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Featured Author: Robert Frost
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Featured Author: Robert Frost
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
In This FeatureReviews of Robert Frost’s Books Reviews of Books About Robert Frost Articles About Robert Frost Related Link
Christopher Benfey Reviews Jay Parini’s ‘Robert Frost: A Life’ (April 25, 1999)
Peter Davison/Houghton MifflinRobert Frost in the 1920’s.
‘Steeple Bush,’ reviewed by Randall Jarrell
(1947)
“‘Steeple Bush’ is no book to convert intellectuals to Frost. Yet the ordinary ‘highbrow’ reader is making a far greater mistake when he neglects Frost as commonplace, than the academic
reader makes when he apotheosizes him, often on the basis of his most complacent or sentimental poems.”‘A Masque of Mercy‘
(1947)
“The humor of the masque is proportional to its seriousness. Reading it is a difficult delight. It is worth many readings. And it would be exciting to watch great actors perform it on stage.”‘Complete Poems of Robert Frost‘
(1949)
“Others abide our endless questioning about contemporary poetry — Robert Frost stands free and serene and magnificent, for all the world as if he were the George Washington of modern American verse.”‘In the Clearing‘
(1962)
“New poem after new poem makes clear how deeply each Frost poem bears on all Frost poems, and how surely all are a constant symbol of his life’s commitment to making metaphors that clarify the dark
paradoxes they contain.”‘Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost‘ and ‘Frost: A Time to Talk‘
(1972)
“There will have to be a more discriminating biography of Frost some day, and the two books under review will prove of some help to its author.”‘Robert Frost on Writing,’ edited by Elaine Barry
(1973)
“I have never heard anyone — including T.S. Eliot — say so many apt, eloquent, original, unexpected, far-reaching, helpful and practical things about the writing of poetry. Mr. Frost must surely be the
world’s most quotable critic.”Winfield Townley Scott Reviews Margaret Bartlett Anderson’s ‘Robert Frost and John Bartlett’
(1963)
“[T]he kind of little book that frequently appears in the first posthumous years of a famed literary person: little books of one phase or relationship that in a later generation are known only to specialists,
for the essential of such memoirs become absorbed by the major biographies.”Richard Poirier Reviews Lawrance Thompson’s ‘Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915’
(1966)
“Finding in his research that many of Frost’s stories about himself and others were full of self-deception and fiction, he therefore decides that Frost can be comprehended within a scheme involving
self-idealization on the one hand and actuality on the other.”David Bromwich Reviews Lawrance Thompsom’s ‘Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963’
(1977)
“[W]hat Lawrence Thompson uncovered has been a shock. . . . [Frost] was from start to finish, and in nearly every aspect of his life, a successful liar. Exposures which to other men might have been the moral
lesson and warning of a lifetime were to Frost merely hints that he ought to refine his tactics.”Irving Howe Reviews Richard Poirier’s ‘Robert Frost’
(1977)
“By arguing for Frost’s complexity of mind and technique, he not merely dissolves the amiable misunderstanding on which the poet’s high reputation once rested, but also initiates a more risky confrontation
with such modernist writers as Eliot or Joyce. . . . But he does not develop this argument at convincing length . . .”R. W. Flint Reviews Stanley Burnshaw’s ‘Robert Frost Himself’
(1986)
“. . . a few large issues escape him. We want to ask if academic critical biography in its new-found pride of place and with its frequent obtuseness toward the arts it ostensibly serves, can ever be trusted
with figures as self-created, as aboriginal, as Frost.”Michiko Kakutani Reviews Jeffrey Meyers’ ‘Robert Frost’
(1996)
“. . . a judicious book that serves as a welcome antidote to Thompson’s angry screed and to his own earlier exercises in literary destruction.”Robert Frost Adds Poet’s Touch
(January 21, 1961)
Frost was asked to read a poem at the Kennedy inauguration. The poem he chose, “The Gift Outright” is reprinted here.Robert Frost Dies at 88; Kennedy Leads in Tribute
(January 30, 1963)
Frost’s obituary surveys his poetry and the public role he played during his later years.A Poet of Rural Spirit
(January 30, 1963)
In this remembrance, Thomas Lask writes that Frost “fascinated Americans because he was in their eyes what they, in so many moments, wanted to be: one who lived in the 20th century but was not
of it.Robert Frost’s Last Adventure by Stewart L. Udall
(June 11, 1972)
Stewart L. Udall, Secretary of the Interior in the Kennedy Administration and a close friend of Frost, recounts Frost’s diplomatic mission to meet Nikita Khrushchev at the same time that the Soviet
Premier was preparing to install ballistic missiles in Cuba in 1962. Frost told Khrushchev that the superpowers should strive towards a “noble rivalry.”The Terror in Robert Frost
(August 18, 1974)
William Stafford who writes of Frost that “in the centennial year of his birth, it looks as if he has become America’s foremost poet, its emblem poet,” examines the evolution of Frost’s
poetic and public reputation.
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