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The third installment of Harvard's five-volume edition of Robert
Frost's correspondence. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3:
1929-1936 is the latest installment in Harvard's five-volume
edition of the poet's correspondence. It presents 601 letters, of
which 425 are previously uncollected. The critically acclaimed
first volume, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year,
included nearly 300 previously uncollected letters, and the second
volume 350 more. 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. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by
a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, these letters
illuminate a triumphant and difficult period in the life of a
towering literary figure.
One of the acknowledged giants of twentieth-century American
literature, Robert Frost was a public figure much celebrated in his
day. Although his poetry reached a wide audience, the private
Frost-pensive, mercurial, and often very funny-remains less
appreciated. Following upon the publication of Frost's notebooks
and collected prose, The Letters of Robert Frost is the first major
edition of the poet's written correspondence. The hundreds of
previously unpublished letters in these annotated volumes deepen
our understanding and appreciation of this most complex and subtle
of verbal artists. Volume One traverses the years of Frost's
earliest poems to the acclaimed collections North of Boston and
Mountain Interval that cemented his reputation as one of the
leading lights of his era. The drama of his personal life-as well
as the growth of the audacious mind that produced his
poetry-unfolds before us in Frost's day-to-day missives. These
rhetorical performances are at once revealing and tantalizingly
evasive about relationships with family and close friends,
including the poet Edward Thomas. We listen in as Frost defines
himself against contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats,
and we witness the evolution of his thoughts about prosody, sound,
style, and other aspects of poetic craft. In its literary interest
and sheer display of personality, Frost's correspondence is on a
par with the letters of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and Samuel
Beckett. The Letters of Robert Frost holds hours of pleasurable
reading for lovers of Frost and modern American poetry.
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920-1928 is the second
installment of Harvard's five-volume edition of the poet's
correspondence. Nearly three hundred letters in the
critically-acclaimed first volume had never before been collected;
here, close to four hundred are gathered for the first time. Volume
2 includes letters to some 160 correspondents: family and friends;
colleagues, fellow writers, visual artists, editors, and
publishers; educators of all kinds; farmers, librarians, and
admirers. In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems,
New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced 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.
Robert Frost was a masterful prose stylist, often brilliant and
always engaging. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a
biographical glossary, chronology, and detailed index, these
letters are both the record of a remarkable literary life and a
unique contribution to American literature.
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