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Robert Frost, one of the greatest American poets, is certainly the most widely read and most loved. After Frost's death in 1963, his authorized biographer wrote a three-volume work which deeply distorted the personality of the poet. Jeffrey Meyers has returned to the sources and survivors and has given us a radically new interpretation of Robert Frost's life. The poet that emerges from this biography is neither the hayseed sage that Frost personified in public nor the monster in human form portrayed by his previous biographer. Meyer's new biography reveals numerous things for the first time - but, most notably, the fact that after Elinor Frost's death in 1938, Frost became passionately involved, in his sixties, with his secretary (the wife of a Harvard lecturer), who dominated the last twenty-five years of his life and inspired his most intense love poems. With the cooperation of her daughter, Meyers finally portrays this fascinating woman's involvement with Frost and her influence on
- Sales Rank: #2761608 in Books
- Published on: 1997-05-19
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 424 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Meyers, the author of 12 earlier biographies, gets off to a less-than-persuasive start by asserting that "now" he can reveal that Frost's (1874-1963) love poems after his wife's death can be traced to his passion, beginning at 64, for his married secretary, who was his mistress. The accommodation with her complaisant husband has been acknowledged in print since at least 1990. Furthermore, Meyers contends that his biography will overturn Frost's unpleasant reputation as "a mean old bastard," yet the life as he relates it is a litany of unlikability. While some earlier segments of the narrative seem Meyers's most felicitous biographical prose to date, the pace is clotted with digressions. His editorial "we" is also off-putting, and numerous flash-forwards interrupt the life and result in later repetitions. The promised "new view" of Frost's character fails to materialize, although the "original interpretations of his poems" is in some cases satisfying. His life outside his books, in Meyers's account, is a series of relocations to farmhouses or campuses, followed by public readings that Frost claimed to despise but that fed his purse and his vanity. Photos.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
YA?Frost's development as a poet is central to this biography. His classical education, life experiences, relationships with others (including contemporary writers), and personal statements constantly elucidate his work. Meyers's comparisons to images and language in the Bible, the classics, and poets such as Keats and Hardy (further enhanced by an appendix called "Literary Allusions") assist teens in understanding connections among literary works. Frequent explications of Frost's lines/stanzas/poems are seamlessly woven into the narrative of his life. The conversational, almost gossipy tone of this sympathetic view of the poet hastens readers along, and they are provided with enough detail to grasp his importance in American literature. YAs seeking sufficient criticism to complete an assignment may find themselves reading on to learn "what happens next."?Barbara Hawkins, Oakton High School, Fairfax, VA
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Frost wrote that poetry is "a way of taking life by the throat." Perhaps the same comment could be made about Meyers's take on the life, private and public, of the great poet. A prolific biographer (e.g., Edmund Wilson: A Biography, LJ 2/15/95), Meyers offers a different view of Frost from the one commonly held (largely generated by Lawrence Thompson's critical biography, Robert Frost: A Biography, 1982) of a mean-spirited, uncaring husband and father and an enemy of other poets. Meyers writes?not judgmentally?that Frost was touchy and frequently insecure, yet the biographer gives ample evidence that Frost possessed a great wit, conversed brilliantly, and was capable of personal generosity and courage. Meyers believes that Frost lived his life for and through poetry and that poetry prompted many of his responses to events ranging from the seduction of his wife to the death of his children. In light of these and other conclusions, Meyers's interpretation of Frost's poetry offers an invaluable contribution to understanding and accepting the best and the most controversial aspects of Frost the man and poet. For literature collections.?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A REVIEW, FROM SOMEWHERE NORTH OF BOSTON...
