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Overview
This fascinating reassessment of America's most popular and famous poet reveals a more complex and enigmatic man than many readers might expect. Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Frost and working in the poet's archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful portrait of both the public and private man. While he depicts the various stages of Frost's colorful life, Parini also sensitively explores the poet's psyche, showing how he dealt with adversity, family tragedy, and depression. By taking the reader into the poetry itself, which he reads closely and brilliantly, Parini offers an insightful road map to Frost's remarkable world.
Synopsis
This fascinating reassessment of America's most popular and famous poet reveals a more complex and enigmatic man than many readers might expect. Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Frost and working in the poet's archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful portrait of both the public and private man. While he depicts the various stages of Frost's colorful life, Parini also sensitively explores the poet's psyche, showing how he dealt with adversity, family tragedy, and depression. By taking the reader into the poetry itself, which he reads closely and brilliantly, Parini offers an insightful road map to Frost's remarkable world.
New York Times Book Review - Christopher Benfey
...[S]turdy and well-informed....Jay Parini is staunchly pro-Frost, approving of his subject's many ways of "providing" for himself....Lionel Trilling....[commented in 1958,] "I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet"....Frost [replied,] "No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms when I am down." Jay Parini's sympathetic book might have seemed sweet music to Frost, but the clash of arms will continue.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"A pleasure to read, combining penetrating commentary on the poetry and good illustrative anecdotes. Mr. Parini has brought Frost more sharply into focus." (Christopher Lehman-Haupt, The New York Times)
"Inspired and always humanizing, Parini sympathetically illuminates the stunning contradictions embedded in Frost's personality, work, and life." (Susan Miron, The Miami Herald)
Jeffrey Hart
I can...report, and dance in the street as I do, that there is almost no academic jargon here....Parini has made a valuable addition to our understanding of this great and very complicated poet. —National ReviewStephen Ward
...[S]uccessfully balances the dichotomy of myth and reality in the popular perception...—Biography Magazine
Christopher Benfey
...[S]turdy and well-informed....Jay Parini is staunchly pro-Frost, approving of his subject's many ways of "providing" for himself....Lionel Trilling....[commented in 1958,] "I regard Robert Frost as a terrifying poet"....Frost [replied,] "No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms when I am down." Jay Parini's sympathetic book might have seemed sweet music to Frost, but the clash of arms will continue.—New York Times Book Review
Tom O'Brien
Parini has written his book to provide a balanced view of Frost, and he succeeds fairly well. He neatly balances art and life, without limiting the poems to some sort of commentary on Frost's inner struggles.— USA Today
Richard Gray
Robert Frost: A Life will surely become the definitive biography because it reveals this hidden Frost, and the fundamental oddity of a shy man who became a national institution.— Literary Review
Publishers Weekly
March 26 marks the 125th anniversary of Frost's birth, and there could be no better tribute for a poet so often underrated, maligned and misunderstood than this sympathetic and balanced portrayal. Frost has been depicted as selfish and vindictive in biographies by Lawrance Thompson and Jeffrey Meyers, but Parini, himself a poet and novelist, sees Frost as a man who "struggled throughout his long life with depression, anxiety, self-doubt, and confusion." Rarely has Frost's story been told this dexterously, or with a better understanding of the relation of Frost's personal crises to his accomplishment as a poet. The Yankee farmer-poet actually lived his first 11 years in San Francisco, was thoroughly schooled in Latin was, in fact, "more of a classicist by training than either Eliot or Pound", and nursed an early ambition to pitch in the major leagues. He was competitive, funny, smart about his own career and reputation, and throughout the height of his fame was plagued by horrible family tragedies. His father, sister and several of his children suffered from deep depression, suicide and early death, and Frost was often blamed for tragedies he was helpless to prevent. Frost fought his own bouts with what he called "the grippe" with hard work, and thrived on outdoor labor. Parini makes generous use of Frost's verse, often quoting entire poems, but avoids treating the poems as if they were mere transcriptions of the poet's experience. Instead, he achieves the more difficult task of clarifying Frost's process of composition, as he shaped his material from everyday sources and shaped his lines against the strict pattern of a metric line to achieve the natural stresses of the spoken voice. The result is a book revelatory of both the poetry and the poet.Library Journal
Parini, a Middlebury College English professor, poet, novelist, and essayist e.g., Some Necessary Angels, LJ 2/1/98 believes that there is more to be said about Robert Frost, especially as a husband, a father, and a man struggling for recognition of his poetry, which often represented the layered levels of his and his family's existence. While some biographers have concluded that Frost was self-involved and tyrannical, Parini sees him as a loving and faithful husband and a tender father. Parini acknowledges that Frost was often combative and independent, sometimes duplicitous, and wrestled with depression. However, he maintains that these characteristics informed the strength and spirit of Frost's best poems--those that attempted to find clarity in confusion and made the case for individualism and personal freedom. The well-known Frost is here, too, from his early days in San Francisco to his three-year sojourn in England. After all is said and done, it is the poetry that finally matters, but Parini does offer a fresh perspective on Frost and his poetry.--Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., INStephen Ward
...[S]uccessfully balances the dichotomy of myth and reality in the popular perception...— Biography Magazine
Entertainment Weekly
[Reveals] a darker and more mysterious side to a body of work too often dismissed as the folksy ruminations of an avuncular naturalist.Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
...[G]raceful....[A] pleasure to read, combining...penetrating commentary on the poetry and good illustrative anecdotes....By making Frost more complex and contradictory than his previous biographers have, Mr. Parini has brought him more sharply into focus.— The New York Times