About robert frost biography book

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Frost proved himself a popular guy, of course, informal at a time (early-1920s) when university life was still pretty much cap-n-gown formality. He seems to have had a kind of baffler effect on the kids, at once close and caring and formidably remote (maybe this is the definition of fatherhood). Was he a jerk? Neither the yearly influx of cash nor the farm were enough to make Frost what you’d call a gentleman farmer, but they provided enough livelihood to enable him to be a poor farmer and – and this is the important part – write most of the poems that appeared in his first two books “A Boy’s Will” and “North of Boston.” But as for the farming, don’t think Frost’s aw-shucks accounts of how bad he was were exaggerations – when after ten years or so it came time to sell it, the only taker was the bank because the house and property had become so rundown.

Okay, so Frost was a lousy professor. First it was the avuncular but flinty teller o’ tales with the tossled white hair, hard to keep straight from Carl Sandberg (whom Frost despised and feared). Then, in the late fifties, Randall Jarrell published his justly famous “dark Frost” essay which added a corrective depth and nuance to Mr.

Road Less Traveled. His son committed suicide after a feckless perhaps unbalanced existence. Frost sees things then sees through them then keeps going…

I waited so long to finish this piece that I don’t recall hat Parnini had to say about Frost’s work, and I don’t feel like wading back in to find out. When he talked about poetry he was at his best.

More there there, I guess. No big deal. Then Frost’s authorized biography came out soon after Frost’s death in ’63, written by his hand-chosen biographer and erstwhile friend Lawrance (that’s how it’s spelled) Thomson; to everyone’s surprise, this turned out to be a bitter invective against Frost personally, and it led to the darkening of not only Frost’s poems, but his personality and character as well: bad dad, bad husband, vindictive, jealous, money-grubbing fraud.

Frost the Farmer was pretty much a slob. At Frost’s worse moments, his students would play cards at their desks, knowing he wouldn’t do anything about it, given his oft-claimed objection to formal discipline. This leads to smugness and a rote kind of agenbite of inwit that is usually so seasoned with irony that it becomes meaningless.

Jeffrey Meyers has returned to the sources and survivors and has given us a radically new interpretation of Robert Frost's life.

The farm itself was a gift from the worried old gent. After Frost's death in 1963, his authorized biographer wrote a three-volume work which deeply distorted the personality of the poet. But the older I get, the more I begin to suspect that he was better than Pound and Eliot, and even my idol Wallace Stevens.