Struggle for Democracy in India

Robert Frost
1874–1963

Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. "Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet," writes James M. Cox, "it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many nineteenth-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his twentieth-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O 'Connor point out inPoems for Study, "Frost 's poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.

Frost 's theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the nineteenth-century Romantics, he maintained that a poem is "never a put-up job.... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness." Yet, "working out his own version of the 'impersonal ' view of art," as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T. S. Eliot 's idea that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. In a 1932 letter to Sydney Cox, Frost explained his conception of poetry: "The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse.... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful."

To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took up nineteenth-century tools and made them new. Lawrence Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, "the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content" work to a poet 's advantage; they liberate him from the experimentalist 's burden—the perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures. Thus Frost, as he himself put it in "The Constant Symbol," wrote his verse regular; he never completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as so many of his contemporaries were doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line length, and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice. He maintained that "the freshness of a poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to verse as the verse in turn might be set to music." He believed, rather, that the poem 's particular mood dictated or determined the poet 's "first commitment to metre and length of line."

Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style by setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of Criticism,Yvor Winters faulted Frost for his "endeavor to make his style approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation." But what Frost achieved in his poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to restore to literature the "sentence sounds that underlie the words," the "vocal gesture" that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poet 's ear must be sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word. "The Death of the Hired Man," for instance, consists almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and Warren, her farmer-husband, but critics have observed that in this poem Frost takes the prosaic patterns of their speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound "The Death of the Hired Man" represented Frost at his best—when he "dared to write ... in the natural speech of New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from the 'natural ' speech of the newspapers, and of many professors."

Frost 's use of New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed regionalism. Within New England, his particular focus was on New Hampshire, which he called "one of the two best states in the Union," the other being Vermont. In an essay entitled "Robert Frost and New England: A Revaluation," W. G. O 'Donnell noted how from the start, in A Boy 's Will, "Frost had already decided to give his writing a local habitation and a New England name, to root his art in the soil that he had worked with his own hands." Reviewing North of Boston in the New Republic, Amy Lowell wrote, "Not only is his work New England in subject, it is so in technique.... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness which is extraordinary." Many other critics have lauded Frost 's ability to realistically evoke the New England landscape; they point out that one can visualize an orchard in "After Apple-Picking" or imagine spring in a farmyard in "Two Tramps in Mud Time." In this "ability to portray the local truth in nature," O 'Donnell claims, Frost has no peer. The same ability prompted Pound to declare, "I know more of farm life than I did before I had read his poems. That means I know more of 'Life. '"

Frost 's regionalism, critics remark, is in his realism, not in politics; he creates no picture of regional unity or sense of community. In The Continuity of American Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce describes Frost 's protagonists as individuals who are constantly forced to confront their individualism as such and to reject the modern world in order to retain their identity. Frost 's use of nature is not only similar but closely tied to this regionalism. He stays as clear of religion and mysticism as he does of politics. What he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the earth 's fertility and to man 's relationship to the soil. To critic M. L. Rosenthal, Frost 's pastoral quality, his "lyrical and realistic repossession of the rural and 'natural, '" is the staple of his reputation.

Yet, just as Frost is aware of the distances between one man and another, so he is also always aware of the distinction, the ultimate separateness, of nature and man. Marion Montgomery has explained, "His attitude toward nature is one of armed and amicable truce and mutual respect interspersed with crossings of the boundaries" between individual man and natural forces. Below the surface of Frost 's poems are dreadful implications, what Rosenthal calls his "shocked sense of the helpless cruelty of things." This natural cruelty is at work in "Design" and in "Once by the Pacific." The ominous tone of these two poems prompted Rosenthal 's further comment: "At his most powerful Frost is as staggered by 'the horror ' as Eliot and approaches the hysterical edge of sensibility in a comparable way.... His is still the modern mind in search of its own meaning."

The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frost 's poems is modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual intersect. John T. Napier calls this Frost 's ability "to find the ordinary a matrix for the extraordinary." In this respect, he is often compared withEmily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, too, a simple fact, object, person, or event will be transfigured and take on greater mystery or significance. The poem "Birches" is an example: it contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground- temporarily by a boy 's swinging on them or permanently by an ice-storm. But as the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only with child 's play and natural phenomena, but also with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge.

Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many of Frost 's poems, and in "Education by Poetry" he explained: "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace ' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.... Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere."

Frost 's own poetical education began in San Francisco where he was born in 1874, but he found his place of safety in New England when his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1884 following his father 's death. The move was actually a return, for Frost 's ancestors were originally New Englanders. The region must have been particularly conducive to the writing of poetry because within the next five years Frost had made up his mind to be a poet. In fact, he graduated from Lawrence High School, in 1892, as class poet (he also shared the honor of co-valedictorian with his wife-to-be Elinor White); and two years later, the New York Independent accepted his poem entitled "My Butterfly," launching his status as a professional poet with a check for $15.00.

To celebrate his first publication, Frost had a book of six poems privately printed; two copies of Twilight were made—one for himself and one for his fiancee. Over the next eight years, however, he succeeded in having only thirteen more poems published. During this time, Frost sporadically attended Dartmouth and Harvard and earned a living teaching school and, later, working a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But in 1912, discouraged by American magazines ' constant rejection of his work, he took his family to England, where he could "write and be poor without further scandal in the family." In England, Frost found the professional esteem denied him in his native country. Continuing to write about New England, he had two books published, A Boy 's Will andNorth of Boston, which established his reputation so that his return to the United States in 1915 was as a celebrated literary figure. Holt put out an American edition ofNorth of Boston, and periodicals that had once scorned his work now sought it.

Since 1915 Frost 's position in American letters has been firmly rooted; in the years before his death he came to be considered the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. On his seventy-fifth birthday, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution in his honor which said, "His poems have helped to guide American thought and humor and wisdom, setting forth to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men." In 1955, the State of Vermont named a mountain after him in Ripton, the town of his legal residence; and at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Frost was given the unprecedented honor of being asked to read a poem. Frost wrote a poem called "Dedication" for the occasion, but could not read it given the day 's harsh sunlight. He instead recited "The Gift Outright," which Kennedy had originally asked him to read, with a revised, more forward-looking, last line.

Though Frost allied himself with no literary school or movement, the imagists helped at the start to promote his American reputation. Poetry: A Magazine of Versepublished his work before others began to clamor for it. It also published a review by Ezra Pound of the British edition of A Boy 's Will, which Pound said "has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it has just this utter sincerity. It is not post-Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post Kiplonian. This man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it." Amy Lowell reviewed North of Bostonin the New Republic, and she, too, sang Frost 's praises: "He writes in classic metres in a way to set the teeth of all the poets of the older schools on edge; and he writes in classic metres, and uses inversions and cliches whenever he pleases, those devices so abhorred by the newest generation. He goes his own way, regardless of anyone else 's rules, and the result is a book of unusual power and sincerity." In these first two volumes, Frost introduced not only his affection for New England themes and his unique blend of traditional meters and colloquialism, but also his use of dramatic monologues and dialogues. "Mending Wall," the leading poem in North of Boston,describes the friendly argument between the speaker and his neighbor as they walk along their common wall replacing fallen stones; their differing attitudes toward "boundaries" offer symbolic significance typical of the poems in these early collections.

Mountain Interval marked Frost 's turn to another kind of poem, a brief meditation sparked by an object, person or event. Like the monologues and dialogues, these short pieces have a dramatic quality. "Birches," discussed above, is an example, as is "The Road Not Taken," in which a fork in a woodland path transcends the specific. The distinction of this volume, the Boston Transcript said, "is that Mr. Frost takes the lyricism of A Boy 's Will and plays a deeper music and gives a more intricate variety of experience."

Several new qualities emerged in Frost 's work with the appearance of New Hampshire, particularly a new self-consciousness and willingness to speak of himself and his art. The volume, for which Frost won his first Pulitzer Prize, "pretends to be nothing but a long poem with notes and grace notes," as Louis Untermeyer described it. The title poem, approximately fourteen pages long, is a "rambling tribute" to Frost 's favorite state and "is starred and dotted with scientific numerals in the manner of the most profound treatise." Thus, a footnote at the end of a line of poetry will refer the reader to another poem seemingly inserted to merely reinforce the text of "New Hampshire." Some of these poems are in the form of epigrams, which appear for the first time in Frost 's work. "Fire and Ice," for example, one of the better known epigrams, speculates on the means by which the world will end. Frost 's most famous and, according to J. McBride Dabbs, most perfect lyric, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," is also included in this collection; conveying "the insistent whisper of death at the heart of life," the poem portrays a speaker who stops his sleigh in the midst of a snowy woods only to be called from the inviting gloom by the recollection of practical duties. Frost himself said of this poem that it is the kind he 'd like to print on one page followed with "forty pages of footnotes."

