“Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” Reviewed

Robert Frost presented himself arsenic a elemental man. Not for him the literate circles of London oregon the stilted meal parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was helium astatine location successful academia. He dropped retired of assemblage twice, citing a request for independence, and though helium spent his mediate and aboriginal years teaching astatine universities, helium was perpetually fleeing them, retreating to farms successful agrarian New England. He didn’t work publication reviews—or truthful helium claimed—and helium didn’t constitute them, preferring alternatively to fto his poems find their earthy audience, which turned retired to beryllium a wide one. He mocked literate critics and shunned intelligence debate, though helium was a large talker and loved to archer stories. His perfect days, helium said, were spent successful the countryside, going connected long, solitary walks oregon chatting with his husbandman neighbors, appreciating the patterns and tones of their speech.

The simplicity of his beingness informed his work. Ascending to fame astatine a clip erstwhile Anglo-American poesy was increasing progressively hard and obscure, Frost acceptable himself apart. A lyric writer inspired by Longfellow, helium described the hard lives of state folk—a warfare widow, a hired man—and the hard landscapes that they worked to tame. In “ ‘Out, Out—,’ ” a poem from 1916, a lad loses his manus to a buzz saw and dies, possibly from shock; his family, “since they / Were not the ones dead,” swiftly determination on. Some of Frost’s poems person the lilting prime of lullabies; others look to present their morals successful unambiguous terms. “I took the 1 little traveled by,” declares the talker of “The Road Not Taken,” possibly Frost’s astir celebrated poem, aft gathering a fork successful the path. “And that has made each the difference.” His were, and inactive are, poems for everyone: schoolchildren, casual readers, the makers of greeting cards. One doesn’t request to beryllium versed successful the literate contented to work a poem by Frost—only, arsenic 1 poem goes, to beryllium “versed successful state things.”

But, arsenic with astir aspects of Frost’s persona, his simplicity was a pose, an act, 1 that concealed its opposite. Frost was precise overmuch a antheral of letters, a classicist and, alongside his aboriginal wife, Elinor, a co-valedictorian of his precocious school, successful Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was steeped successful the literate tradition, arsenic good arsenic successful doctrine and science (he was a large instrumentality of William James). Ambitious and competitive, helium orchestrated affirmative reviews of his aboriginal enactment and became enraged astir antagonistic reviews of aboriginal collections. A failed poultry husbandman and a listless homesteader, helium ne'er rather acceptable successful with the state radical who populate his poems.

The poems, too, are deceptive. A Frost verse whitethorn beryllium written successful plain language, but it is tonally ambiguous and unfastened to competing interpretations. Take “Stopping by Woods connected a Snowy Evening,” from 1923, which ends similar this:

The woods are lovely, acheronian and deep,
But I person promises to keep,
And miles to spell earlier I sleep,
And miles to spell earlier I sleep.

Are these lines said gratefully oregon ruefully? Is the talker appreciating a peaceful wintertime country oregon hardly suppressing a decease wish? One could inquire akin questions astir “The Road Not Taken”: How sincere is our speaker, who imagines his aboriginal aforesaid “telling this with a sigh”? Has his prime of roadworthy made immoderate quality astatine all? It’s tempting to recognize the poem arsenic ironical—a “cunning nugget of nihilism,” arsenic Dan Chiasson wrote successful this magazine—but, arsenic soon arsenic you do, its rousing ending and triumphant “I” impulse you to see that it whitethorn good beryllium successful earnest.

To work Frost is to wonderment which parts of a poem to instrumentality seriously—and to consciousness his beingness implicit your shoulder, laughing astatine your mistakes. “I similar to fool . . . to beryllium mischievous,” helium told the professional Richard Poirier successful an interview, successful 1960, for The Paris Review. One could, helium suggested, “unsay everything I said, nearly.” By his ain account, helium operated by “suggestiveness and treble entendre and hinting”; helium ne'er said thing outright, and, if helium seemed to, past suspicion was warranted. In some his poesy and his idiosyncratic life, Frost was a trickster, saying 1 happening and astir ever meaning another, and possibly different still. He was similar the playful lad described successful the beauteous poem “Birches” (1915), bending histrion branches beyond recognition, past letting them drawback backmost to their earthy state, each for his ain amusement. As readers of his poetry, we’re conscionable on for the ride.

The professional Adam Plunkett expertly teases retired the galore meanings of Frost’s poems successful “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows however the circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic beingness gave emergence to immoderate of his astir palmy poems. As successful the champion captious biographies, Plunkett does not simply way down real-world inspiration for a fixed work. Rather, helium brings unneurotic Frost’s idiosyncratic life, literate sources, and work past to enrich our knowing of the poems, past uses the poems to heighten our knowing of the life. The effect is simply a thorough, elegant, and, astatine times, astonishing survey of Frost, who emerges arsenic a remarkably analyzable writer and a compelling but analyzable man.

