As we end the 20th century a rough consensus has emerged. The pre-eminent poets writing in English have been Yeats, Eliot and Frost. A bit lower many would place Stevens, Pound and maybe Auden. I note that Americans score well; also that, taken as a whole, this has been a glorious century for poetry in English, perhaps the best since the 17th century.
Jay Parini's new biography of Frost enters a strange situation. We already have the three-volume biography (1966-76) by Lawrance Thompson and RH Winnick. That project has a grotesque aspect. Thompson was chosen as biographer by Frost himself, but well into his undertaking Thompson discovered that he loathed the poet. To every aspect of his subject, Thompson gave the darkest possible interpretation. When Thompson died, the third volume was completed by Winnick.
In 1984, William Pritchard, an Amherst professor, came to the rescue with Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Pritchard, who had known Frost well, provided a credible but far from hagiographic portrait. The best approach to Frost thus became Thompson-Winnick for their accumulation of fact, but corrected by the judgements of Pritchard.
Can Parini, professor, poet, novelist, add anything? Yes. He has uncovered much in letters, tapes and other material. He has also conducted many interviews with people who knew Frost at various stages of his life. The varied voices in montage produce a portrait that is credible and often very moving.
It bears repeating that the public image of Frost is far from the truth. He was not a kind of cuddly, reassuring, white-haired Will Rogers who also wrote some easy poems. From the beginning, he had a steely determination to be a great poet. He attended Dartmouth and Harvard only briefly and rebelliously, but he was comprehensively learned. The title of his first volume, A Boy's Will (1913), established him as a poet when he was almost 40. That noun "will" is important. William James wrote The Will to Believe, Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea, Nietzsche The Will to Power. These were declarations of a "will" against pessimism and nihilism, moral reconstruction efforts. Frost, too, was a man of that certain late 19th-century outlook.
Frost's family history is something out of the House of Atreus. There were terrible tensions in his marriage to Elinor White. They lost their firstborn son in infancy, an adult son to suicide, a daughter and Frost's sister to madness and another daughter to early illness. Tuberculosis ran in his family. No wonder Frost had spells of melancholy. But his "will" prevailed.
As Parini makes clear, there were also joys, serious friendships, intense intellectual life, artistic triumphs, boyish mischievousness, animosities (against Eliot, Pound and others), many acts of courtesy and love, and always the insistence on his unique voice in poetry, prose and lecture. That voice is recognisable in every phrase.
Parini has uncovered many special things. When Frost was courting Elinor, who was at St Lawrence, he "published" an edition of two copies containing five short poems. Leather-bound, it was called Twilight. He journeyed to St Lawrence and presented it to her. When she was unimpressed, he destroyed his own copy. Her copy later became a collector's item.
As a Dartmouth professor myself, I treasure this next one. After collecting essays from a class of Dartmouth students, Frost asked whether what they had written had any permanent significance, if only to themselves. No one raised his hand. Frost threw the essays in the wastebasket, saying that if they were unimportant to the students, they were unimportant to him.
Parini is, with occasional lapses, a skilful literary critic. I can also report that there is almost no academic jargon in his book. Yet amid all his expert commentary, he misses one or two important things. Frost swung for the bleachers, by which I mean that at times he consciously went up against such masters as Pascal and Dante. Parini doesn't always give evidence of having appreciated these nuances.
But he does accurately place Frost in friendly connection with the Southern Agrarian group of poets. Like Frost, they used traditional verse forms, but refined them to express modern themes of personal and cosmic loneliness, existential irony and our complex relations with history and nature. Parini is surely right that Frost was a New England agrarian individualist. In a footnote, he discloses that Frost's wife Elinor hated the New Deal even more than he did.
This review first appeared in the New York-based National Review
Robert Frost: A life
Jay Parini
Heinemann ?20
