A Warmer Frost

...The children also were taught to rely on imagination, work and play rather than material conveniences, and were given fairly free rein...

...Lesley, for one, seems to have inherited a measure of her father's poetic gift...

...Eliot, could recite Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" by heart...

...After poring over family papers and letters from that period, she "came to look upon RF's quest for recognition as a positive force inseparable from his and [his wife] Elinor's efforts to awaken the world of imagination in their children (and grandchildren...

...Elinor and the children relished the opportunities England and Scotland provided to see sights they had read about in literature and history...

...The War was the chief cause of their return, but Robert had grown increasingly uncomfortable with certain aspects of English life??in particular the class system...

...As he explained, "Places are more to me in thought than in reality...

...The speaker describes setting out one afternoon to turn the new-cut grass someone else had scythed that morning...

...That probably accounts for the sudden spate of poems he produced about New England after moving away...

...His American comrade, who had recently overcome his own shyness and lack of confidence, persuaded him to switch from prose to verse...

...The excuse some people offered for the keeper's behavior??that he didn't realize Frost was "gentry," not a laborer??only further disgusted the poet...

...Many of his best-known lyrics, though done from 1912 through the '20s, seemed almost prophetically relevant to the national climate during the Cold War...

...Unlike Thompson's exhaustive study, Francis' book does not attempt to plumb Frost's psyche for clues to his artistic development...

...This land was ours before we were the land's"??for the new President...

...British friends were horrified not only by their poverty but by the lack of regular hours or routine in the household...

...Indeed, what seems to have meant most to him during his British sojourn was the stimulating company of fellow poets...

...Frost seems to have devoted a lot of energy to overcoming anxieties??his, and those of people he loved...

...Lesley once captured in verse the way night terrors transform a house's familiar objects into spooky shapes until, at dawn, "each grey post and coat and door/Resumes the life it led before...

...When our Yankee bard died two years later, pundits wondered if the country would ever again produce a writer so able to affect men and women from all walks of life...

...Although her interest in the man her family called simply RF is more personal than scholarly, perhaps because of her background (she is a former Spanish professor) she is impressively objective...

...In The Frost Family's Adventure in Poetry, Francis documents how her mother, aunts and uncle did precisely that, and how her grandfather similarly used poetry to beat back the dark or wrest some victory out of loss...

...Their symbiotic relationship lasted until Thomas' death on a French battlefield in 1917...

...Nevertheless, by revealing him through the eyes of his children and close friends, she demolishes Thompson's profile of a loveless slave to ambition...

...they had been hoping the Thomases would join them there to continue a life of farming and poetry...

...Staunch American ideals kept the youngsters from fitting into the British school system, so they received haphazard lessons at home according to their father's own system...

...Undeniably, his image had been sentimentalized for some time...

...People who had never heard of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, even T.S...

...his approach to earning a living was disorganized...

...In turn, his critical acumen bolstered Frost's self-assurance...

...By then, the Frosts were back in the United States...

...Robert indulged his family, but remained "a grudging sightseer...

...Sicknesses and some unpleasant experiences notwithstanding, the stay in England grew to seem idyllic in retrospect, and the Frosts kept in touch with the friends they had made there for many years...

...It was in England, too, that he forged the closest friendship of his life with another struggling writer, Edward Thomas...

...Her father's chilling dialogue poem, "The Fear," touches the same theme: A woman returning home after dusk becomes convinced a stalker, perhaps a jilted suitor, is waiting for her...

...complete with handsome, telling photographs??is no less valuable for being sympathetic...

...His first two books, A Boy's Will and North of Boston??with their strong Yankee inflection??were both written and published in England...

...He was saying what the postmodern sensibility longed to hear: The adored old man was actually a neurotic, mean-spirited sort, spiteful toward literary rivals and ruthless enough to sacrifice friends in his pursuit of art and fame...

...It will surely lead readers back to Robert Frost's poetry with deepened understanding, and with renewed appreciation for his own "sheer morning gladness at the brim...

...Despite this, or maybe because of it, their writings evince considerable intelligence and charm...

...The two were about the same age, and their children (Thomas had three) became playmates...

...A bullying gamekeeper had provoked an incident that resulted in Frost's being summoned by the local constable and charged with threatening the man...