West-Running Brook, Frost 's fifth book of poems, is divided into six sections, one of which is taken up entirely by the title poem. This poem refers to a brook which perversely flows west instead of east to the Atlantic like all other brooks. A comparison is set up between the brook and the poem 's speaker who trusts himself to go by "contraries"; further rebellious elements exemplified by the brook give expression to an eccentric individualism, Frost 's stoic theme of resistance and self-realization. Reviewing the collection in the New York Herald Tribune, Babette Deutsch wrote: "The courage that is bred by a dark sense of Fate, the tenderness that broods over mankind in all its blindness and absurdity, the vision that comes to rest as fully on kitchen smoke and lapsing snow as on mountains and stars—these are his, and in his seemingly casual poetry, he quietly makes them ours."

A Further Range, which earned Frost another Pulitzer Prize and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, contains two groups of poems subtitled "Taken Doubly" and "Taken Singly." In the first, and more interesting, of these groups, the poems are somewhat didactic, though there are humorous and satiric pieces as well. Included here is "Two Tramps in Mud Time," which opens with the story of two itinerant lumbermen who offer to cut the speaker 's wood for pay; the poem then develops into a sermon on the relationship between work and play, vocation and avocation, preaching the necessity to unite them. Of the entire volume, William Rose Benet wrote, "It is better worth reading than nine-tenths of the books that will come your way this year. In a time when all kinds of insanity are assailing the nations it is good to listen to this quiet humor, even about a hen, a hornet, or Square Matthew.... And if anybody should ask me why I still believe in my land, I have only to put this book in his hand and answer, 'Well-here is a man of my country. '"

Most critics acknowledge that Frost 's poetry in the forties and fifties grew more and more abstract, cryptic, and even sententious, so it is generally on the basis of his earlier work that he is judged. His political conservatism and religious faith, hitherto informed by skepticism and local color, became more and more the guiding principles of his work. He had been, as Randall Jarrell points out, "a very odd and very radical radical when young" yet became "sometimes callously and unimaginatively conservative" in his old age. He had become a public figure, and in the years before his death, much of his poetry was written from this stance.

Reviewing A Witness Tree in Books, Wilbert Snow noted a few poems "which have a right to stand with the best things he has written": "Come In," "The Silken Tent," and "Carpe Diem" especially. Yet Snow went on: "Some of the poems here are little more than rhymed fancies; others lack the bullet-like unity of structure to be found in North of Boston." On the other hand, Stephen Vincent Benet felt that Frost had "never written any better poems than some of those in this book." Similarly, critics were let down by In the Clearing. One wrote, "Although this reviewer considers Robert Frost to be the foremost contemporary U.S. poet, he regretfully must state that most of the poems in this new volume are disappointing.... [They] often are closer to jingles than to the memorable poetry we associate with his name." Another maintained that "the bulk of the book consists of poems of 'philosophic talk. ' Whether you like them or not depends mostly on whether you share the 'philosophy. '"

Indeed, many readers do share Frost 's philosophy, and still others who do not nevertheless continue to find delight and significance in his large body of poetry. In October, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. "In honoring Robert Frost," the President said, "we therefore can pay honor to the deepest source of our national strength. That strength takes many forms and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant.... Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost." The poet would probably have been pleased by such recognition, for he had said once, in an interview with Harvey Breit: "One thing I care about, and wish young people could care about, is taking poetry as the first form of understanding. If poetry isn 't understanding all, the whole world, then it isn 't worth anything."

