Word: frosted
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...pensiveness of an old man surveying his fields and finding solace in memory. The book's third section contains more poems inspired by the tale of Sweeney. They describe the bird- man's first flight: "more sleepwalk than spasm" . . . drawing "close to pebbles and berries . . . relearning the acoustic of frost." He recalls his roosting place in a chestnut tree, characterized as "a queen in her fifties, dropping/ purses and earrings," and the highlights of an avian existence as he goes "scaling heaven/ by superstition/ drunk and happy/ on a chapel gable...
...Frost Family...
...agree that William Pritchard's book on Robert Frost [BOOKS, Nov. 12] succeeds in restoring a positive, plausible view of the man who gave us great narrative and lyric poetry. But as Frost's granddaughter, I must protest the reviewer's harsh tone in depicting my grandfather's handling of family tragedies like his son's suicide. Your review resurrects Lawrence Thompson's literal-minded pseudopsy-choanalysis that I thought the Pritchard biography had laid to rest...
...Frost's self-absorption exacted a heavy toll in his private life. His family often found him hard to love and harder to please. A sister and a daughter went insane; a son killed himself. Pritchard repeatedly uses the word shocking to describe the sardonic hardness with which Frost inured himself to these blows. "As I get older I find it easier to lie awake nights over other people's troubles," the poet wrote to a friend after committing his sister to a mental hospital. "But that's as far as I go to date. In good...
Meantime he had his uncommon gift. His refuge was form, which for him equaled "sanity." After his favorite daughter and his wife died within a few years of each other, he could still produce poised, masterly poems that, as Pritchard poignantly notes, "bore out his spiritual persistence." They were Frost's way, if not of redeeming a harsh life, at least of transforming it and trying to make it inseparable from art. Ultimately, he confessed in another letter, he had only one anxiety: "Am I any good? That's what I'd like to know...