“Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” Reviewed

Robert Frost presented himself as a simple man. Not for him the literary circles of London or the stilted dinner parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was he at home in academia. He dropped out of college twice, citing a need for independence, and although he spent his middle and later years teaching at universities, he was constantly fleeing them, retreating to farms in rural New England. He didn’t read book reviews—or so he claimed—and he didn’t write them, preferring instead to let his poems find their natural audience, which turned out to be a wide one. He mocked literary critics and shunned intellectual debate, though he was a great talker and loved to tell stories. His ideal days, he said, were spent in the countryside, going on long, solitary walks or chatting with his farmer neighbors, appreciating the patterns and tones of their speech.

The simplicity of his life informed his work. Ascending to fame at a time when Anglo-American poetry was growing increasingly difficult and obscure, Frost set himself apart. A lyric poet inspired by Longfellow, he described the hard lives of country folk—a war widow, a hired man—and the hard landscapes that they worked to tame. In “ ‘Out, Out—,’ ” a poem from 1916, a boy loses his hand to a buzz saw and dies, perhaps from shock; his family, “since they / Were not the ones dead,” swiftly move on. Some of Frost’s poems have the lilting quality of lullabies; others seem to deliver their morals in unambiguous terms. “I took the one less traveled by,” declares the speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” perhaps Frost’s most famous poem, after meeting a fork in the path. “And that has made all the difference.” His were, and still are, poems for everyone: schoolchildren, casual readers, the makers of greeting cards. One doesn’t need to be versed in the literary tradition to read a poem by Frost—only, as one poem goes, to be “versed in country things.”

But, as with most aspects of Frost’s persona, his simplicity was a pose, an act, one that concealed its opposite. Frost was very much a man of letters, a classicist and, alongside his future wife, Elinor, a co-valedictorian of his high school, in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was steeped in the literary tradition, as well as in philosophy and psychology (he was a big fan of William James). Ambitious and competitive, he orchestrated positive reviews of his early work and became enraged about negative reviews of later collections. A failed poultry farmer and a listless homesteader, he never quite fit in with the country people who populate his poems.

The poems, too, are deceptive. A Frost verse may be written in plain language, but it is tonally ambiguous and open to competing interpretations. Take “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” from 1923, which ends like this:

Are these lines said gratefully or ruefully? Is the speaker appreciating a peaceful winter scene or barely suppressing a death wish? One could ask similar questions about “The Road Not Taken”: How sincere is our speaker, who imagines his future self “telling this with a sigh”? Has his choice of road made any difference at all? It’s tempting to understand the poem as ironical—a “cunning nugget of nihilism,” as Dan Chiasson wrote in this magazine—but, as soon as you do, its rousing ending and triumphant “I” urge you to consider that it may well be in earnest.

To read Frost is to wonder which parts of a poem to take seriously—and to sense his presence over your shoulder, laughing at your mistakes. “I like to fool . . . to be mischievous,” he told the critic Richard Poirier in an interview, in 1960, for The Paris Review. One could, he suggested, “unsay everything I said, nearly.” By his own account, he operated by “suggestiveness and double entendre and hinting”; he never said anything outright, and, if he seemed to, then suspicion was warranted. In both his poetry and his personal life, Frost was a trickster, saying one thing and almost always meaning another, and perhaps another still. He was like the playful boy described in the lovely poem “Birches” (1915), bending tree branches beyond recognition, then letting them snap back to their natural state, all for his own amusement. As readers of his poetry, we’re just along for the ride.

The critic Adam Plunkett expertly teases out the many meanings of Frost’s poems in “Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Blending biography and criticism, Plunkett shows how the circumstances of Frost’s peripatetic life gave rise to some of his most successful poems. As in the best critical biographies, Plunkett does not merely track down real-world inspiration for a given work. Rather, he brings together Frost’s personal life, literary sources, and publication history to enrich our understanding of the poems, then uses the poems to enhance our understanding of the life. The result is a thorough, elegant, and, at times, surprising study of Frost, who emerges as a remarkably complex poet and a compelling but complicated man.