Frost 's poetry is revered to this day. When a previously unknown poem by Frost titled "War Thoughts at Home," was discovered and dated to 1918, it was subsequently published in the fall, 2006, edition of the Virginia Quartely Review.
CAREER
Poet. Held various jobs between college studies, including bobbin boy in a Massachusetts mill, cobbler, editor of a country newspaper, schoolteacher, and farmer. Lived in England, 1912-15. Tufts College, Medford, MA, Phi Beta Kappa poet, 1915 and 1940; Amherst College, Amherst, MA, professor of English and poet-in-residence, 1916-20, 1923-25, and 1926-28; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Phi Beta Kappa poet, 1916 and 1941; Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, co-founder of the Bread-Loaf School and Conference of English, 1920, annual lecturer, beginning 1920; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, professor and poet-in-residence, 1921-23, fellow in letters, 1925-26; Columbia University, New York City, Phi Beta Kappa poet, 1932; Yale University, New Haven, CT, associate fellow, beginning 1933; Harvard University, Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, 1936, board overseer, 1938-39, Ralph Waldo Emerson Fellow, 1939-41, honorary fellow, 1942-43; associate of Adams House; fellow in American civilization, 1941-42; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, George Ticknor Fellow in Humanities, 1943-49, visiting lecturer.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
POETRY * Twilight, [Lawrence, MA], 1894, reprinted, University of Virginia, 1966. * A Boy 's Will, D. Nutt, 1913, Holt, 1915. * North of Boston, D. Nutt, 1914, Holt, 1915, reprinted, Dodd, 1977. * Mountain Interval, Holt, 1916. * New Hampshire, Holt, 1923, reprinted, New Dresden Press, 1955. * Selected Poems, Holt, 1923. * Several Short Poems, Holt, 1924. * West-Running Brook, Holt, 1928. * Selected Poems, Holt, 1928. * The Lovely Shall Be Choosers, Random House, 1929. * The Lone Striker, Knopf, 1933. * Two Tramps in Mud-Time, Holt, 1934. * The Gold Hesperidee, Bibliophile Press, 1935. * Three Poems, Baker Library Press, 1935. * A Further Range, Holt, 1936. * From Snow to Snow, Holt, 1936. * A Witness Tree, Holt, 1942. * A Masque of Reason (verse drama), Holt, 1942. * Steeple Bush, Holt, 1947. * A Masque of Mercy (verse drama), Holt, 1947. * Greece, Black Rose Press, 1948. * Hard Not to Be King, House of Books, 1951. * Aforesaid, Holt, 1954. * The Gift Outright, Holt, 1961. * "Dedication" and "The Gift Outright" (poems read at the presidential inaugural, 1961; published with the inaugural address of J. F. Kennedy), Spiral Press, 1961. * In the Clearing, Holt, 1962. * Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Dutton, 1978. * Early Poems, Crown, 1981. * A Swinger of Birches: Poems of Robert Frost for Young People (with audiocassette), Stemmer House, 1982. * Spring Pools, Lime Rock Press, 1983. * Birches, illustrated by Ed Young, Holt, 1988. * The Runaway (juvenile poetry), illustrated by Glenna Lang, Godine (Boston, MA), 1996.
Also author of And All We Call American, 1958.

