Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry

Literary critic Plunkett debuts with a nuanced examination of how a desire for privacy clashed with a need to be known in the poems and life of Robert Frost (1874–1963). The poet often obscured the autobiographical nature of his work, Plunkett argues, suggesting that mourning’s centrality to Frost’s 1912 debut collection, A Boy’s Will (which included poems written shortly after the deaths of Frost’s mother and first child in 1900), only becomes discernible after recognizing how the volume’s structure mirrors Lord Tennyson’s elegiac “spiritual autobiography,” In Memoriam. Frost’s ambivalence over how much of himself to reveal colored his relationship with biographer Lawrance Thompson, Plunkett contends, noting that Frost left only oblique evidence of his decades-long affair with his married secretary, Kathleen Morrison, even as he pleaded with Morrison to allow Thompson to write about their relationship. Plunkett complicates Thompson’s portrayal of Frost as a “monster,” suggesting that Thompson was wrong to interpret Frost’s guilt over his treatment of his wife Elinor, who died in 1938, as anything other than “paranoiac self-doubt.” This is unlikely to settle the debate over Frost’s character, but Plunkett’s thorough account of how Thompson arrived at his damning assessment adds a meaningful contribution to the discourse. A sharp blend of literary analysis and biography, this is sure to spark discussion. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Feb.)