Pensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and Beckett.
Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Abbreviations -- Editorial Principles -- Introduction -- Chapter 1. "Book Farmer"--Chapter 2. "The Guessed of Michigan"--Chapter 3. A New Regime at Amherst -- Chapter 4. To Michigan Again (for a Lifetime in a Year) -- Chapter 5. Ten Weeks a Year in Amherst, Fourteen Once in Europe -- Biographical Glossary of Correspondents -- Chronology: February 1920-December 1928 -- Acknowledgments -- Index
Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion--his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War--as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control. Edited and annotated by Robert Faggen, the notebooks are cross-referenced to mark thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.
Pensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and Beckett.
"In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Robert 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"--Dust jacket flap
Robert Frost was a practicing farmer, a skilled naturalist and one of America's best-loved poets. His body of work provides a vivid and compelling narrative of New England's changing environment--though it can be hard to discern when its parts are scattered through hundreds of different poems, voices and moods. This book pieces together Frost's environmental commentary, examining his poems thematically and in a logical order. In them, homesteads are carved out of the forest, families make their living from an obdurate land, property is abandoned when it fails to sell, and plants and animals reclaim deserted farms. Frost bemoaned the loss of people from the land but also celebrated the flora and fauna that thrived in fallow fields and empty barns.
A wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind selection of Berryman’s correspondence with friends, loved ones, writers, and editors, showcasing the turbulent, fascinating life and mind of one of America’s major poets. The Selected Letters of John Berryman assembles for the first time the poet’s voluminous correspondence. Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent a few weeks before his death in 1972, Berryman tells his story in his own words. Included are more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his art within the confines of the publishing industry and contemporary critical expectations. Correspondence with Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich, Saul Bellow, and other writers demonstrates Berryman’s sustained involvement in the development of literary culture in the postwar United States. We also see Berryman responding in detail to the work of writers such as Carolyn Kizer and William Meredith and encouraging the next generation—Edward Hoagland, Valerie Trueblood, and others. The letters show Berryman to be an energetic and generous interlocutor, but they also make plain his struggles with personal and familial trauma, at every stage of his career. An introduction by editors Philip Coleman and Calista McRae explains the careful selection of letters and contextualizes the materials within Berryman’s career. Reinforcing the critical and creative interconnectedness of Berryman’s work and personal life, The Selected Letters confirms his place as one of the most original voices of his generation and opens new horizons for appreciating and interpreting his poems.
The Life of Robert Frost presents a unique and rich approach to the poet that includes original genealogical research concerning Frost’s ancestors, and a demonstration of how mental illness plagued the Frost family and heavily influenced Frost’s poetry. A widely revealing biography of Frost that discusses his often perplexing journey from humble roots to poetic fame, revealing new details of Frost’s life Takes a unique approach by giving attention to Frost’s genealogy and the family history of mental illness, presenting a complete picture of Frost’s complexity Discusses the traumatic effect on Frost of his father’s early death and the impact on his poetry and outlook Presents original information on the influence of his mother’s Swedenborgian mysticism