POEMS ISSUED AS CHRISTMAS GREETINGS * Christmas Trees, Spiral Press, 1929. * Neither Out Far Nor In Deep, Holt, 1935. * Everybody 's Sanity, [Los Angeles], 1936. * To a Young Wretch, Spiral Press, 1937. * Triple Plate, Spiral Press, 1939. * Our Hold on the Planet, Holt, 1940. * An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box, Spiral Press, 1944. * On Making Certain Anything Has Happened, Spiral Press, 1945. * One Step Backward Taken, Spiral Press, 1947. * Closed for Good, Spiral Press, 1948. * On a Tree Fallen Across the Road to Hear Us Talk, Spiral Press, 1949. * Doom to Bloom, Holt, 1950. * A Cabin in the Clearing, Spiral Press, 1951. * Does No One but Me at All Ever Feel This Way in the Least, Spiral Press, 1952. * One More Brevity, Holt, 1953. * From a Milkweed Pod, Holt, 1954. * Some Science Fiction, Spiral Press, 1955. * Kitty Hawk, 1894, Holt, 1956. * My Objection to Being Stepped On, Holt, 1957. * Away, Spiral Press, 1958. * A-Wishing Well, Spiral Press, 1959. * Accidentally on Purpose, Holt, 1960. * The Woodpile, Spiral Press, 1961. * The Prophets Really Prophesy as Mystics, the Commentators Merely by Statistics, Spiral Press, 1962. * The Constant Symbol, [New York], 1962.
COLLECTIONS
* Collected Poems of Robert Frost, Holt, 1930, new edition, 1939, reprinted, Buccaneer Books, 1983. * Selected Poems, Holt, 1934, reprinted, 1963. * Come In, and Other Poems, edited by Louis Untermeyer, Holt, 1943, reprinted, F. Watts, 1967, enlarged edition published as The Road Not Taken: An Introduction to Robert Frost, reprinted as The Pocket Book of Robert Frost 's Poems, Pocket Books, 1956. * The Poems of Robert Frost, Modern Library, 1946. * You Come Too: Favorite Poems for Young Readers, Holt, 1959, reprinted, 1967. * A Remembrance Collection of New Poems by Robert Frost, Holt, 1959. * Poems, Washington Square Press, 1961. * Longer Poems: The Death of the Hired Man, Holt, 1966. * Selected Prose, edited by Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem, Holt, 1966, reprinted, Collier Books, 1968. * Complete Poems of Robert Frost, Holt, 1968. * The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Lathem, Holt, 1969. * Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, edited by Lawrence Thompson and Lathem, Holt, 1972. * Selected Poems, edited by Ian Hamilton, Penguin, 1973. * Collected Poems, Plays, and Prose, Library of America (New York, NY), 1995. * Early Frost: The First Three Books, Ecco (Hopewell, NJ), 1996. * Versed in Country Things, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Little, Brown, 1996. * (With Christopher Burkett) Robert Frost: Seasons, MJF (New York, NY), Books, 1996. * The Robert Frost Reader: Poetry and Prose, edited by Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 2002. * Robert Frost, compiled by S. L. Berry, Creative Education (Mankato, MN), 2003.
LETTERS
* The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, Holt, 1963. * Selected Letters, edited by Thompson, Holt, 1964.
OTHER
* A Way Out: A One-Act Play, Harbor Press, 1929. * The Cow 's in the Corn: A One-Act Irish Play in Rhyme, Slide Mountain Press, 1929. * (Contributor) John Holmes, editor, Writing Poetry, Writer, Inc., 1960. * (Contributor) Milton R. Konvitz and Stephen E. Whicher, editors, Emerson, Prentice-Hall, 1962. * Robert Frost on "Extravagance" (the text of Frost 's last college lecture, Dartmouth College, November 27, 1962), [Hanover, NH], 1963. * Robert Frost: A Living Voice (contains speeches by Frost), edited by Reginald Cook, University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. * (With Caroline Ford) The Less Travelled Road, Bern Porter, 1982. * Stories for Lesley, edited by Roger D. Sell, University Press of Virginia, 1984.
Frost 's papers are collected at the libraries of the University of Virginia, Amherst College, and Dartmouth College, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
FURTHER READING
BOOKS
* Anderson, Margaret, Robert Frost and John Bartlett: The Record of a Friendship, Holt, 1963. * Barry, Elaine, compiler, Robert Frost on Writing, Rutgers University Press, 1973. * Barry, Elaine, Robert Frost, Ungar, 1973. * Bloom, Harold, ed., Robert Frost, Chelsea House Publishers, 1998. * Breit, Harvey, The Writer Observed, World Publishing, 1956. * Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography: The Twenties, 1917-1929, Gale, 1989. * Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 3, 1975, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 10, 1979, Volume 13, 1980, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 26, 1983, Volume 34, 1985, Volume 44, 1987. * Cook, Reginald L., The Dimensions of Robert Frost, Rinehart, 1958. * Cook, Reginald L., Robert Frost: A Living Voice, University of Massachusetts Press, 1974. * Cox, James M., Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1962. * Cox, Sidney, Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost, New York University Press, 1957. * Cramer, Jefferey S., Robert Frost among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet 's Own Biographical Contexts and Associations, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 1996. * Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 54: American Poets, 1880-1945, Third Series, Gale, 1987. * Dodd, Loring Holmes, Celebrities at Our Hearthside, Dresser, 1959. * Doyle, John R., Jr., Poetry of Robert Frost: An Analysis, Hallier, 1965. * Evans, William R., editor, Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship, University Press of New England, 1981. * Faggen, Robert, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, University of Michigan Press, 1997. * Fleissner, Robert F., Frost 's Road Taken, Peter Lang (New York), 1996. * Francis, Lesley Lee, The Frost Family 's Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim, University of Missouri Press (Columbia), 1994. * Francis, Robert, recorder, A Time to Talk: Conversations and Indiscretions, University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. * Frost, Lesley, New Hampshire 's Child: Derry Journals of Lesley Frost, State University of New York Press, 