The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920-1928

by Robert Frost, Donald Sheehy (Editor), Mark Richardson (Editor), Robert Bernard Hass (Editor), Henry Atmore (Editor)

Overview

The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920–1928 is the second installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. Nearly three hundred letters in the critically-acclaimed first volume had never before been collected; here, close to four hundred are gathered for the first time. Volume 2 includes letters to some 160 correspondents: family and friends; colleagues, fellow writers, visual artists, editors, and publishers; educators of all kinds; farmers, librarians, and admirers.

In the years covered here, publication of Selected Poems, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook enhanced Frost’s stature in America and abroad, and the demands of managing his career—as public speaker, poet, and teacher—intensified. A good portion of the correspondence is devoted to Frost’s appointments at the University of Michigan and Amherst College, ​through which he played a major part in staking out the positions poets would later hold in American universities.​​ Other letters show Frost helping to shape the Bread Loaf School of English and its affiliated Writers’ Conference.​ We encounter him discussing his craft with students and fostering the careers of younger poets. His ​​observations (and reservations) about educators are illuminating and remain pertinent. And family life—with all its joys and sorrows, hardships and satisfactions—is never less than central to Frost’s concerns.

Robert Frost was a masterful prose stylist, often brilliant and always engaging.​ Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary, chronology, and detailed index, these letters are both the record of a remarkable literary life and a unique contribution to American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674726642
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Pages:	848
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Donald Sheehy is Professor Emeritus of English and Philosophy at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan.

Robert Bernard Hass is Professor of English and Philosophy at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.

Henry Atmore is Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Abbreviations xiii

Editorial Principles xix

Introduction 1

1 "Book Farmer" 19

2 "The Guessed of Michigan" 202

3 A New Regime at Amherst 337

4 To Michigan Again (for a Lifetime in a Year) 479

5 Ten Weeks a Year in Amherst, Fourteen Once in Europe 547

Biographical Glossary of Correspondents 695

Chronology: February 1920-December 1928 739

Acknowledgments 761

Index 773

Editorial Reviews

07/25/2016
For all its bulk, comprehensiveness, and thorough scholarly apparatus, this collection of letters, second in a five-volume series, yields relatively slender insight into the technique behind Frost’s enduringly beloved poems. Equally sparse on engagement with current events, the letters instead brim with Frost’s affections for and rivalries with the literary lions of his day, a deep ambivalence toward the colleges where he earned most of his income, and an ongoing interest in poetry as an ideal and a practice. The bulk of the subject matter is mundane: polite responses to fan mail, much haggling over living situations and fees for speaking engagements, encouragement of protégés, and negotiations with his publishers, all delivered in an accomplished, subtle prose style thick with allusion, intelligence, and humor. With his closest friends, Frost is most revealing: philosophical, broad-minded, and wry, self-deprecating and ambitious, anxious about his family, and longing to withdraw from his exhausting public life to be a simple poet-farmer. A temperamental streak beneath the cultivated persona of the humble, mild-mannered raconteur keeps things lively for the reader. This second installment in an impressive project tracks the transformation of the hardworking craftsman into a monument of American letters. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Exemplary is a wholly inadequate word to characterize [this] joint editorial enterprise.

Hopkins Review - William H. Pritchard

Meticulously annotated…and provides fascinating insights into his philosophy, politics, and personality.

Philadelphia Inquirer - Glenn C. Altschuler

This second of a proposed four-volume enterprise comprises 569 letters, two-thirds of which are published here for the first time. This book, like its predecessor—which covers 1886–1920—is a masterpiece of scholarly attention and an important adjunct to the poetry of an American master. Readers hear the poet’s voice in his letters as clearly as in his lyrical, plain-spoken poetry. Frost’s affections, his occupations and preoccupations, his political tendencies, and his aesthetic and moral sensibility are apparent in these letters to family, friends, and fellow poets…These years were also a rich period in Frost’s life: he published four new collections and in 1924 received the first of his four Pulitzers. However, coinciding with success and national recognition were ongoing family health issues and personal tragedy.

Choice - B. Wallenstein

As one reads The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume Two—never tedious for all the chat and twice as entertaining for the clarity of the notes—poems are still finding him, and he is having some fun.

Times Literary Supplement - David Bromwich

Praise for the previous volume:

“In almost every way, this new edition is a triumph of scholarly care… For all his private flaws, his tragedies large and small, American literature—and the language itself—owes a profound debt to that dark, demonic, beguiling figure, Robert Frost.”
—William Logan, New York Times Book Review

“Long overdue, The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920 is deservedly getting a lot of attention. Frost is not simply a lively correspondent, he is an artist of the epistolary form, defining himself and his poetic era in these pages… The truly original, splenetic, aphoristic, and revisionary mind of a major poet comes into view.”
—Jay Parini, Chronicle of Higher Education

“Thanks to Harvard’s undertaking, Frost’s more complete, chronological letters help correct the poet’s legacy by allowing it weight and breadth.”
—Valerie Duff, Boston Globe

“Not the rustic sage, but the savvy, ambitious, cosmopolitan poet emerges from this first volume of Frost’s lively, shrewd letters… [T]he collection [is] a must for scholars; but Frost’s witty, urbane style make the letters an engaging browse for ordinary readers, too.”
—Publishers Weekly

“It must be said that these early letters carry the burden of [Frost’s] poetry so finely as to be no embarrassment to the poetry. The book has been edited…with continuous tact and sensitivity to the likely demands of a literate reader.”
—David Bromwich, Times Literary Supplement

“Such a joy to read… This is the first time a complete version of [Frost’s letters]—running in chronological order—has been made available… Anyone interested in the laborious process an artist must undertake to perfect his craft will read this book with awe and fascination, and as a constant source of inspiration.”
—J. P. O’Malley, NPR online

“[T]his volume may well inspire a Frost renaissance.”
—Kirkus Reviews

— Reviews of The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886–1920

A temperamental streak beneath the cultivated persona of the humble, mild-mannered raconteur keeps things lively for the reader. This second installment in an impressive project tracks the transformation of the hardworking craftsman into a monument of American letters.
— Publishers Weekly

Meticulously annotated…and provides fascinating insights into his philosophy, politics, and personality.
— Glenn C. Altschuler Philadelphia Inquirer

This second of a proposed four-volume enterprise comprises 569 letters, two-thirds of which are published here for the first time. This book, like its predecessor—which covers 1886–1920—is a masterpiece of scholarly attention and an important adjunct to the poetry of an American master. Readers hear the poet’s voice in his letters as clearly as in his lyrical, plain-spoken poetry. Frost’s affections, his occupations and preoccupations, his political tendencies, and his aesthetic and moral sensibility are apparent in these letters to family, friends, and fellow poets…These years were also a rich period in Frost’s life: he published four new collections and in 1924 received the first of his four Pulitzers. However, coinciding with success and national recognition were ongoing family health issues and personal tragedy.
— B. Wallenstein Choice

Exemplary is a wholly inadequate word to characterize [this] joint editorial enterprise.
— William H. Pritchard Hopkins Review

As one reads The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume Two—never tedious for all the chat and twice as entertaining for the clarity of the notes—poems are still finding him, and he is having some fun.
— David Bromwich Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher