FIRE AND FROST

...Parini calls this a labor of love...

...Parini finds this "depressing" and, with astonishing obtuseness, adds, "Like Dylan Thomas after him, Frost was prepared to 'rage against the dying of the light.'" But clearly it isn't Frost who'll be doing the raging here...

...It's surprising to realize, given the figure Frost later cut as poet, performer, and national symbol, that he had written the bulk of his great poetry by the time his fourth and most autobiographical volume, New Hampshire, took the Pulitzer Prize (the first of his four) in 1924...

...But, nice though it is to see anyone weigh in on the anti-Thompson side of l'affaire Frost, one no longer particularly needs such a corrective...

...On A Boy's Will, his first book published in England: "It was gratifying to find such enthusiasm for his work in the country that had produced Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth...

...I hadn't a plan for the future that didn't include him...

...The effect is appalling...

...There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken...

...All Frost biographers of the last quarter-century have worked in the shadow of the monumental—and monumentally flawed—authorized biography written by Lawrance Thompson, a Princeton critic whom Frost rashly hired for the job in 1942...

...The clouds were low and hairy in the skies, Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes...

...Of Eliot, he said, "I don't think a thing has to be obvious before it is said, but it ought to be obvious when it is said...

...The shattered water made a misty din...

...In 1915, he returned to America famous...

...Frost took a bit from each parent...

...Lionel Trilling too confessed to having come around—after years of typical academic snickering at the greeting-card aspects of the poetry—to see Frost Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Thereafter, Frost's life was a mix of public acclaim and private despera-tion—particularly in the 1930s and early 1940s when, amidst a succession of prestigious university appointments, honorary degrees, and rich speaking deals, he lost a daughter to disease, his wife to a heart ailment, and his son to suicide, while his only sister and another daughter descended into insanity...

...Not just Frost's modernism but his Americanism can be called into question...

...He was a late bloomer who lacked stick-to-it-iveness, a dropout from Dartmouth and Harvard who drifted into chicken and apple farming and teaching...

...What is needed is a reckoning with Frost's relation to modernism...

...as not merely a genius but a "terrifying" poet...

...But he had little respect for the willful obscurity and flaunted erudition that were the stock-in-trade of high poetic modernism...

...His reading of "West-Running Brook," for instance, brings in the critics Robert Faggen, William Pritchard, and Reuben Brow-er—and in a sense that's lucky: When Parini ventures an original interpretation, the results are disastrous...

...I had nearly a perfect life over there," Frost said of his English years, "a romance such as happens to few...

...He also wrote dozens of the poems that, re-jiggered, would seed his later collections...

...From his father, he got his habit to go his own way and fall into depression over it...

...Or was he exactly the reactionary he appears, our best American link back to the pre-modernist poetry that now needs rediscovering...

...Frost's "Acquainted with the Night" may be a stark and ghostly terza-rima sonnet, but Parini is stretching the point when he calls Dante's meter "appropriate for a poem about the descent into darkness...

...It's possible this hatchet job helped Frost's reputation in a perverse way, providing an identity badge ("evil loner") of the sort modernist critics love to attach, for a poet who was neither gay, drunk, suicidal, nor Communist enough to stoke biographical interest otherwise...

...Or worse, a life for ninth graders...

...Until finally: "The heights of Parnassus had been scaled...

...His unfeigned enthusiasm, visible on every page, insulates Parini from many earlier biographers' flaws...

...At times, indeed, that seems the driving purpose of modern scholars— most ridiculously Duke's Frank Len-tricchia, who credits Frost with "subvert- ing" popular literary anthologies merely by writing poems that weren't actively stupid...

...There he worked on the lyrics of his first book, A Boy's Will (1913) and wrote most of the blankverse narratives that form his masterwork, North of Boston (1914...

...There's no reason to doubt him, but he has failed to put Frost on the page, either as a poet or a person...

...Parini has taken a poem that is self-evidently an intimation of God's apocalypse and read it as a warning that the poet is gonna get really, really mad if he has to look at those crashing waves any longer...

...The sad upshot is that no one can any longer lovingly spout lines from Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" or "Desert Places" or "The Gift Outright" without fearing that every opportunity for enjoyment hides a chance to expose oneself as a rube...

...Jarrell and Trilling were right...

...Was he part and parcel of the Pound-Eliot movement, merely effecting his modernist project through superficially traditional (or, as Lentricchia would put it, "subversive") means...

...And it is hardly confidence-inspiring to see Frost's main poetic rival Edwin Arlington Robinson referred to as "Edward...

...It does not, however, bring with it any special virtues...

...As a 1990s academic, Parini is excellent on Frost the educator (adored by his students and recognized for his innovations by the state of New Hampshire) and Frost the autodidact (ignorant of modern languages, but a considerably more formidable classicist than either Pound or Eliot...

...Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco to William Prescott Frost, a melancholic, dipsomaniac Harvard grad so rebellious that during the Civil War he ran away from his Massachusetts home to join the Confederate army...

...This is a biography that, lacking any sense of the biographer's art, takes us neither out far nor in deep...

...If the poem's narrator is "preparing" for anything, it's to get squashed like a bug...