...This transformed Thomas into one of Britain's outstanding pre-World War I poets...

...Those of us old enough to remember John F. Kennedy's inauguration can picture the white-thatched octogenarian fighting a January wind to declaim lines from "The Gift Outright...

...when she hears something, it turns out to be only a small boy and his father, who explains that "Every child should have the memory/of at least one long-after-bedtime walk...

...She shows him to have been complicated, high-strung, and at times quite difficult...

...Whenever his children were afraid of something, Frost had them confront their fear by writing about it...

...Still, the negative impact of Thompson's work cannot be overestimated...

...Their eldest child, Lesley??Francis' mother??was 13...

...Robert, Elinor and Marjorie returned for a visit in 1928...

...Francis takes her subtitle from "The Tuft of Flowers," a poem Frost had written earlier about the Derry farm...

...Thomas was a highly regarded reviewer, yet he still suffered from crippling melancholy and self-doubt...

...Elinor had always wished to spend some time in the land of her favorite authors, and Robert yearned for the freedom to concentrate on writing without the burden of earning money...

...which the farm's proceeds made possible, if only for a short period...

...Yeats, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, Rupert Brooke, and then Poet Laureate Robert Bridges...

...The biographer was, after all, one of Frost's literary executors and no doubt was aware of the supercilious pleasure many get from believing education allows them to discover what the masses have missed in a body of work...

...Francis does not whitewash her grandfather...

...Close readers of his poetry already knew that its bright surface occasionally masked an undercurrent of depression, sarcasm or sharp impatience...

...Dry stone dikes in Scotland, the home of his ancestors, triggered the memories of New Hampshire that inspired "Mending Wall...

...People ate when hungry and went to bed when tired...

...She, her brother Carol, and her sisters Irma and Marjorie were trained by their parents to write about their daily activities, as well as to compose stories, poems and drawings...

...Hoping to have the other's companionship, he was disappointed to discover that "he had gone his way, the grass all mown/And I must be, as he had been??alone,/'As all must be,' I said within my heart,/ 'Whether they work together or apart.'" But he stumbles across an uncut clump of blue flowers, and realizes the mower spared them "from sheer morning gladness at the brim...

...Francis readily acknowledges, for example, that Thompson brought to the forefront a number of overlooked truths about Frost: He was not always as benign as his poetic persona...

...In Congressional chambers, in courts and schools, and on editorial pages, one would come across such nuggets as "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," or So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may take something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid...

...in 1957 the widowed poet went to England on a cultural mission for the government, accompanied by his granddaughter...

...In London, he spent evenings at readings with such notables as W.B...

...On the other hand, she asserts, the poet's intimates agreed that "Thompson's obsessive treatment of RF's personality reduced to an absurdity the wonderfully complex and sensitive nature of a man who made friends easily and whose generous devotion to family was exemplary among the struggling artists of his day...

...mostly spent in Britain??when a father, farmer and part-time schoolmaster, unknown and nearly 40, transformed himself into one of the significant writers of his age...

...Her portrait of the whole clan...

...Their journals, along with the Frosts' correspondence, have furnished Francis with a detailed account of the family's three years in Britain...

...mental instability ran in the family...

...But a mere three years after Frost's death in 1963, the first volume of Lawrance Thompson's three-part biography appeared and??at least among critics and teachers??the poet's sunny reputation was soon eclipsed...

...In thanksgiving, the speaker addresses his absent comrade: '"Men work together,' I told him from the heart,/'Whether they work together or apart.'" This is the first expression of Frost's creed that although a writer may work in solitude, he is connected in spirit to the people and culture around him...

...Instead, she concentrates on the few years...

...To an extent, the approach may even have been calculated to sustain academic interest in a writer who appealed strongly to a less sophisticated audience...

...In 1912 the Frosts sold their farm in Derry, New Hampshire, along with all except a few possessions, and set sail for England...

...and he harbored jealousy toward some, albeit not all, of his competitors...

...Whatever, Frost's granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, has now written The Frost Family's Adventure in Poetry: Sheer Morning Gladness at the Brim (Missouri, 236 pp., $29.95), a convincing counterweight to Thompson's unflattering portrait...