Robert frost a biography jeffrey meyers

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Frost's legacy includes his notorious malice and scampish hot temper. Meyers's comparisons to images and language in the Bible, the classics, and poets such as Keats and Hardy (further enhanced by an appendix called "Literary Allusions") assist teens in understanding connections among literary works. Poverty, illness, death, and ruin were apparently abiding themes in his parents' rough-and-tumble marriage; in his sister's eventual insanity (and that of his daughter Irma); in his uneasy noncareer as a New England farmer before achieving literary recognition relatively late; in the more or less miserable lot of his children; and in the demanding magnetism of his husbandly loyalty.

Furthermore, Meyers contends that his biography will overturn Frost's unpleasant reputation as "a mean old bastard," yet the life as he relates it is a litany of unlikability. His editorial "we" is also off-putting, and numerous flash-forwards interrupt the life and result in later repetitions. Photos. This biography explores his psychic Yankee crawl space and surveys the contents frankly yet fairly.

Frost led a very interesting, if tragic, life and there is no shortage of significant events to hold the interest. On another occasion, while sitting on the stage when a guest poet was speaking he managed somehow to set his hand-held notes afire, causing a commotion as he put out the flames and waved away the smoke. Jeffrey Meyers has returned to the sources and survivors and has given us a radically new interpretation of Robert Frost's life.

For literature collections.?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The promised "new view" of Frost's character fails to materialize, although the "original interpretations of his poems" is in some cases satisfying. The most amusing sections deal with Frost's serio-comic relations with other poets, such as Ezra Pound, with whom Frost quarrelled in England before his (Frost's) first success, then helped to bail out of the insane asylum; Carl Sandburg, who was Frost's rival for all-American poetic simplicity; and T.S.

Eliot, who started as a Modernist competitor but ended as a fellow grand old man of letters. Although Lawrance Thompson's detail-drenched three-volume authorized biography stripped Frost of his folksy public persona, it not only nakedly displayed, in Meyers's words, ""a pathological hatred"" toward its subject, but also concealed Thompson's affair with Kay Morrison, Frost's secretary, literary executor, and lover.

Too many writers of auspicious lives plod through excessive facts in prose that no one would brave but for the halo of the illustrious figure. End result of each incident: attention taken away from the speaker and put onto Frost himself.

In spite of being somewhat sickly during his youth, Frost seemed to grow robust with age and lived until his late 80s.

Meyers is occasionally guilty of confusing the reader (me) by using too many pronouns.

Instead, Meyers shapes a long life into a vivacious character study based on the conflicts that seemed to drive Frost as well as do him damage. Frost ends as a model of his hero, Thomas Hardy, revered and still productive, but Meyers underscores the aged Frost's pessimism and desperate need for recognition. Molly McQuade

Frost wrote that poetry is "a way of taking life by the throat." Perhaps the same comment could be made about Meyers's take on the life, private and public, of the great poet.

Well, it's just too much. His life outside his books, in Meyers's account, is a series of relocations to farmhouses or campuses, followed by public readings that Frost claimed to despise but that fed his purse and his vanity.