...By 1945, Thompson loathed his subject and would devote the remaining three decades of his life to compiling a phonebook-sized work of character assassination...

...Part of the problem is that this is not a biography so much as a bare-bones life interrupted by indigestible gobbets of criticism—which, moreover, are only occasionally Parini's own...

...Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had," Frost would recall...

...Great waves looked over others coming in, And thought of doing something to the shore That water never did to land before...

...Dante also wrote the Paradiso, after all, and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" uses a string of terza rima sonnets to build what is, of all serious poems in English, probably the most sunlit and outdoorsy...

...In 1947, the critic Randall Jarrell mocked the stage-Yankee persona of the most popular American poet since Longfellow, calling him "the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity...

...Surely the title of Frost's late poem "The Wind and the Rain" echoes not Hardy's "During Wind and Rain" but Feste's song from Twelfth Night (A great while ago the world begun / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain...

...Frost helped get Pound released from the mental hospital where he was held in lieu of a treason conviction after World War II, and his relations with Eliot were cordial...

...FIRE AND FROST A New Life of America's Poet By Christopher Caldwell For fifty years it has been a big project of the American academy to rescue the poet Robert Frost from his admirers—to show that his traditional rhyming sonnets and odes were not merely beautiful ditties, that his blank-verse narratives of ordinary New Englanders were more than just nice stories...

...The American critic Louis Untermeyer, Frost's friend who followed a mission as an anthologist parallel to Frost's as a poet, scarcely makes an appearance except as the addressee of Frost's epistolary rants...

...Parini makes other stumbles...

...Parini adds little to what close readers of Frost will know already...

...You could not tell, and yet it looked as if The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff, The cliff in being backed by continent...

...But he also identified an "Other Robert Frost," a virtuoso who differed from Ezra Pound and T.S...

...This line of inquiry doesn't interest Parini...

...Eliot only in his resolute defiance of modernist convention (hardly a failing, to Jarrell's ear) and his absence of pretense...

...But their claims for Frost, relayed to a later, less literary generation of critics, have rendered Frost almost unenjoyable outside of the academy...

...He was an aspiring poet, a political hack, and one of the most gifted journalists in San Francisco until tuberculosis killed him at age thirty-four...

...In one oft-ridiculed passage, Thompson sought to enlist Frost's lifelong love of baseball to paint him as evil, vindictive, and cutthroat: In Salem, when he became the best pitcher on his grammar school team, he dreamed he would some day achieve renown as a hero in the major league of his choice—and even a baseball could serve as a lethal weapon if carefully aimed at the head of an enemy batter...

...When his high-school sweetheart and (later) wife of forty-two years hesitated to marry him, he threw her engagement ring into a stove and took off for the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, possibly to commit suicide...

...In 1912, at thirty-eight, thanks to an annuity left by his grandfather and the sale of his farm, Frost was able to move his family to England...

...In fact, Frost expressed an urge to "stay with them until I'm deported" and became the mentor and friend of the exquisite lyric poet Edward Thomas, who was killed in World War I before he'd published more than a few dozen poems...

...But that does not keep Thompson's book from being the most unfair literary biography of the late twentieth century...

...From his mother, he got his taste for Scottish ballads and a tendency (despite private religious skepticism) to take the religiously orthodox viewpoint in any late-night discussion...

...What's more, much of the story is told through raw interviews with a handful of subjects, which are poured, unedited, into the text...

...At thirty-four, he was still grateful to get his poems published in the newspaper of Pinkerton Academy, the New Hampshire prep school where he taught...

...In another passage, he recounted a story told by the poet's daughter Lesley about Frost pointing a gun at his wife and himself and asking the toddler which one she wanted to see alive in the morning—this despite Lesley's later assertion that it was most likely an image from one of the vivid nightmares that plagued her...

...It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming, and not only a night, an age...

...Take his gloss on Frost's splendid "Once by the Pacific...

...Parini shows little curiosity about Thomas—or anyone else who crossed Frost's path, for that matter...

...Parini sides against Thompson, and with such revisionists as William Pritchard, who largely dismissed the book in his excellent Robert Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered...

...The book reads less like a serious biography than an interminable magazine profile...

...For anyone looking to rediscover a straightforward, more purely poetic Frost, unmuddied by irony-mongering, it's promising that he should have a biographer like the Middlebury professor and poet Jay Parini, who admits that Frost has been his favorite poet since the ninth grade...

...Here's Parini on Frost's upbringing: "One's early experience is, of course, essential in the formation of character...

...Frost's mother Belle was a Scottish immigrant with a lot of poetry in her head and a religious enthusiasm that would take her through a half-dozen denominations before she landed on Swedenborgianism...

...John Evangelist Walsh's great 1988 study of Frost's English years, Into My Own, invites us to discard this simple idea of Frost's American-ness—which is particularly bold of Walsh, in light of Frost's later stage persona as the repository of all America's folk wisdom...

...He falls into the tendency of conventional Frost critics to read the poet almost exclusively through the American literary tradition (with a feint at German romantic philosophy), viewing Emerson as Frost's most significant literary ancestor...

...Someone had better be prepared for rage...

...and Stanley Burnshaw, whose fond and delightful Robert Frost Himself exposed the pettiness and jealousy that fired Thompson...