Portland Public Library

The letters of Robert Frost, edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Faggen

eng

Includes bibliographical references and indexes

autobiography

index present

non fiction

The letters of Robert Frost

bibliography

840460732

edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Faggen

Pensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and BeckettVolume 2. "In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Robert 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"--, Dust jacket flapVolume 3. "During the period covered here, Robert Frost was close to the height of his powers. If Volume 2 covered the making of Frost as America's poet, in Volume 3 he is definitively made. These were also, however, years of personal tribulation. The once-tight Frost family broke up as marriage, illness, and work scattered the children across the country. In the case of Frost's son Carol, both distance and proximity put strains on an already fractious relationship. But the tragedy and emotional crux of this volume is the death of Frost's youngest daughter, Marjorie. Frost's correspondence from those dark days is a powerful testament to the difficulty of honoring the responsibilities of a poet's eminence while coping with the intensity of a parent's grief. Volume 3 also sees Frost responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the onset of the New Deal, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with wit, canny political intelligence, and no little acerbity. All the while, his star continues to rise: he wins a Pulitzer for Collected Poems in 1931 and will win a second for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he is in constant demand as a public speaker at colleges, writers' workshops, symposia, and dinners. Frost was not just a poet but a poet-teacher; as such, he was instrumental in defining the public functions of poetry in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Frost lived a life of paradox, as personal tragedy and the tumults of politics interwove with his unprecedented achievements."--, Dust jacket flap

volume 1. 1886-1920. Introduction -- The Early Years (September 1886 -- July 1912) -- "England in the Grip of Frost" (Beaconsfield, September 1912 -- March 1914) -- "This Quiet Corner of a Quiet Country" (Gloucestershire, May 1914 -- February 1915) -- Making It in America (February 1915-December 1917) -- Amherst (January 1917 -- February 1920) -- Biographical Glossary of Correspondents -- Chronology: 1874 -- February 1920. volume 2. 1920-1928volume 2. 1920-1928. Introduction -- "Book farmer" (February 1920-September 1921) -- "The guessed of Michigan" (September 1921-May 1923) -- A new regime at Amherst (May 1923-September 1925) -- To Michigan again (for a lifetime in a year) (October 1925-June 1926) -- Ten weeks a year in Amherst, fourteen once in Europe (June 1926-December 1928) -- Biographical glossary of correspondents -- Chronology: February 1920-December 1928volume 3. 1929-1936. Introduction -- The "big book" : Collected poems (1930) (January 1929-October 1930) -- A frost family diaspora (October 1930-June 1932) -- Going to California (June 1932-October 1932) -- 'The temptation of the times is to write politics..." (November 1932-March 1934) -- Marj (March 1934-June 1934) -- FERA and loathing in Key West (July 1934-March 1935) -- Further ranges and a Harvard year (April 1935-December 1936) -- Biographical glossary of correspondents -- Chronology: January 1929-December 1936