Word: frosts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ROAD from Middlebury College up to the Breadloaf Mountain campus (where in late summer a gang of artist types and their students celebrate the annual writers' conference started about 50 years ago by Robert Frost), you pass first through the scenic village of Ripton, Vermont, a town which will probably satisfy your expectations of what Robert Frost's home town should look like, You find little more than a post office, a phone booth and a combination gas station and general store dealing in two-for-a-penny-candy, dusty bottles of aspirin, applejack, Vermont cheese (kept under the moldy...
...then pass by one of those brown wooden national landmark signs indicating the proximity of the cabin where Robert Frost lived. Picnic tables and litter bins help commemorate the entrance to the road. Stopping to read the sign, you feel like a reverent tourist at Lexington and Concord or the Statue of Liberty. At the end of the dirt road which climbs about a mile through the woods toward the advertised cabin, there is still another engraved plaque. There, through a hedge and over another bank, an orchard of dwarf apple trees conceals (except from the annual busloads...
...SUNDAY afternoon and raining; in Vermont the foliage of the swamp maples and sumac had already turned their final colors. I sat in the rocker where Frost must have sat, before a fire leaping in the fireplace, enjoying the comfortable associations that I used to have with Frost. That was before Lawrence Thompson's just-published heavy second volume of Frost's biography, Years of Triumph. With it a whole summer's worth of enraged reviews have emerged, suggesting that Thompson had written an expose which profaned a sacred image...
Reading years of Triumph, I find Frost's image not so much profaned, or de-popularized. It was, for the reader, simply confused. The Thompson biography approaches Frost not with the reverence that one might treat a national monument but with the candor and objectivity that a literary topic merits. In 1939 Frost invited Lawrence Thompson, then curator of books at Princeton, to be his official biographer. Frost died in 1963 and the next year Thompson published Selected Letters in which it begins to be clear that the feelings between Frost and Thompson were not all pure affection and admiration...
...Years of Triumph covers the early years of Frost's fame in England and the United States, up to the death of his wife in 1938. It describes without malice or apparent prejudice several incidents which indicate that Frost was not a benign simple rustic writing pure-hearted doggerel, but rather an impatient, frequently lazy, hyperbolic man. The reviewers were furious. Some treated the book as a personal insult. One almost-yellow journal reduced its reaction to a sixteen-point print blare, "A good poet-but a very...