By Bruce Loveitt
This is a solid, workmanlike biography of Robert Frost. It will probably appeal more to the reader who wants to know about Frost the man as opposed to the reader who is more interested in the poetry. There are some excerpts from the poetry but not a lot, and very little analysis. Probably the best thing about the book is the balanced attitude Mr. Meyers takes towards the poet. The author doesn't gloss over Frost's faults, but doesn't demonize him either. Yes, Frost had a tremendous ego. (Show me an artistic person that doesn't!) He loved to receive praise. He "collected" honorary degrees. Towards the end of his life he made it clear that he wanted degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, so that he could equal the achievement of Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. He was famous enough and knew enough of the "right" people that he was able to get what he wanted. He was extremely competitive and made nasty comments about other poets who he perceived to be a "threat", both in terms of popularity and talent- such as Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Frost made fun of Sandburg's self-created "folksy" persona- playing his "geetar" and combing his long, white hair over his eyes. But Mr. Meyers makes clear that Frost wasn't alone in his competitiveness. Though Sandburg was apparently a very nice fellow, Eliot and Pound had plenty of nasty things to say about Frost and other poets as well. Where Mr. Meyers is most sympathetic is in discussing Frost's relationship with his family. In the past, Frost has been portrayed as a selfish "monster" who ignored his wife and children and caused their unhappiness, mental problems and, in the case of Frost's son Carol, a suicide. It seems clear that mental illness ran in Frost's family, going back at least to his father and mother. Frost heard "voices" in his youth and they came back in times of severe stress, such as right after Frost's wife Elinor died in 1938. Frost had an unnatural fear of the dark and apparently suffered from some degree of depression. He managed to overcome these problems and to live a long, creative life. He did the best he could to be a good husband and father. He remained faithful to his wife despite the temptation of female students "throwing" themselves at him. (After all, even in middle-age, he was a handsome man, as well as being charismatic, artistic and famous.) He tried to be emotionally present for his children, giving advice (if also at times trying to control them) and he was always generous with money. Again, this book is strong on Frost's personal life. But it is a bit weak on analyzing the poetry and it covers Frost's teaching career in too cursory a manner, "flitting" about from place to place too quickly. Some of this is inherent in Mr. Meyers' decision to write a relatively brief biography. He tries to cover in 350 pages the personal life and career of a man who lived to be 88 years old, and who remained creative for approximately 70 of those years. Mr. Meyers had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out and other things had to be compressed. Unfortunately, it shows. This book is not the definitive biography of Frost. That remains to be written. But it is a good introduction, a book that succeeds in being fair-minded and will leave you wanting to know more about the man and the poetry.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
All Kinds Of Grief Shall Arrive
By The Wingchair Critic
Jeffrey Meyers' 'Robert Frost: A Biography' is a thorough, if disjointed, episodic, and often uncomfortably apologetic account of the poet's tumultuous and psychically violent life.
While the broad American public continues to lionize Frost and his collected verse, Meyers' volume reveals that there was little to admire in the individual man (a list of character traits in the index includes, among others, "accident-prone," "competitive," "domineering," "egotistic," "fears insanity," "hears voices," "hypersensitive," "insecure," "jealous," "puritanical," "restless," "self-promoting," "temperamental," "tendency to gossip," "uses illness to escape responsibility," and "vanity.") At one extreme, neurotic personalities take their illnesses out on themselves; the aggressively competitive Frost fell into the opposite camp, so that it was his family and intimate friends who suffered primarily, and often fatally, from the grossly irresponsible attitude he adopted towards his own pathology.
Both of Frost's parents, as well as his only sibling, were physically and mentally unstable: "bad blood" clearly ran freely in the family's veins. Emotionally smothered by and dependent upon his "terribly queer" mother, the young Frost was equally at the mercy of his alcoholic, brutal, and vindictive father. Both parents died relatively young after lives of dissolution and extreme hardship.
The circumstances of Frost's youth set the course for his adult existence: year after year, decade after long decade, the poet replicated his fundamental "family romance" and thus found himself surrounded by, and indeed, further afflicting, a variety of tragically disturbed people and families.
Generational patterns of mental instability and violent "accidents" were the norm, not the exception, in the lives of the people Frost embraced. Amazingly, the fatalistic and cowardly Frost never became fully conscious of the destructive role he played in the lives of those closest to him. Nor did he learn how to master himself or take healthy control over the calamitous events of his personal life.
Tellingly, the poet openly mocked anyone who sought out professional psychological help, which he strenuously avoided receiving himself.
No single event illustrates Frost's grandiose immaturity and reckless disregard for the lives and emotional health of his family more blatantly than the episode in which Frost woke his six year old daughter Lesley in the middle of night, escorted her downstairs where his sobbing wife was waiting, and, pointing a gun at himself and then at his spouse, told her, "Take your choice. Before morning, one of us will be dead!"
Perhaps understandably, three decades later, Frost's only son, Carol, 38, committed suicide in front of his own small son under identical circumstances.
Frost's children were raised in isolation on various New England farms and schooled at home; they grew up in a constricted environment dominated by their severe, tyrannical father and exhausted, physically stricken, and ineffectual mother.
With the exception of Lesley, Meyers fails to communicate the children's side of their stories to the reader. The author's intermittent presentation of Frost as a loving father who spent much of his free time nurturing his children falls flat.
Frost survived into his 89th year as a wealthy, respected, and world-renowned poet who lunched with American presidents and honored foreign dignitaries, including Nikita Khrushchev, with his presence.
It is more than interesting to note that, like an engine of destruction in the mythological guise of a respectable patriarch, Frost's health grew more robust as he aged and as his wife, Elinor ("rather silent, sad and dour" even before her marriage to Frost), and family withered, became severely mentally ill (both Carol and daughter Irma suffered some kind of psychosis; in her 45th year, Irma was committed "as a hopeless case to a hospital for the insane," as was Frost's sister, Jeanie), or otherwise died young (favorite daughter Marjorie at 29).
