Robert Frost: A Biography - Softcover

Meyers, Jeffrey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0395856035 ISBN 13: 9780395856031

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1997

Synopsis

Offering a new interpretation of the life of Robert Frost, a biography of the great poet chronicles Frost's private life, including a long-time romance with his secretary, his work, and his influence on modern poetry

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffrey Meyers has written lives of Katherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, and Robert Frost. He lives in Berkeley, California, and is now writing a life of Gary Cooper.

From Booklist:

Frost (1874^-1963), perhaps our last great "public" poet, was incorrigibly private. This biography explores his psychic Yankee crawl space and surveys the contents frankly yet fairly. Though Meyers may first seize a reader's interest with a rightly touted account of Frost's previously unchronicled quarter-century romance with his secretary, Kay Morrison, after his wife's death, the book's main strengths throughout are actually more striking: balance, clarity, and concision. Too many writers of auspicious lives plod through excessive facts in prose that no one would brave but for the halo of the illustrious figure. Instead, Meyers shapes a long life into a vivacious character study based on the conflicts that seemed to drive Frost as well as do him damage. Poverty, illness, death, and ruin were apparently abiding themes in his parents' rough-and-tumble marriage; in his sister's eventual insanity (and that of his daughter Irma); in his uneasy noncareer as a New England farmer before achieving literary recognition relatively late; in the more or less miserable lot of his children; and in the demanding magnetism of his husbandly loyalty. Frost's legacy includes his notorious malice and scampish hot temper. Without insisting, Meyers portrays the cantankerousness as a product of hard-won wit that sometimes went wild yet must amuse. His discussions of Frost's pent-up relations with past biographers and with poets Eliot and Pound are fascinating for their quality of consanguinity spiked with contempt. This biography does what all of them should, characterizing the subject fully and compelling your return to the immortalizing work. Molly McQuade

About this edition

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0395856035
• ISBN 13: 9780395856031
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 424