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.

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