Plunkett is not the first critic to trouble the popular conception of Frost as a wise woodsman dispensing comfort and inspiration. Astute readers have been challenging the naïve interpretation of Frost’s work for decades. The effort could be said to have started with Lionel Trilling, who, at a party for Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, declared the guest of honor to be “anything but” a writer who “reassures us by affirmation of old virtues, simplicities, pieties and ways of feeling.” Frost was, rather, “a terrifying poet” and “a tragic poet.” (Frost, listening in the audience, appeared nonplussed.) Trilling was channelling the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who, for years, had urged readers to turn away from Frost’s sentimental poems and consult instead the writer’s darker, spikier efforts, such as “Provide, Provide,” a sardonic paean to success, and “Acquainted with the Night,” as lonely a poem as there ever was.

Frost’s first major biographer, Lawrance Thompson, seemed to take his cue from such critics. In a three-volume biography published after Frost’s death in 1963, Thompson emphasized Frost’s darkness, detailing the poet’s frequent depressions and his jealous rages, such that reviewers declared Frost to be “a monster of egotism” and “a mean-spirited megalomaniac.” In the decades since, critics and biographers have pushed back on this dim view of Frost. William H. Pritchard, in “Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered,” from 1993, which has long been the gold-standard biography for many Frost enthusiasts, emphasized the poet’s ingenuity and playfulness, both in his work and in his life. Even when Frost was boastful or inconsiderate, Pritchard suggested, one couldn’t help but appreciate his cleverness.

Plunkett, like Pritchard, admires Frost in all his guises. Throughout, he stresses the poet’s multiplicity, his ability to exhibit opposing attitudes in the same poem, sometimes in the same line. Interpreting “The Pasture,” an early poem, Plunkett shows how its refrain—“You come too”—can be understood “in at least four ways at once,” as “a suggestion, an insistence, a command, a plain statement.” Recognizing all possible meanings, Plunkett argues, allows us to access “a mind in its nakedness weighing how it means to use the phrase, why it means to use it, and what it wants and needs of you.” To read the line simply as a benign invitation—or, conversely, as a straightforward command—is to miss the point: the poem is exploring the different ways that people connect, rather than insisting on one kind of intimacy.

“Love and Need”—which takes its title from Frost’s poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” from 1934—proceeds in loosely chronological fashion, taking us from love poems that Frost wrote for Elinor during their courtship to later poems such as “The Gift Outright,” which an eighty-six-year-old Frost recited at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration. (Kennedy went on to eulogize Frost at Amherst College, noting that many readers “preferred to ignore his darker truths,” just weeks before the President’s assassination.) Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874, moved across the country following the death of his dissolute, larger-than-life father, and made a series of homes in mill towns north of Boston with his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and his younger sister. He came to poetry in high school—his first poem, “La Noche Triste,” composed when he was a sophomore, was inspired by a book about the Aztec Empire—and published the lyric “My Butterfly” in The Independent in 1894. A long fallow period followed, during which he married, raised four children, tried his hand at farming, and taught high school, all the while writing poems but publishing very few. In 1912, he moved his family to England, where he met Ezra Pound, who championed his work. Frost’s first book, “A Boy’s Will,” was published in 1913. At thirty-nine, he finally had a taste of literary success.

In Plunkett’s hands, “A Boy’s Will,” sometimes seen as one of Frost’s less impressive collections, becomes newly intriguing. (In a generally positive review, Pound called the book “a bit raw.”) Plunkett reveals the book to be a “spiritual autobiography” modelled on Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam A. H. H.” (1850), which commemorates the poet’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam. There are striking similarities between Frost’s collection and Tennyson’s poem; many of Frost’s poems refer directly to a corresponding canto in Tennyson’s work. The difference is that Frost’s poems are mourning not a friend but the pastoral life the poet has left behind, and mourning, too, his eldest child, Elliott, who died at age three, of cholera, in 1900. “Though not a literal story of mourning, A Boy’s Will suffuses its every texture in an atmosphere of mourning,” Plunkett writes. “The poems are tinged throughout with a sense of amorphous loss, the other side of which is a depth of gratitude.”

The connections Plunkett draws between Frost’s lyric poems and their literary influences are valuable, particularly for anyone taken in by Frost’s aw-shucks persona. Though Frost sometimes disavowed his literary education—“I haven’t had a very literary life,” he told Poirier in the Paris Review interview—he was an avid reader of poetry and the owner of several well-thumbed poetry anthologies, which he regarded as superior to any literary magazine. (Too many critics in the latter.) He used canonical poems to inspire his own. The early poem “Flower-Gathering” is patterned on “Carpe Diem,” a love song from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” and the late poem “The Wind and the Rain” owes something to Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode.” Frost’s range of references was as impressive as that of any modernist poet—though his poems, unlike T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” didn’t come with a set of footnotes.