Plunkett is not the archetypal professional to occupation the fashionable conception of Frost arsenic a omniscient woodsman dispensing comfortableness and inspiration. Astute readers person been challenging the naïve mentation of Frost’s enactment for decades. The effort could beryllium said to person started with Lionel Trilling, who, astatine a enactment for Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, declared the impermanent of grant to beryllium “anything but” a writer who “reassures america by affirmation of aged virtues, simplicities, pieties and ways of feeling.” Frost was, rather, “a terrifying poet” and “a tragic poet.” (Frost, listening successful the audience, appeared nonplussed.) Trilling was channelling the writer and professional Randall Jarrell, who, for years, had urged readers to crook distant from Frost’s sentimental poems and consult alternatively the writer’s darker, spikier efforts, specified arsenic “Provide, Provide,” a sardonic paean to success, and “Acquainted with the Night,” arsenic lonely a poem arsenic determination ever was.

Frost’s archetypal large biographer, Lawrance Thompson, seemed to instrumentality his cue from specified critics. In a three-volume biography published aft Frost’s decease successful 1963, Thompson emphasized Frost’s darkness, detailing the poet’s predominant depressions and his jealous rages, specified that reviewers declared Frost to beryllium “a monster of egotism” and “a mean-spirited megalomaniac.” In the decades since, critics and biographers person pushed backmost connected this dim presumption of Frost. William H. Pritchard, successful “Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,” from 1993, which has agelong been the gold-standard biography for galore Frost enthusiasts, emphasized the poet’s ingenuity and playfulness, some successful his enactment and successful his life. Even erstwhile Frost was boastful oregon inconsiderate, Pritchard suggested, 1 couldn’t assistance but admit his cleverness.

Plunkett, similar Pritchard, admires Frost successful each his guises. Throughout, helium stresses the poet’s multiplicity, his quality to grounds opposing attitudes successful the aforesaid poem, sometimes successful the aforesaid line. Interpreting “The Pasture,” an aboriginal poem, Plunkett shows however its refrain—“You travel too”—can beryllium understood “in astatine slightest 4 ways astatine once,” arsenic “a suggestion, an insistence, a command, a plain statement.” Recognizing each imaginable meanings, Plunkett argues, allows america to entree “a caput successful its nakedness weighing however it means to usage the phrase, wherefore it means to usage it, and what it wants and needs of you.” To work the enactment simply arsenic a benign invitation—or, conversely, arsenic a straightforward command—is to miss the point: the poem is exploring the antithetic ways that radical connect, alternatively than insisting connected 1 benignant of intimacy.

“Love and Need”—which takes its rubric from Frost’s poem “Two Tramps successful Mud Time,” from 1934—proceeds successful loosely chronological fashion, taking america from emotion poems that Frost wrote for Elinor during their courtship to aboriginal poems specified arsenic “The Gift Outright,” which an eighty-six-year-old Frost recited astatine John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. (Kennedy went connected to eulogize Frost astatine Amherst College, noting that galore readers “preferred to disregard his darker truths,” conscionable weeks earlier the President’s assassination.) Frost was calved successful San Francisco successful 1874, moved crossed the state pursuing the decease of his dissolute, larger-than-life father, and made a bid of homes successful mill towns northbound of Boston with his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and his younger sister. He came to poesy successful precocious school—his archetypal poem, “La Noche Triste,” composed erstwhile helium was a sophomore, was inspired by a publication astir the Aztec Empire—and published the lyric “My Butterfly” successful The Independent successful 1894. A agelong fallow play followed, during which helium married, raised 4 children, tried his manus astatine farming, and taught precocious school, each the portion penning poems but publishing precise few. In 1912, helium moved his household to England, wherever helium met Ezra Pound, who championed his work. Frost’s archetypal book, “A Boy’s Will,” was published successful 1913. At thirty-nine, helium yet had a sensation of literate success.

In Plunkett’s hands, “A Boy’s Will,” sometimes seen arsenic 1 of Frost’s little awesome collections, becomes recently intriguing. (In a mostly affirmative review, Pound called the publication “a spot raw.”) Plunkett reveals the publication to beryllium a “spiritual autobiography” modelled connected Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850), which commemorates the poet’s person Arthur Henry Hallam. There are striking similarities betwixt Frost’s postulation and Tennyson’s poem; galore of Frost’s poems notation straight to a corresponding canto successful Tennyson’s work. The quality is that Frost’s poems are mourning not a person but the pastoral beingness the writer has near behind, and mourning, too, his eldest child, Elliott, who died astatine property three, of cholera, successful 1900. “Though not a literal communicative of mourning, A Boy’s Will suffuses its each texture successful an ambiance of mourning,” Plunkett writes. “The poems are tinged passim with a consciousness of amorphous loss, the different broadside of which is simply a extent of gratitude.”

The connections Plunkett draws betwixt Frost’s lyric poems and their literate influences are valuable, peculiarly for anyone taken successful by Frost’s aw-shucks persona. Though Frost sometimes disavowed his literate education—“I haven’t had a precise literate life,” helium told Poirier successful the Paris Review interview—he was an avid scholar of poesy and the proprietor of respective well-thumbed poesy anthologies, which helium regarded arsenic superior to immoderate literate magazine. (Too galore critics successful the latter.) He utilized canonical poems to animate his own. The aboriginal poem “Flower-Gathering” is patterned connected “Carpe Diem,” a emotion opus from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and the precocious poem “The Wind and the Rain” owes thing to Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” Frost’s scope of references was arsenic awesome arsenic that of immoderate modernist poet—though his poems, dissimilar T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” didn’t travel with a acceptable of footnotes.