1969. * Gerber, Philip L., Robert Frost, Twayne, 1966. * Gould, Jean, Robert Frost: The Aim Was Song, Dodd, 1964. * Grade, Arnold, editor, Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost, State University of New York Press, 1972. * Greiner, Donald J., Checklist of Robert Frost, Charles E. Merrill, 1969. * Greiner, Donald J. and Charles Sanders, Robert Frost: The Poet and His Critics, American Library Association, 1974. * Hall, Donald, Remembering Poets, Hater, 1977. * Ingebretsen, Ed, Robert Frost: Star and a Stone Boat: Aspects of a Grammar of Belief, International Scholars Publications (San Francisco), 1994. * Isaacs, Emily Elizabeth, Introduction to Robert Frost, A. Swallow, 1962, reprinted, Haskell House, 1972. * Jarrell, Randall, Poetry and the Age, Vintage, 1955. * Jennings, Elizabeth, Frost, Barnes & Noble, 1966. * Kearns, Katherine, Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1994. * Kilcup, Karen L., Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition, University of Michigan Press, 1998. * Lathem, Edward C. and Lawrence Thompson, editors, Robert Frost: Farm Poultryman; The Story of Robert Frost 's Career As a Breeder and Fancier of Hens, Dartmouth Publishers, 1963. * Lathem, Edward C., editor, Interviews with Robert Frost, Rinehart, 1966. * Lathem, Edward C., editor, A Concordance to the Poetry of Robert Frost, Holt Information Systems, 1971. * Lentriccia, Frank, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self, Duke University Press, 1975. * Lowell, Amy, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, Macmillan, 1917. * Maxson, H.A., On the Sonnets of Robert Frost, McFarland and Co., 1997. * Mertins, Marshall Louis and Esther Mertins, Intervals of Robert Frost: A Critical Bibliography, University of California Press, 1947, reprinted, Russell, 1975. * Mertins, Marshall Louis, Robert Frost: Life and Talks— Walking, University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. * Meyers, Jeffrey, Robert Frost: A Biography, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1996. * Muir, Helen, Frost in Florida: A Memoir, Valiant Press (Miami), 1995. * Munson, Gorham B., Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense, G. H. Doran, 1927, reprinted, Haskell House, 1969. * Newdick, Robert Spangler, Newdick 's Season of Frost: An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost, edited by William A. Sutton, State University of New York Press, 1976. * Orton, Vrest, Vermont Afternoons with Robert Frost, Tuttle, 1971. * Pearce, Roy Harvey, The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton, 1961. * Poirier, Richard, Robert Frost, Oxford University Press, 1977. * Pound, Ezra, The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, New Directions, 1954. * Pritchard, William H., Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, 1984. * Reeve, Franklin D., Robert Frost in Russia, Little, Brown, 1964. * Richardson, Mark, The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics, University of Illinois Press, 1997. * Rosenthal, M. L., The Modern Poets, Oxford University Press, 1965. * Shepley, Elizabeth, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, Holt, 1960. * Sohn, David A. and Richard Tyre, Frost: The Poet and His Poetry, Holt, 1967. * Spiller, Robert E. and others, Literary History of the United States, 4th revised edition, Macmillan, 1974. * Squires, Radcliffe, Major Themes of Robert Frost, University of Michigan Press, 1969. * Tharpe, Jac, editor, Frost: Centennial Essays II, University Press of Mississippi, 1976. * Thompson, Lawrence, Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost, Holt, 1942, reprinted, Russell, 1975. * Thompson, Lawrence, Robert Frost, University of Minnesota Press, 1959. * Thompson, Lawrence, editor, Selected Letters of Robert Frost, Holt, 1964. * Thompson, Lawrence, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915, Holt, 1966. * Thompson, Lawrence, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938, Holt, 1970. * Thompson, Lawrence and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938-1963, Holt, 1976. * Tutein, David W., Robert Frost 's Reading: An Annotated Bibliography, Edwin Mellen, 1997. * Unger, Leonard and William Van O 'Connor, Poems for Study, Holt, 1953. * Untermeyer, Louis, Makers of the Modern World, Simon & Schuster, 1955. * Untermeyer, Louis, Lives of the Poets, Simon & Schuster, 1959. * Untermeyer, Louis, Robert Frost: A Backward Look, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964. * Van Egmond, Peter, The Critical Reception of Robert Frost, G. K. Hall, 1974. * Waggoner, Hyatt H., American Poetry from the Puritans to the Present, Houghton, 1968. * Wagner, Linda Welshimer, editor, Robert Frost: The Critical Reception, B. Franklin, 1977. * West, Herbert Faulkner, Mind on the Wing, Coward, 1947. * Wilcox, Earl J., His "Incalculable" Influence on Others: Essays on Robert Frost in Our Time, English Literary Studies, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia), 1994. * Winters, Yvor, The Function of Criticism, A. Swallow, 1957.
PERIODICALS
* America, December 24, 1977. * American Literature, January, 1948. * Atlantic, February, 1964, November, 1966. * Bookman, January, 1924. * Books, May 10, 1942. * Boston Transcript, December 2, 1916. * Commonweal, May 4, 1962, April 1, 1977. * New Republic, February 20, 1915. * New York Herald Tribune, November 18, 1928. * New York Times, October 19, 1986. * New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1988. * New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1972; August 18, 1974. * Poetry, May, 1913. * Saturday Review of Literature, May 30, 1936; April 25, 1942. * South Atlantic Quarterly, summer, 1958. * Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 1967. * Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1957. * Wisconsin Library Bulletin, July, 1962. * Yale Review, spring, 1934, summer, 1948.
OBITUARIES:
PERIODICALS * Current Biography, March, 1963. * Illustrated London News, February 9, 1963. * Newsweek, February 11, 1963. * New York Times, January 30, 1963. * Publishers Weekly, February 11, 1963.

