The Letters of Robert Frost

by Robert Frost, Donald Sheehy (Editor), Mark Richardson (Editor), Robert Bernard Hass (Editor), Henry Atmore (Editor)

Overview

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920–1928 is the second installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. Nearly three hundred letters in the critically-acclaimed first volume had never before been collected; here, close to four hundred are gathered for the first time. Volume 2 includes letters to some 160 correspondents: family and friends; colleagues, fellow writers, visual artists, editors, and publishers; educators of all kinds; farmers, librarians, and admirers.

In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Frost’s stature in America and abroad, and the demands of managing his career—as public speaker, poet, and teacher—intensified. A good portion of the correspondence is devoted to Frost’s appointments at the University of Michigan and Amherst College, ​through which he played a major part in staking out the positions poets would later hold in American universities.​​ Other letters show Frost helping to shape the Bread Loaf School of English and its affiliated Writers’ Conference.​ We encounter him discussing his craft with students and fostering the careers of younger poets. His ​​observations (and reservations) about educators are illuminating and remain pertinent. And family life—with all its joys and sorrows, hardships and satisfactions—is never less than central to Frost’s concerns.

Robert Frost was a masterful prose stylist, often brilliant and always engaging.​ Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary, chronology, and detailed index, these letters are both the record of a remarkable literary life and a unique contribution to American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674973442
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	780
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

Donald Sheehy is Professor Emeritus of English and Philosophy at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Bernard Hass is Professor of English and Philosophy at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

Henry Atmore is Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies.

Table of Contents

Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Abbreviations Editorial Principles Introduction Chapter 1. “Book Farmer” Chapter 2. “The Guessed of Michigan” Chapter 3. A New Regime at Amherst Chapter 4. To Michigan Again (for a Lifetime in a Year) Chapter 5. Ten Weeks a Year in Amherst, Fourteen Once in Europe Biographical Glossary of Correspondents Chronology: February 1920–December 1928 Acknowledgments Index

Editorial Reviews

03/01/2021

Robert Frost emerges as a struggling father and a poet at the height of his career in the intimate latest addition to the five-volume collection of his letters. Family matters are central, primarily the death of his daughter, Marjorie, at age 29 in 1934, and some correspondence reveals Frost as an unsentimental realist in regards to poetry—in one letter, he writes that he isn’t a poet if it means being someone “who thinks there is something special about a poet and about his loving one unattainable woman.” Elsewhere, Frost cannily informs his editor, Joseph Blumenthal, not to use anything Frost “modestly said” to keep him from getting the royalties he deserves, and offers his own theory of the form, writing that it is “the act of heightening not taking advantage of” things others have written about. Frost’s letters to his son cover such topics as football, the price of turkey, and the weather; when his daughter Marjorie dies of puerperal fever, he writes to poet Louis Untermeyer that “the noblest of us is dead and has taken our hearts out of the world.” Frost’s fans and anyone with a deep interest in poetry will find this a treasure trove of emotion and insights. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Masterfully edited within an inch of its life…No free verser, [Frost] believed that poetry was ‘measured feet’ but ‘more important still it is a measured amount of all we could say an we would.’ All the more striking, then, are moments in the correspondence when his experience was such that it could not be held back for pressure, but issued rather in words and sentences testing the limits of his measuring.

Wall Street Journal - William H. Pritchard

‘I believe in survival. That is my fundamental doctrine,’ Frost wrote to a friend in 1936. The first two volumes of his letters showed how Frost survived early poverty and obscurity to become a great poet and an American institution. This third volume reveals how his ironic wit and artistic devotion enabled him to survive the personal tragedy of his daughter’s death and the national crisis of the Depression, as well as the more ambiguous perils of fame.

Adam Kirsch

Reading The Letters of Robert Frost is as indispensable as reading the poems, for revealed in these pages are the layers of thinking that buttressed the great poet’s talent. What emerges into view is a fuller individual—at times humane, empathetic, avuncular—whose complexity and art were utterly responsive to the political and aesthetic ferment of his times.

Major Jackson

Here Frost’s bracingly wide-ranging letters are illuminated. Through notes that capture even the most elusive of references, the editors have produced a book that is impressively thorough, rigorous, and generous—a pleasure to read page by page, event by event.

Calista McRae

[A] monumental enterprise…[We] have many reasons to be grateful to the editors…who have added greatly to our knowledge of the poet’s life, his family ties, and his various friendships—as well, of course, as his thoughts on his own art…These letters do much to cancel the impression given by Frost’s official biographer, Lawrance Thompson, of the poet as a monstrous egotist who drove his son to suicide by crushing his poetic ambitions.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Gregory Dowling

The man in the letters is very much the man in the poems—flinty, funny, and dark. Despite his classical knowledge and sophistication, he comes across as a rugged individual, unspoiled by niceties of Autocorrect, with a syntax entirely his own. One would never mistake Robert Frost for anyone else.

Hudson Review - David Mason

★ 2021-01-19
The latest installment of the poet’s letters, in which he becomes a celebrity.

Meticulously edited by scholars Sheehy, Richardson, Hass, and Atmore, the third of a projected five volumes of letters of Robert Frost (1874-1963) covers the poet’s life from 1929-1936, when his reputation soared. The 602 letters and telegrams, 70% previously uncollected, afford a comprehensive view of Frost’s family, work, and friendships as well as opinions on human nature, academia, and art. A literary star, Frost fulfilled myriad obligations: teaching, lecturing, serving as poet-in-residence, and giving a prodigious number of readings. In 1931, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems; many other honors followed. When his friend Louis Untermeyer failed to win a Pulitzer in 1936, Frost commiserated. “I have suffered nervous collapse in my time from the strain of conscious competition and learned from it how to pretend at least that I am below or above it for the rest of my life,” he wrote. “And I’m a good stout pretender when I set out to be.” Along with professional success, though, came personal misfortune. In 1931, his beloved daughter Marjorie and daughter-in-law Lillian were both in sanatoriums for tuberculosis. “We are in many many troubles for the moment,” he confided, “so many that grief loses its dignity and bursts out laughing. I toughen it seems to me.” When Marjorie died of puerperal fever, in 1934, he was disconsolate. Many letters reveal Frost’s prickly opinions on politics and poets. For example, he disparaged Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and scorned “modernismus” in poetry, although he admired Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. “For my part,” he wrote, “I should be as satisfied to play tennis with the net down as to write verse with no verse form set to stay me.” Besides an informative introduction contextualizing the letters and consistently rigorous footnotes, the editors provide a biographical glossary and a narrative chronology.

A richly detailed portrait of Frost in his own words.

Kirkus Reviews