At times, Plunkett’s painstaking efforts to track each poem’s influences can be tiresome. My appreciation of the exquisite late sonnet “The Silken Tent” did not increase upon learning that it borrows an image from the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick’s “The Bracelet to Julia.” But, more often, Plunkett’s work pays off. Many know that “The Road Not Taken” was written for the English poet Edward Thomas, Frost’s close friend, a romantic and an idealist, who, walking with Frost, often dithered about what path to take. But it’s less well known that Frost was inspired by a poem by Emerson, “Étienne de la Boéce,” about Montaigne’s relationship with a close friend. With these sources in mind, we read the poem’s tone and aims differently: Frost may be mocking Thomas’s indecisiveness, but he is also legitimating the dilemma of choice. The poem is skeptical of the idea of life-defining actions but not entirely cynical, Plunkett concludes; it is “not a denial of epiphanic self-realization but a questioning of it.” Situating the poem within a tradition softens its bite.

In tracking Frost’s influences, Plunkett shows just how invested Frost was in the literary tradition—how the poet had, despite his protestations, led a “literary life.” Unlike those who obeyed the modernist imperative to “make it new” by inventing poetic styles and forms, Frost stuck with the templates available to him but changed them in subtle ways. He didn’t slavishly imitate the poets he admired but, rather, riffed on them. This approach produced, in Plunkett’s estimation, “the greatest achievements of Frost’s lyric style: to contain the growing complexity of his poetry in forms that were no more difficult than those preceding them, that were in most instances simpler, belying the turbulence one is made to feel under the surface.”

What accounts for this turbulence? Frost offered one answer in a letter from 1914, in which he described the unusual rhythm of his poems. He preferred to write in regular meter, usually “the very regular pre-established accent and measure of blank verse,” but he also worked to incorporate “the very irregular accent and measure” of human speech. “I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation,” he wrote. “I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle.”

That “strained relation” is what we find in a poem like “Home Burial,” which appeared in Frost’s acclaimed second collection, “North of Boston,” from 1914. The poem, one of Frost’s finest, comprises a dialogue between a husband and wife who have recently buried a child in a small graveyard near their home. The husband, a loquacious man, wants to talk about the loss; his wife thinks he doesn’t know how to talk about it and tries to leave the house when he broaches the topic. Frost captures the friction between the couple:

The dialogue is both realist, full of the ejaculations and repetitions that characterize human speech, and poetic, with only the occasional anapest interrupting the poem’s iambic pentameter. So much remains unsaid between the couple; the wife’s gestures—her hand on the latch—say more than her words. The poem ends abruptly, with the wife halfway out the door and the husband threatening to bring her back “by force.” There is no epiphany and no resolution, only a rupture that even the husband’s eloquence can’t heal.

“Home Burial” doesn’t appear in “Love and Need,” nor do some of the better-known poems from “North of Boston,” including “Mending Wall” and “After Apple-Picking.” On the whole, Plunkett gives the collection short shrift, perhaps because it is Frost’s most original book and thus his least indebted to the literary tradition. Though there are precedents for Frost’s dialogue poems—Virgil’s Eclogues, Browning’s dramatic monologues—they are nonetheless distinctive and hard to pin down. They are somehow both fiction and poetry, at once evidently crafted and seemingly transcribed. “It speaks, and it is poetry,” Frost’s friend Edward Thomas wrote in a review. He rightly observed that “North of Boston” was “one of the most revolutionary books of modern times.”

When Frost returned from England, in 1915, he was pleased to see that he’d become a public figure in absentia. The New Republic, a recent addition to the magazine world, carried both a poem of his and a positive review of “North of Boston,” by the critic and poet Amy Lowell. More positive reviews followed, as did dinner invitations, magazine commissions, and a teaching opportunity at Amherst College. It was the beginning of a swift and irreversible ascent. In the decades that followed, universities competed over Frost, young people flocked to him, and statesmen solicited his opinions on world affairs. His books sold well, even those which were reviewed tepidly, and he was frequently invited to lecture and to read. By 1939, his publisher could describe him as “the best-loved poet in America without a question.” He won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times—the only poet ever to do so.

