Word: frostes
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...LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER. The poet and the anthologist corresponded for 46 years. Frost, a man who could not write a note for the milk man without giving it his own distinctive twist, writes over the long years of recurring tragedy in his own family, his endless gripes with little worlds of editors, politicians and educators, his deep distrust of liberalism, and his fierce judgment of his fellow writers...
...Frost's distrust of liberalism, which in his poems and letters occasionally made him sound like an outrageous parody of crackerbarrel conservatism, was based on a profound belief in smallness and a conviction that life must be lived on a level deeper than anything within the ken of group action. "Beyond the participation of the politicians and beyond the relief of senates," he wrote eloquently to Untermeyer, "lie our sorrows." But Frost also was aware of how much he had staked on sticking to the caricature personality he had partly invented and partly evolved for himself-the curmudgeonly egocentric...
...this Frost seems comic most of the time, the book offers one brief, chilling hint that Frost's relentless self-preoccupation lay at the heart of the tragedies that beset most of the people close to him. His sister and one of his children went insane; another daughter died from tuberculosis. After failing at farming and writing, Frost's only son Carol shot himself. Frost had spent the previous night assuring the boy that he was not a failure. Duly reported to Louis Untermeyer, Carol's last words to his father have a ring of true horror...
...Wrote Frost to Untermeyer: "Cast your eye back over my family's luck and perhaps you'll wonder if I haven't had pretty near enough?" But he stoically refused to make literary capital of his losses. "You shouldn't wax literary about what you've been through," he wrote in 1933. "It must be kept way down under the surface where the great griefs belong...
Last Talk. "Poets die in different ways," Frost told Untermeyer in 1947, when he was 73. "Most of them do not die into the grave but into business as you almost did, or into criticism as so many of them are doing nowadays." Frost refused to do either. He had just brought out a book of poems, his 22nd, when he died of combined pulmonary embolism and pneumonia at 89. He had not changed his character, either...