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

Frost’s first major biographer, Lawrance Thompson, seemed to take his cue from such critics. In a three-volume biography published after Frost’s death in 1963, Thompson emphasized Frost’s darkness, detailing the poet’s frequent depressions and his jealous rages, such that reviewers declared Frost to be “a monster of egotism” and “a mean-spirited megalomaniac.” In the decades since, critics and biographers have pushed back on this dim view of Frost. William H. Pritchard, in “Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,” from 1993, which has long been the gold-standard biography for many Frost enthusiasts, emphasized the poet’s ingenuity and playfulness, both in his work and in his life. Even when Frost was boastful or inconsiderate, Pritchard suggested, one couldn’t help but appreciate his cleverness.

Plunkett, like Pritchard, admires Frost in all his guises. Throughout, he stresses the poet’s multiplicity, his ability to exhibit opposing attitudes in the same poem, sometimes in the same line. Interpreting “The Pasture,” an early poem, Plunkett shows how its refrain—“You come too”—can be understood “in at least four ways at once,” as “a suggestion, an insistence, a command, a plain statement.” Recognizing all possible meanings, Plunkett argues, allows us to access “a mind in its nakedness weighing how it means to use the phrase, why it means to use it, and what it wants and needs of you.” To read the line simply as a benign invitation—or, conversely, as a straightforward command—is to miss the point: the poem is exploring the different ways that people connect, rather than insisting on one kind of intimacy.

“Love and Need”—which takes its title from Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” from 1934—proceeds in loosely chronological fashion, taking us from love poems that Frost wrote for Elinor during their courtship to later poems such as “The Gift Outright,” which an eighty-six-year-old Frost recited at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. (Kennedy went on to eulogize Frost at Amherst College, noting that many readers “preferred to ignore his darker truths,” just weeks before the President’s assassination.) Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, moved across the country following the death of his dissolute, larger-than-life father, and made a series of homes in mill towns north of Boston with his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and his younger sister. He came to poetry in high school—his first poem, “La Noche Triste,” composed when he was a sophomore, was inspired by a book about the Aztec Empire—and published the lyric “My Butterfly” in The Independent in 1894. A long fallow period followed, during which he married, raised four children, tried his hand at farming, and taught high school, all the while writing poems but publishing very few. In 1912, he moved his family to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who championed his work. Frost’s first book, “A Boy’s Will,” was published in 1913. At thirty-nine, he finally had a taste of literary success.

In Plunkett’s hands, “A Boy’s Will,” sometimes seen as one of Frost’s less impressive collections, becomes newly intriguing. (In a generally positive review, Pound called the book “a bit raw.”) Plunkett reveals the book to be a “spiritual autobiography” modelled on Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850), which commemorates the poet’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam. There are striking similarities between Frost’s collection and Tennyson’s poem; many of Frost’s poems refer directly to a corresponding canto in Tennyson’s work. The difference is that Frost’s poems are mourning not a friend but the pastoral life the poet has left behind, and mourning, too, his eldest child, Elliott, who died at age three, of cholera, in 1900. “Though not a literal story of mourning, A Boy’s Will suffuses its every texture in an atmosphere of mourning,” Plunkett writes. “The poems are tinged throughout with a sense of amorphous loss, the other side of which is a depth of gratitude.”

The connections Plunkett draws between Frost’s lyric poems and their literary influences are valuable, particularly for anyone taken in by Frost’s aw-shucks persona. Though Frost sometimes disavowed his literary education—“I haven’t had a very literary life,” he told Poirier in the Paris Review interview—he was an avid reader of poetry and the owner of several well-thumbed poetry anthologies, which he regarded as superior to any literary magazine. (Too many critics in the latter.) He used canonical poems to inspire his own. The early poem “Flower-Gathering” is patterned on “Carpe Diem,” a love song from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and the late poem “The Wind and the Rain” owes something to Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” Frost’s range of references was as impressive as that of any modernist poet—though his poems, unlike T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” didn’t come with a set of footnotes.

At times, Plunkett’s painstaking efforts to track each poem’s influences can be tiresome. My appreciation of the exquisite late sonnet “The Silken Tent” did not increase upon learning that it borrows an image from the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s “The Bracelet to Julia.” But, more often, Plunkett’s work pays off. Many know that “The Road Not Taken” was written for the English poet Edward Thomas, Frost’s close friend, a romantic and an idealist, who, walking with Frost, often dithered about what path to take. But it’s less well known that Frost was inspired by a poem by Emerson, “Étienne de la Boéce,” about Montaigne’s relationship with a close friend. With these sources in mind, we read the poem’s tone and aims differently: Frost may be mocking Thomas’s indecisiveness, but he is also legitimating the dilemma of choice. The poem is skeptical of the idea of life-defining actions but not entirely cynical, Plunkett concludes; it is “not a denial of epiphanic self-realization but a questioning of it.” Situating the poem within a tradition softens its bite.

In tracking Frost’s influences, Plunkett shows just how invested Frost was in the literary tradition—how the poet had, despite his protestations, led a “literary life.” Unlike those who obeyed the modernist imperative to “make it new” by inventing poetic styles and forms, Frost stuck with the templates available to him but changed them in subtle ways. He didn’t slavishly imitate the poets he admired but, rather, riffed on them. This approach produced, in Plunkett’s estimation, “the greatest achievements of Frost’s lyric style: to contain the growing complexity of his poetry in forms that were no more difficult than those preceding them, that were in most instances simpler, belying the turbulence one is made to feel under the surface.”

What accounts for this turbulence? Frost offered one answer in a letter from 1914, in which he described the unusual rhythm of his poems. He preferred to write in regular meter, usually “the very regular pre-established accent and measure of blank verse,” but he also worked to incorporate “the very irregular accent and measure” of human speech. “I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation,” he wrote. “I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle.”

That “strained relation” is what we find in a poem like “Home Burial,” which appeared in Frost’s acclaimed second collection, “North of Boston,” from 1914. The poem, one of Frost’s finest, comprises a dialogue between a husband and wife who have recently buried a child in a small graveyard near their home. The husband, a loquacious man, wants to talk about the loss; his wife thinks he doesn’t know how to talk about it and tries to leave the house when he broaches the topic. Frost captures the friction between the couple: