Word: frosts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ROBERT FROST: THE EARLY YEARS-1874-1915 by Lawrence Thompson. 641 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston...
...millions who watched the old man recite The Gift Outright at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, or learned to love Mending Wall or After Apple-Picking in their school days, Robert Frost was the serene, supremely benevolent country poet. A generation of interviewers had gorged themselves on his folksy humor and humble denims, on that familiar shock of untutored hair, those earthy accounts of his early scrabbling for a living from his New Hampshire poultry farm. Yet Frost also used to say: "I'm liable to tell you anything. Trust me in the poetry...
Lawrance Thompson, the New Hampshire-born Princeton professor and critic whom Frost chose in 1939 to be his official biographer, did a lot of watching and checking. Out of nearly three decades of conversation and affectionate companionship has come an eloquent biography-this is the first of two volumes-that will surprise Frost's idolators. Thompson shows that there was very little in Frost's style that was spontaneous; he had to whittle laboriously at his poetry to achieve his roughhewn colloquial effects. Even more interesting is the author's picture of Frost as a selfish, baffling...
Self-Doubt & Hatred. Young Robbie Frost was a spoiled brat almost from the day he was born in San Francisco in 1874. His father was a hard-drinking, Harvard-educated journalist who beat Rob often. His mother indulged the boy, taught him to love poetry and nature; she was a devout Swedenborgian who believed that she had religious visions. It was her influence, says Thompson, that encouraged Robbie and his sister Jeanie to withdraw into a private world as children...
Jeanie died in an insane asylum in 1929. Robbie, infected with a tendency to explosive furies-which, as Thompson says, were much like his father's-and with what Frost himself called "my Indian vindictiveness," found survival in poetry. His poems became "tools or weapons for actually trying to resolve those conflicts within himself, or between himself and others, which he viewed as being so dangerous that they might otherwise engulf...