The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, edited by Robert Faggen. A collection of fine scholarly essays on Frost by critics like William Pritchard and Donald Sheehy. The more recent Robert Frost in Context, edited by Mark Richardson and also published by Cambridge University Press, supplements scholarly essays with criticism from poets like Paul Muldoon, as well as the perspective of Frost’s granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis.

INDEX

The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable. Additionally, titles are works by Frost unless otherwise noted.

Adams, John, 13, 104

Adams, Sherman, 46

Aeneid, 165

“After Apple-Picking,” 25

Aiken, Conrad, 20

Alain-Fournier, 20

Aldington, Richard, 154

Aldridge, John W., 53

Amazon.com, 129

Amherst Student, 62

Anka, Paul, 107

anosognosia, 120

anticipatory shipping, 129

Ariely, Dan, Predictably Irrational, 114–15

Ashbery, John, 95

asomatognosia, 120

Auden, W. H., 49

audience:

expectations of, 58–60

relationship of poet and, 61

authenticity, 43, 64, 134

Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 171

Beatles, “I Am the Walrus,” 132

Bergson, Henri, 20

Berry, Wendell, 73

Best American Poetry (Lehman, ed.), 95

“Birches,” 10, 57–58

Bishop, Elizabeth, 86

Boy’s Will, A, 21, 28, 29

brain:

contralateral control by, 121

and neuroscience, 129

split-brain research, 120–24

unconscious neural activity in, 126–27

Braithwaite, William Stanley, 39

Brodkey, Harold, 56

Bromwich, David, 52

Brower, Reuben, 96

Brown, Brené, 160

bundle theory, 148, 152

Bush, George W., 131–33, 155

Camus, Albert, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” 113, 115

Capgras syndrome, 120

Carnegie, Dale, 135

causal determinism, 125, 151

“cautious,” use of term, 87–88

chaos, 149

Chiasson, Dan, 85

choice, 99–130

act of, see decision making

age of, 129

ambiguity in, 16, 63–64, 88, 129, 160

in American culture, 12–13

chance vs., 9

concept of, 100–101, 116

conscious, 118

consequences of, 84, 98, 141, 144–45

existential significance in, 76

by free agent acting freely, 104, 125–30

happiness via, 113

how-to books about, 108–9, 111–15, 126

idealized (“pure”), 103–4

illusory nature of, 115

of interpretation, 97, 117

leading to improvement, 104–5, 113

life-changing, 78

meaningful, 124

choice (cont.)

missing aspects in this poem, 101–3

moral consequences of, 102

multiple options, 102

never made, 12

not to choose, 103

other possibilities foreclosed in, 91, 97

patterns of, 107

possibility of, 161

sameness of options in, 76–78, 103

subjection to, 75

telling the story of, 118–19

choice blindness, 123, 126

chooser, 131–61

alone, 152, 158

authenticity of, 134

Bush as decider, 131–33, 155

as changed by choice, 141

control by, 133

and personhood, 140–45

as responsible agent, 146

and the self, see self

Chrysippus, 125

Chun Siong Soon, 127

Churchill, Winston, 10

closure, fear of, 92

Collected Poems (Frost), 32

collectivism, 112, 155

compatibilists, 128–29

Complete Poems (Frost), 45

confabulation, 119–24

confusion, overcoming, 98

“Constant Symbol, The,” 99

control, 16, 133, 163–64

corpus callosum, 120

Cox, Sidney, 139

Coyne, Jerry, 126

Cramer, Jeffrey S., Robert Frost Among His Poems, 165