Product Description

A biography of American poet Robert Frost, covering his life and works.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #775317 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 420 pages

Customer Reviews

A balanced, judicious, entertaining biography
Jeffrey Meyers' ROBERT FROST: A BIOGRAPHY is a masterful account of Frost's lives, personal and literary. Cast in the long shadow of Lawrance Thompson's three-volume diatribe against the modern titan, Meyers' work is balanced, judicious, and highly entertaining. It does not deny Frost's tragic shortcomings, but it also lauds his compelling and unique body of work and restores his eminence as a 20th- century virtuoso, all the while exposing the contradictions in the personal and moral life of the intellectual. The work is full of wonderful anecdotes and has unparalleled direct accounts of Frost's early courtship of his wife, Elinor, and of his later complicated relationship with his mistress, Kay Morrison. Meyers is especially adept at providing insight into the biographical events that shaped individual poems. This is the most honest biography of Frost yet written.

Robert Frost and the Barrier of Silence
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".