Dark and Deep

Helen Vendler

• Robert Frost: A Biography by Jeffrey Meyers
  Constable, 424 pp, £20.00, May 1996, ISBN 0 09 476130 2
• Collected Poems, Prose and Plays by Robert Frost, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson
  Library of America, 1036 pp, $35.00, October 1995, ISBN 1 883011 06 X

‘It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of Boston, and out of the same books.’ Frost’s biographers, who began their collective labours well before he died, were not to be put off by such a statement, and the early collections of memoirs and reminiscences culminated in Lawrance Thompson’s three-volume biography published between 1966 and 1976. Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963; between those dates he lived a long and harrowing life, the general details of which have become well known. They include the early death of his editor-father, the family’s return from San Francisco to Massachusetts and New Hampshire; Frost’s abortive stays at both Dartmouth and Harvard; his assisting in his mother’s school; his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Elinor White; their ten-year stay on a New Hampshire farm given to Frost by his grandfather; the early deaths of two of their six children; the brief two-and-a-half year escape to England, where Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (reviewed enthusiastically by Pound) was published; the subsequent appearance of many volumes of poetry, four of which received Pulitzer prizes; the sporadic teaching at Amherst and elsewhere as a poet in residence and éminence grise; the immensely popular stage-readings; the catastrophic fates of three of the four surviving children (Marjorie died of a post-partum infection; Irma was permanently confined in an insane asylum; Carol, the only son, committed suicide); the exhaustion of Elinor, whose heart gave out in her sixties after many changes of dwelling and ten pregnancies – the last when she was 52; the final years of public fame, culminating in Frost’s reading of ‘The Gift Outright’ at the Kennedy Inauguration and his meeting with Khrushchev in Russia.