a house on verdant Brewster Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and one on leafy Sunset Avenue in Amherst, Massachusetts. Add to these two houses in England, where Frost lived from 1912 to 1915 and first found acclaim, along with a cottage in Key West, where he often spent winters, and a white pillared house that once stood in Ann Arbor, Michigan (where Frost lived while he worked at the University of Michigan, in the twenties), but was moved by Henry Ford to Greenfield Village, a part of Ford’s museum complex. It now sits on a cleansed American green, near Edison’s laboratories, the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop, and a courthouse where Lincoln practiced law.
Frost’s stone walls, old barns, cellar holes, birches, and brooks—the sedimentary, second-growth New England that, before Frost, had awaited its bard—imply a writer who cared, like Thoreau, only to be “admitted to Nature’s hearth.” But, wherever he went, Frost schemed to buy land or a house or a farm. Frost is sometimes still associated with the old-fashioned comforts of home, but in reality he was frequently on the move, spending, and often squandering, whatever investments of the heart and the wallet he had lately made. Those cozy houses and picturesque farms that litter the countryside make a trail of places Frost fled. Emerson, whose work he always kept nearby, suggests the fitting motto: “Everything good is on the highway.” And yet Frost never really lit out for the territories; instead, he moved among carbon-copy small farms with mountain views, and smart Victorians on the fringes of campuses, where, having escaped the “academic ways” he always said he loathed, he could return day after day.
Book details
- The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886-1920 edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Faggen
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EAN: 9780674057609
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