Frost: An Analysis of Letters, Article Writing Example

Editors D. Sheehy, M. Richardson & R. Faggen offers insight into American poet Robert Frost’s life through a book entitle The Letters of Robert Frost (2014). The publication seeks to re-establish the iconic American poet after Lawrence Thompson’s biography. In the book the editors offer a “reassessment of the poet’s stature and significance” through letters starting with when the young poet was twelve years old and writing love notes, to when the poet is a middle-aged man. These letters, edited and arranged the way they are, offer a more intimate glimpse into the poet’s life and “reveal candid self-reflections” of Frost.

These self-reflections give the reader a closer glimpse of Frost not as a poet only, but as a man returning to farm life or “retreating” back to it as Frost states in the book. It is during this “retreating” period in Frost’s life that the editor’s offer letters in explanation to Frost’s decision to move back to the farm after having some success as a poet, as Frost states in one of his letters, “to save myself and fix myself before I measured my strength against all creation.” By this the editors suggest that Frost wanted to find an inner strength before offering himself up to the world.

The volume of letters gives the reader a new perspective of the poet as “playful, sly, caring and supremely serious about his art in his letters to poets.” With the body of Frost’s work it can be surmised that he was indeed this man the editors and the letters reveal him to be. Frost’s presentation of self as somewhat of a recluse only solidifies this assumption. Frost’s artistic disposition in shyness—his reserve—comes through in his poems (e.g. high fences make good neighbors) and in his letters to friends, poets, and former students. Frost is a man who was “serious about his art” – he offered himself to it wholly, without reserve as this collection proves.

References

Robert, F. (2014). The Letters of Robert Frost Volums I: 1886-1920. D. Sheehy, M.

Richardson & R. Faggen (Eds). Austin, TX: Kirkus Media LLC.