Win-Win

Peter Howarth

• BuyThe Collected Prose of Robert Frost edited by Mark Richardson
  Harvard, 375 pp, £25.95, January 2008, ISBN 978 0 674 02463 2
• BuyThe Notebooks of Robert Frost edited by Robert Faggen
  Harvard, 809 pp, £25.95, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 674 02311 6

The first and last pieces in this new Collected Prose have never been reprinted before, but they have a misleadingly familiar ring. In 1891, Frost got himself elected to the editorship of the Lawrence, Massachusetts High School Bulletin, and his opening salute to his classmates insists that ‘this chair, when not acting as a weapon of defence, will be devoted to the caprices of its occupant.’ A fortnight before his death in 1963, he sent a message from his hospital bed to the Poetry Society of America: ‘I may wobble when I’m sitting up but I never waver.’ These declarations of independence sound reassuringly like the Frost of the anthologies, the author of ‘guidebooks for the spirit of individualism’, as Robert Faggen puts it, attracted to empty woods and roads less travelled, and suspicious of New Deals and other easy offers of a lift.