Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry by Adam Plunkett; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 512 pp., $37
Adam Plunkett is an eloquent and meticulous writer, and his new biographical study of Robert Frost, Love and Need, is a welcome addition to a long list of excellent books on the poet. In it, Plunkett sets out to trace connections between Frost’s life and his work—an inherently precarious undertaking. As one of Frost’s many biographers, I have skated on the same thin ice, and I appreciate the dangers. Poems arise from many sources, most of them hidden. Yet Plunkett seems to have understood the difficulties before him, and his work adds handsomely to our understanding of Frost, bringing us closer to the poems themselves.
Frost’s poems grew out of his circumstances, especially his time spent on farms in rural New Hampshire and Vermont, that area he famously called “north of Boston.” Frost, it should be said, wasn’t much of a farmer, though he liked to keep a farm—a small apple orchard, some vegetables, a chicken coop—in his back yard. The imagery of his poetry is largely that of the New England countryside, with its distinct seasons and microseasons. His poetry is time frozen: the “modern” world rarely obtrudes. And it’s a social space, too. There is hardly a Frost poem that doesn’t have a person somewhere in view (he often noted this himself), even if that person is the speaker himself. Like the poet, that speaker is often a person with a sharply idiosyncratic viewpoint, one who conjures the conversational rhythms and dialects of human speech, as in “Mending Wall,” where he writes:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Frost was not, as Plunkett shrewdly observes, an “optimistic rationalist” like his benefactor, Alexander Meiklejohn, the president of Amherst who sought out Frost at his farm in New Hampshire and invited him to join the faculty soon after the poet and his family returned from England in 1915. “Frost, an anti-rationalist in the tradition of Burke and Milton, believed that in matters beyond the purview of reason one was guided best by passion that one might as well call prejudice,” writes Plunkett. Frost took against Meiklejohn for his “vague enthusiasm rather than sober reflection, for an airy Romanticism rather than a classical conception of one’s own capacity for evil.” This is the real Frost, I think: the New England Puritan at heart, who resisted the “anti-Puritan anti-American” attitudes of Meiklejohn and his colleague, Stark Young, a man whom Frost despised because of his homosexuality and liberal politics. (It has always depressed me to see how mean-spirited Frost could be at times. But he was only human.)
Frost was often jealous of other writers—a point elaborated at vast length by his first biographer, Lawrance Thompson. Frost was also, like many writers, a self-obsessed person who worked hard to make himself agreeable to others. The version of himself he projected to his reading public was that of a sweet, wry, and rural man, the farmer-poet. He often presented himself as someone without a great deal of book learning: that was part of his appeal to the masses. Alas, this was an elaborate head fake, as John F. Lynen pointed out many years ago in The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost, one of the best early books on the poet. It was published in 1960, a few years before Frost’s death, and it brilliantly paints him as a writer in the tradition of the Greek and Roman pastoral poets. He wrote as a countryman, with emphasis on as. He was indeed an accomplished and learned man who had studied Greek and Latin and read deeply in the classical British authors, Emerson, and others.
One of the pleasures of Love and Need comes in Plunkett’s ability to reveal many of the sources of Frost’s creative inspiration, as when, in his deft reading of “Birches,” Plunkett traces parallels with Milton’s “Lycidas.” Frost, of course, “had a habit of covering the tracks of his influences.” And this was “all the more so” when that influence ran deep. On the surface, there are few similarities of style here: Milton was aggressively allusive and learned, prone to writing visionary poems in the grand style; the opposite is true of Frost. But Frost’s engagement with the tradition of “Lycidas” seems worth considering at length. “Milton’s learned poem,” Plunkett writes, “[was] an imitation not of Theocritus but of Virgil’s learned imitation of Theocritus, who actually imitated something of the manner of the folk poetry of his day.” Exactly how these poems relate is not easily assessed, even after reading and rereading Plunkett’s analysis; but I found myself interested enough to reread “Lycidas” and consider what distant echoes might be found in Frost, who wrote his poem in Beaconsfield, near London, only a few miles from where Milton wrote Paradise Lost.
The depth of Frost’s literary education becomes evident as Plunkett takes us back to the poet’s time in high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, when he seems to have read Schopenhauer as well as Plato’s Republic—experiences that he carried with him throughout his long life. In these sources, he found some version of his notion of the transmigration of souls, an idea that figures in any number of his poems and prose pieces. I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that Frost’s mother, a Scottish immigrant, was a devout Swedenborgian, with a strong mystical side to her; this impulse, in Frost, lived in delicate contrast to his wry, materialistic side, represented in his life by his father, Will Frost, who remains something of an enigmatic figure.
Frost himself in later life characterized his father as “importunate and impatient,” writes Plunkett. “Frost said at times that his father had clearly been fond of him, that his brutality has been mixed with love; at other times he said his father had been inscrutable and that he could never tell if his father had cared about him.” Frost’s only sister, Jeanie, showed a great deal of ambivalence toward their father, but she believed that “he certainly thought a lot of us.” She also said that after his death, it seemed as if “his ghost followed us from San Francisco to Lawrence.”
The life journey of Frost—from boyhood in San Francisco to his troubled teenage years in Lawrence to his hard times at Dartmouth and Harvard, through his early marriage, the years he spent on the poultry farm in Derry, New Hampshire, his English sojourn, and his climb to fame as a poet—is well-known. In recounting it, Plunkett draws on a range of biographers from Sidney Cox and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant through Thompson and any number of more recent biographers. In Love and Need, Plunkett displays an impressively broad and detailed knowledge of this trajectory.
He spends a good deal of time on Frost’s awkward, often painful and overwrought relationship to Thompson, whom Frost named as his official biographer, much to his later regret. Thompson was part of the mix in Ripton, Vermont, where Frost spent long periods on his small farm, and where his companions were Kay and Ted Morrison. (Ted directed the School of English at Bread Loaf.) Frost had an affair with Kay. She likewise had a special relationship with Thompson, though the extent of their feelings for each other remains unclear and subject to lots of hearsay. In any case, there was trouble on the mountain, and Thompson died before he finished his three-volume biography, which has always seemed to me a work of resentment toward Frost. Thompson was no reader of poetry: his tin ear for verse undermines his occasional forays into criticism. But given his unique access to Frost, Thompson’s book has considerable value as a document. The past 60 years, post-Thompson, have seen a rich tradition of Frost biography emerge, with a lot of effort put into correcting Thompson’s various misimpressions.
Frost has been lucky in his critics. In Poetry and the Age (1953), Randall Jarrell, who understood Frost as well as anyone ever has, noted his “stubborn truthfulness, his willingness to admit both the falseness in the cliché and the falseness in the contradiction of the cliché.” Lionel Trilling famously insulted Frost at his 85th birthday celebration by calling him a terrifying poet: “I have to say that my Frost … is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, old simplicities and ways of feeling; he is anything but.” Frost objected, as he would, but generously wrote to Trilling on June 18, 1959, that he was free to give his opinions, adding, “No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body.” That clash of arms has been loud and constant, with various opinions on the meaning of many of Frost’s poems, and includes important books and articles on Frost by Richard Poirier, William H. Pritchard, Karen Kilcup, David Orr, Robert Faggen, Henry Hart, and crucially, Donald Sheehy.
Adam Plunkett has reviewed the literature on Frost carefully, and he had access to recently available letters and diaries that were unavailable to many earlier biographers and critics. He uses this material wisely. Every major writer needs a fresh biography as times and generations pass, as new sources become available, as habits of mind and literary perspectives change. Love and Need does its readers a service by drawing them back into conversation with the poems themselves.
