The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume I (1886–1920), edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen. This is the definitive edition of Frost’s early letters. For the poet’s later correspondence, there is as yet only the out-of-print and unreliable Selected Letters, compiled by Lawrance Thompson. (And to understand why the reliability of the edition matters, consider the following example that my copyeditor, Will Palmer, and I discovered in the letter to Louis Untermeyer discussed on pages 169 and 170 of this book. In that letter, Frost writes [emphasis mine], “There are no vampires there are no ghouls there are no demons, there is no nothing but me.” In the Selected Letters, Thompson takes it upon himself to remove the “no” before “nothing,” thereby changing the line to “there is nothing but me.” It’s a much less interesting formulation, and it isn’t what Frost wrote.)

Elected Friends: Robert Frost & Edward Thomas to One Another, edited by Matthew Spencer. This volume gathers the correspondence between Frost and Thomas, allowing the reader to follow the intriguing progression of their friendship. Spencer also reproduces Thomas’s early reviews of Frost, placing them chronologically among the letters. This material is bracketed by excellent critical essays by Michael Hofmann and Christopher Ricks.

BIOGRAPHIES OF FROST

Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini. A balanced and comprehensive biography aimed directly at general readers. Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume behemoth can never be rivaled for sheer volume of information, but Parini’s is by far the better, more readable book.

Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered by William Pritchard. Half biography, half critique, this elegant study remains one of the finest introductions to Frost’s life and work.

GENERAL READING AIDS

The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, edited by Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta. An extraordinary resource that ranges across the entire Frost enterprise. There are entries on all the individual poems, the Frost biographical controversies, the Derry farm, almost everything having to do with the poet.

Robert Frost Among His Poems by Jeffrey Cramer. Cramer’s hugely helpful book meticulously describes the literary and biographical context in which individual poems were written. For example, “An Old Man’s Winter Night” “may have been inspired by Charles Lambert, a local who lived for years as a hermit” in Derry.

The Art of Robert Frost by Tim Kendall. This unusual but invaluable book reproduces Frost’s first four collections and a selection of well-known later poems, supplementing every poem with a critical gloss by Kendall. (In some cases, as with “The Road Not Taken,” these glosses run for two or three pages.) Kendall corrects a number of persistent errors in his presentation of the text of the poems, and he’s a patient, lively critic.

Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing by Richard Poirier. Poirier is completely at ease with Frost’s contradictions, and his examination of the poet remains as crisp today as when it first appeared twenty-five years ago. Readers up for a challenge may want to supplement Poirier’s book with Mark Richardson’s The Ordeal of Robert Frost, which is more overtly academic (it arose from Richardson’s dissertation) but also one of the most intelligent and sympathetic studies of the poet.