Robert Frost the Poet

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Abigail Deutsch, Acquainted with the Night. Frost's verse is appealing and approachable. His personal life was shot through with pain. Wall Street Journal, Feb 22, 2025, at page C10
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... rk-journey-30025930
(book review on Adam Plunkett, Love and Need; The life of Robert Frost's poetry. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, Feb 18, 2025)

Note:
(a) online title of the review: Robert Frost's Dark Journey
(b) Robert Frost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Frost#Early_life
("After his [Robert Frost's father William Frost Jr's] death on May 5, 1885, the family moved across the country [from San Francisco, Calif,] to Lawrence, Massachusetts, under the patronage of Robert's grandfather William Frost Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill"

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Robert Frost’s poem “Hyla Brook” concludes with a resounding claim: “We love the things we love for what they are.” Frost’s greatest poems capture the details of his world as it was, from the bend in the trunk of a birch tree to the plain music in the speech of his New England neighbors. This quintessentially American artist has secured a reputation as the apple pie of poets—warm, sweet, and just a little spicy—a bard of approachable topics such as the best route for an everyday walk through the woods. But his darker themes, such as isolation and loss, once inspired Lionel Trilling to call Frost “a terrifying poet.” In his first book, “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” the literary critic Adam Plunkett interweaves discussions of the poet’s life and works to show that Frost could also be—whatever else he was—a terrifying man.

Frost’s life story, seen whole, contradicts his popular image. The archetypal farmer-poet of New England grew up in San Francisco to a pro-Confederate father who named his son after his hero, Robert E. Lee. William Prescott Frost Jr. was a Harvard graduate and newspaper editor, and his wife, Isabelle, was a teacher who read her children authors including Poe, Keats and Emerson. After William’s death in 1885, Isabelle moved, with 11-year-old Robert and his younger sister Jeanie, to Massachusetts.At Lawrence High School, Frost encountered Cicero, Virgil, and, perhaps most importantly, Elinor Miriam White, his co-valedictorian, whom he later married. The couple started a family in 1896, and Frost took a turn as an unsuccessful farmer and, later,a caring, rumple-haired teacher. In 1912 he relocated his family for a few years to England. It was there, far from America, that Frost began making his name as a writer.

All the while, he had been developing his poetic style. As far back as 1900, he had attempted something particularly new with “Mowing.”He considered it his first “talk-song,” Mr. Plunkett writes—“the first of his poems to realize its beauty from the tones of actual talking.” The poem begins: “There was never a sound beside the woods but one, / And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.” Frost’s best poems speak in whispers, and, throughout this book, Mr. Plunkett listens with an attentiveness that yields subtle and complex interpretations of talk-songs like “Birches” (1915) and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923). He listens, too, for echoes of Frost’s forebears. In an especially moving section, he shows how Frost’s first book,“A Boy’s Will” (1915)—which contained many poems written after the death of Frost’s son Elliott in 1900—adapts Tennyson’s 1850 elegy “In Memoriam A.H.H.” Mr. Plunkett’s suggestive linkage undergirds the subtle “logic of grief” that runs through the book.

Grief would come to define Frost’s life. In 1934, decades after he lost two young children, his daughter Marjorie died from a postpartum infection. In 1938 Elinor died after suffering multiple heart attacks. In 1940 Frost’s son Carol took his own life. And in 1947 Frost’s daughter Irma, long unstable, broke down and entered a mental institution. The same fate had befallen Frost’s sister, Jeanie, in 1920. This string of tragedies might call to mind the trials of Job. Frost certainly made the connection: by 1942 he had drafted “A Masque of Reason,” a drama that Frost saw as a fictional, final chapter to the biblical Book of Job.

As Job despaired, so did Frost. The poet “had always managed to intimate the movements of a turbulent depth below a calm surface,” Mr. Plunkett writes. He argues that Frost’s personality and poetry alike served as a barrier protecting him from the painful truths of existence. But shortly after Elinor’s death, that barrier “was gone. His friends feared for his sanity.”

Frost’s behavior sometimes justified that fear. The year after Carol’s suicide, he set fire to the schoolbooks of his friend Kay Morrison’s 4-year-old daughter, after picking them up and finding them, Mr. Plunkett writes, “contemptibly simplistic.” At one point in the summer of 1945 he “began a strange, unnatural chant and took an axe into his cabin, threatening to kill himself with it.”  In 1947, in the thick of Irma’s mental collapse and during a rare bout of drinking, he smashed his desk with a hammer.

Frost also entered a relationship with Morrison that, like his prickliest poems, would invite boundless exegesis on the parts of his acquaintances and biographers. More than twenty years younger than Frost, Morrison was married and working as the poet’s amanuensis.  He claimed their connection was romantic; she claimed it was not. Whatever its true nature, the relationship lasted the rest of Frost’s life.

This unconventional arrangement was among the arresting details appearing in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography of Frost  (1966-77), which presented its subject, the critic Helen Vendler argued, as a “monster.” The decades since have seen various efforts to balance the record, of which Mr. Plunkett’s book is the latest. He shines when analyzing the psychological forces propelling Frost and his circle: for instance, how the grieving Frost may have portrayed his earlier self in a misleadingly unappealing way, biasing his acquaintances’ perspectives against him, or how Thompson’s infatuation with the work of the psychoanalyst Karen Horney persuaded him of one interpretation of his subject—Frost as neurotic—while blinding him to others.

In the process of sorting through such uncertainties, Mr. Plunkett adds new ones. He takes a mysteriously inventive approach to chronology, sometimes skipping past a central period—such as Frost’s years in England—only to double back to it later. Mr. Plunkett’s prose, usually elegant and allusive, can grow as unkempt as the young Frost’s hair, with overlong sentences whose meanings point in multiple possible directions. And he pays surprisingly little attention to the potential role of Frost’s turbulent childhood in his later difficulties. (Frost’s father was a drinker whose brutality sometimes sent his mother “running out into the street in fear.” )

Yet “Love and Need” proves an illuminating tour of Frost’s life as well as his afterlife on the page, and these nuanced readings deepen our understanding of his still-powerful poems. Mr. Plunkett offers a compelling reminder that—to quote one of Frost’s favorite lines, by the poet George Meredith—“No villain need be!”

Ms. Deutsch’s reviews and essays appear in Harper’s, Poetry and other publications.