Love and Need

Starred review from January 1, 2025
A capacious exploration of Frost's complicated life and poetry. Plunkett's first book begins with a discussion of Frost's interest in having Lawrance Thompson, a young acquaintance who knew the popular poet's work well, write his official biography, which he would do, in prize-winning volumes, portraying Frost (1874-1963) as an "ornery, erratic old man." Plunkett then begins his own insightful, non-ornery biography. Long associated with rural New England, Frost was born in San Francisco, where, Plunkett writes, the boy "enjoyed keeping hens in his parents' yard." The family moved to the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1884 after his father died. In 1894, Frost published his first poem, "My Butterfly," oozing Shelley-esque imitations. Plunkett describes the burgeoning poet as "acutely conscious of his strange interiority, varieties of solitary and halfway-dreamed experience." Later that year, Plunkett argues, Frost wrote his "first truly original poem"--"Flower-Gathering"--for Elinor, his wife. After moving to a farm in New Hampshire, he wrote "Mowing." The sonnet's "talk-song" style had a major impact on his poetic voice thereafter. Plunkett carefully goes through Frost's first published collection, A Boy's Will, his "spiritual autobiography," revealing other poets' influence on Frost's work. In 1914, in England, Frost composed "The Road Not Taken"--"arguably the most famous poem in all of American literature." While there, he publishedNorth of Boston, became good friends with fellow poet Edward Thomas, and briefly came under the spell of Ezra Pound. AfterNorth of Boston was published in America, Frost's reputation grew--reviews, readings, lectures, fellowships, all yielding much-needed income. Teaching at Dartmouth College in the 1940s, he wrote a number of poems "that were good of their kind but his best work in prose." Unfortunately, his personal life was a bit of a mess. In 1959 the poet wrote to Thompson that "one or other of us will fathom me sooner or later." Plunkett has, now--warts and all. A superb biography that neatly weaves in nuanced and insightful readings of many poems.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

December 9, 2024
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.