Bibliography: Edwin Mellen, 1997. * Unger, Leonard and William Van O 'Connor, Poems for Study, Holt, 1953. * Untermeyer, Louis, Makers of the Modern World, Simon & Schuster, 1955. * Untermeyer, Louis, Lives of the Poets, Simon & Schuster, 1959. * Untermeyer, Louis, Robert Frost: A Backward Look, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964. * Van Egmond, Peter, The Critical Reception of Robert Frost, G. K. Hall, 1974. * Waggoner, Hyatt H., American Poetry from the Puritans to the Present, Houghton, 1968. * Wagner, Linda Welshimer, editor, Robert Frost: The Critical Reception, B. Franklin, 1977. * West, Herbert Faulkner, Mind on the Wing, Coward, 1947. * Wilcox, Earl J., His "Incalculable" Influence on Others: Essays on Robert Frost in Our Time, English Literary Studies, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia), 1994. * Winters, Yvor, The Function of Criticism, A. Swallow, 1957. PERIODICALS * America, December 24, 1977. * American Literature, January, 1948. * Atlantic, February, 1964, November, 1966. * Bookman, January, 1924. * Books, May 10, 1942. * Boston Transcript, December 2, 1916. * Commonweal, May 4, 1962, April 1, 1977. * New Republic, February 20, 1915. * New York Herald Tribune, November 18, 1928. * New York Times, October 19, 1986. * New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1988. * New York Times Magazine, June 11, 1972; August 18, 1974. * Poetry, May, 1913. * Saturday Review of Literature, May 30, 1936; April 25, 1942. * South Atlantic Quarterly, summer, 1958. * Times Literary Supplement, December 14, 1967. * Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1957. * Wisconsin Library Bulletin, July, 1962. * Yale Review, spring, 1934, summer, 1948. * Current Biography, March, 1963. * Illustrated London News, February 9, 1963. * Newsweek, February 11, 1963. * New York Times, January 30, 1963. * Publishers Weekly, February 11, 1963.