The second effect of the Thompson biography was to underscore a fact about Frost that is as peculiar as it is unavoidable: Readers always seem to think he needs rescuing. And not just rescuing in the abstract, as from obscurity or oblivion, but rescuing specifically from some other, less understanding or sympathetic person or group of people. In 1959, Lionel Trilling caused a minor scandal when he spoke at a celebration for Frost’s birthday and declared him to be “a terrifying poet”—which is true enough, in many ways, and which Trilling plainly meant as a compliment. But the more interesting part of Trilling’s address was the way in which he framed his analysis as a means of retrieving the “real” Frost from the hoi polloi: “I have undertaken to say that a great many of your admirers have not understood clearly what you have been doing in your life in poetry.” This, you might say, is exactly what Frost’s various readers have been busy asserting to one another ever since. The Thompson volumes, for example, were followed by numerous books and articles intended not merely to add depth or further context to the biographer’s depiction of Frost but to directly rebut his portrayal. William Pritchard spends the first six pages of his fine study Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered analyzing in detail the shortcomings of Thompson’s style and approach. Jay Parini’s Robert Frost: A Life, the best recent Frost biography, dwells extensively on Thompson’s deficiencies (“Lawrance Thompson, who wasted no opportunity to present Frost as a monster . . .”), going so far as to include an afterword that discusses the ways in which Frost “has generally not been well served by his biographers.” The posthumous discussion of some writers resembles an amiable faculty meeting, a conversation that gradually builds to achieve a resolution that is essentially stable. The posthumous discussion of Frost has been more like a battle—and there is no end in sight. When Joyce Carol Oates published a short story in 2013 that portrayed Frost as a depraved racist, she was promptly blasted by Frost scholars (“Oates’s characterizations are so wrongheaded that they would be laughable were they not also malicious”) and Frost’s own grandchildren. To talk about Frost—even today, even in a book like this one—is to take sides.

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BUT WHY? Certainly there are significant problems with the official biography; certainly Frost’s unique celebrity has made him (for a poet) an unusually tempting target for hostile critics. But even so, why should the work and life of a writer dead for more than fifty years continue to inspire so much contention?