Word: frosts
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...FROST: A LITERARY LIFE RECONSIDERED by William H. Pritchard
...always been easy to make the case for Robert Frost as one of America's greatest poets. His younger colleague Randall Jarrell tried in the 1950s and ran smack up against the self-created public figure, the "Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity": a singer of homely New England scenes, "full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy." Then, shortly after Frost's death in 1963 at age 88, his friend Lawrance Thompson began publishing a three-volume biography; inadvertently or not, it replaced the cracker-barrel sage with a monster. Thompson piled up a chronicle of "jealousies...
...task that William H. Pritchard has set himself in Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered is to create a plausible portrait somewhere between these two extremes. Pritchard, a professor of English at Amherst College, succeeds admirably by emphasizing a fundamental principle in Frost's makeup: the sense of play. The poet, Pritchard maintains, held the universe in a teasing, ironic suspension, indulging his imagination in, as Frost put it, "play for mortal stakes...
Pritchard does not deny that the play was rough. With friends and supporters, Frost was sometimes manipulative and dissembling. Toward rivals, he was hostile at worst, wary at best (when invited to share a platform with other poets, here plied with the ditty "I only go/ When I'm the show"). Yet Pritchard sets all this against Frost's compelling need to establish his poetic voice. The poet knew that his technique-the colloquial tone played against traditional meters, the apprehension of unnamed mysteries in ordinary experiences-was far more original and subtle than it appeared...
...group of English Department professors invited Pales to Harvard as part of the Morris Gras Poetry Fund a University endowment Former guests of the fund have been poets Robert Frost and I.S Eliot...