Only Lesley, who Meyers unaccountably refers to as a "harsh and sinewy old harridan" in later life, survived him.
Meyers provides a detailed account of Frost's friendships with other famous poets, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Lowell.
His analysis of Frost's work is sound if not always persuasive; his evaluation of the influence of Thomas Hardy's poetry on Frost's feels particularly strained.
Meyers' discussion of Frost's classic "The Road Not Taken" in conjunction with one of the poet's letters includes this incomprehensible sentence: "The words "lonely cross-roads," "converged" and neither "much traveled" in the letter become "Two roads diverged" and "less traveled by" at the beginning and end of the poem, and the inevitability of "converged" turns into the perplexity of "diverged."
Meyers also makes a blatant error when attributing an Irish peasant's narrative about capturing and living for several weeks with a fairy, which appears in Lady Gregory's 'Visions & Beliefs in the West of Ireland' (1920), to Yeats himself. Yeats accompanied and assisted Lady Gregory in her field work for the book, but the narrative in question was clearly not his own, as any reader Gregory's book, which is still in print, can see (the memorate is attributed to "an old man, Kelleher," and his wife).
Whether Meyers is repeating a mistake that Frost made concerning the subject, or is making the mistake himself, is impossible to discern from the text, as no source is provided. Considering the extraordinary nature of the claim, Meyers' inaccuracy is difficult to overlook.
Meyers also adopts Frost's biased image of competitor Carl Sandburg, who appears throughout the book as manipulative pseudo-bumpkin perpetually strumming his "geetar" for a gullible public.
Frost placed his poetical ambition and personal fame ahead of everything else in his life, a situation for which his family and loved ones paid dearly, and for which Elinor never forgave him.
Ultimately, Meyers' biography is a casebook example of how the human suffering of others can be the price paid for respectability as well as for great art.
2 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Robert Frost and the Barrier of Silence
By A Customer
In spite of the barrier of silence choking it, the vitality of American identity and consciousness continues to survive, thanks to clues, planted in Robert Frost: a biography, written by Jeffrey Meyers. The first major hint that America is alive and struggling for breath comes with the affirmation of the importance of Frost's identity as a native San Franciscan; the second is the remembrance of Lionel Trilling's valiant attempt in 1985 to put into sharper focus the image of Frost's work and his reputation. Nevertheless, author Meyers does not develop the latter point in which Trilling stated that Frost's reputation had been created over a misinterpretation of his work. In fact Trilling's was a major effort to raze the barrier of silence, to state and restate lines of research in the development and study of literature in America from the East Coast to the West, from Columbia University to the University of California at Berkeley (Lizarraga 1999a y b). In response to criticism both professional and personal, published in major literary reviews of the East Coast, Trilling made a valiant attempt to defend the remarks made on that historical evening, recording in permanent form by way of the Partisan Review both his speech and his will to defend it. Although Meyers describes the reaction of Frost on that evening as one of surprise, the poet was not a stranger to the effects of the barrier of silence. A letter written in 1929 by Frost to Lincoln MacVeagh (Thompson 1964:362), as well as subsequent events in the 1930's, not only establish Frost's initial attitude toward 'the silencers', but also serves as a vindication of Trilling. The letter reads as follows "The first poem I ever wrote (La Noche Triste) was on the Maya-Toltec-Aztec civilization and there is where my heart still is, while outwardly i profess an interest more or less perfunctory in new England. Never mind, I'm lucky to be allowed to write poetry on anything at all". Actually, this was but a prelude to continuing manifestations of the relation of poetry, politics, religion and repression, experienced in 1936, when Frost achieved the publication of a number of works. Key among them is the booklet titled A Further Range, which includes the poems "The Vindictives 'The Andes"and "The Bearer of Evil Tidings 'The Himalayas"and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, and the booklet entitled from Snow to Snow, which, apparently, was the initial publication of the poem "The Road Not Taken"and which by the end of the Thirties as an integral text had been banished to oblivion by Frost himself. It is here that a concept of AngloAmerican literature, which rejects the primacy of geography in the formation of consciousness, begins to be formulated; and, time is divorced from space. This then created a dichotomy in the Americas, centering in the north of america concepts of Angloamerican and Western culture, grounded in language only, as opposed to South and/or Latin American literature in which geographical space and language serve as the cornerstones (Falcon, Huayanca, Lizarraga 1999). If we are to formulate a viable concept of an integrated American culture and education, today we must face this contradiction , a continuing source of repression and chaos. Focusing on this point, the alert reader becomes aware that the true measure of Robert Frost is to be taken by how he dealt with "the silencers" and the consequences this has had, not only on his own life, but also the lives of the rest of us, and not by the shadow of Kay Morrison and her unconventional love life of which Frost was but a part. Channeling a force with the strength to do this is not only to "keep at bey the silencers' but also to demolish the barrier of silence, itself, and"breathe free".
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