Becoming a public figure, one called on to perform himself to audiences nationwide, affected Frost’s style. Plunkett describes the change as “a shift in relative emphasis from experience to reflection,” and he thinks the results were mixed. “At their undramatic best,” he writes, Frost’s “reflective lyrics would embody ideas and impressions with an elegant compactness unmatched in his earlier work.” One thinks of “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923), a tight, gemlike poem that muses on impermanence. But “at its worst,” Plunkett writes, Frost’s new style amounted to “versified thinking rather than poetry unfolding in its own movements of thought.” A poem such as “New Hampshire” (1923), which, according to Plunkett, Frost wrote in “a spirit of reactive pique” after Eliot published “The Waste Land,” is long, loose, and undramatic; it lacks the force of “Home Burial,” in part because its characters don’t come alive. It is a poem written to do something in the world—namely, to shore up Frost’s reputation as superior to his rival’s—rather than a poem, like so many of his greatest, that captures the world as it is.

Roughly half of “Love and Need” dwells on Frost’s later decades, a difficult period for the poet, and Plunkett focusses more on biography than on criticism. In 1934, Frost lost his favorite child, Marjorie, to a postpartum infection. Four years later, Elinor died of a heart attack while the couple was wintering in Florida. Frost had been known to complain to friends about Elinor—she “has never been of any earthly use to me,” he confided to the poet Louis Untermeyer—and had at times felt oppressed by her sullenness. (In one poem, he figured his wife as “my sorrow.”) Elinor, for her part, sometimes resembled the wife in “Home Burial”: sad, taciturn, determined to keep her distance from her husband. But the two had been together for decades, and without her Frost was at sea. “I shall be all right in public, but I can’t tell you how I’m going to behave when I am alone,” he wrote to a friend.

Put simply, he behaved badly. He drank far more and acted erratically. He became infatuated with Kay Morrison, a married woman twenty-four years his junior, whom he employed as a secretary, and he badgered her to leave her husband. He had strained relations with his grown children—one of whom died by suicide, despite Frost’s belated attempts to help him—and insulted old friends. To the critic Bernard DeVoto, a longtime friend who fell out with Frost during this period, the great poet appeared nothing short of “evil,” a selfish and domineering man who ruined the lives of others.

This was “Frost in his third act,” as Plunkett calls it, a man who, in private, seemed far different from the benevolent sage he played in public. Plunkett argues that too much emphasis has been placed on this version of Frost, “this storyteller driven in the early years after his wife’s death to extremes of grief and self-laceration.” He thus works to explain away Frost’s confessed shortcomings as a husband and a father. He also notes that the poet’s affair with Morrison was never substantiated and points out the various biases of those who testified to it. Plunkett aims to be fair, but his efforts, at times, seem defensive of the poet. When you admire your subject, as Plunkett does, it can be tempting to dismiss his failings, to argue that the creator of great art has simply been misunderstood.

Frost, to his credit, seemed to accept his dark side; he knew it powered his poetry. When aspiring poets asked him about his sources of inspiration, he told them, “It’s mostly animus.” He wanted to best his rivals—Eliot, Amy Lowell, Edwin Arlington Robinson—or, at the very least, impress them. He succeeded in every case. At a formal dinner in London, in 1957, Eliot toasted Frost as “the most eminent, the most distinguished . . . Anglo-American poet now living,” to the latter’s great satisfaction.

A younger generation of American poets seemed to enjoy Frost in all his opacity. In the summer of 1947, Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke visited the older poet for lunch at his new home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Frost talked in riddles, as he was wont to do, speaking obliquely of poets who poured out their words noisily, in contrast to the writer whose pour was smooth. (It’s not clear if his guests realized he was criticizing them.) “I’ve got a devil in me,” he joked to a friend when the lunch was over. Lowell, as if picking up somehow on Frost’s self-characterization, praised his host in a letter as “a marvelous devil of a man.”

A devil and a sage, a trickster and a teacher, a farm owner incapable of farming, a professor without a college degree: Frost was always two incompatible things at once. He had a doubleness at the very heart of him, and he put his contradictions into his poetry. “You do throw people off track in your poems again and again,” Thompson, the biographer, wrote in a letter to the poet, not without admiration. Frost’s poetry matched who he was in life: a man who, in Thompson’s words, had “a tendency to play hide-and-seek around a half-truth,” throwing friends and acquaintances off the scent. More than sixty years after his death, Frost remains a cipher; it’s hard to think of a better-known poet who is more difficult to know. “I maintain my mystery for no one to pluck the heart out,” Frost once wrote. In that respect, and in so many others, he achieved what he set out to do. ♦