Word: frosts
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...ROBERT FROST-A PICTORIAL CHRONICLE by KATHLEEN MORRISON 133 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston...
...addition to being a great poet, Robert Frost was the most dazzling performer on the American literary stage since Mark Twain. The impersonation of a mischievous, lovable old sugar maple of a man that he gave while lecturing during the last three decades of his life is still vivid to anyone who came near a college auditorium during that period...
Undoubtedly it was because of the brilliant success of this impersonation that the news of Frost's actual character struck so hard. After the publication a few years ago of his Selected Letters and the first two volumes of Lawrance Thompson's biography, there could be no doubt about it: Frost never matured emotionally, and the dark side of a powerful and childish nature frequently dominated. He was often malicious, vindictive and jealous to a degree that could not be passed off as the mere crankiness of a sensitive man. He was insatiably greedy for attention and praise...
Biographer Thompson died before finishing his third and concluding volume on Frost (it is now going forward under other hands and is expected to be ready next year). In the interim comes a fascinating sketch of Frost's last 25 years, written by the woman who became his secretary after the unexpected death of his wife Elinor in 1938. Kathleen Morrison, the wife of Harvard English Professor Theodore Morrison, was Frost's friend and principal day-to-day protector until his death...
...remains a protector in her recollections, which favor Frost and reticence. Still, she does not turn aside from what must be admitted about the man. When he was angry, she recalls, he would sometimes hide in the woods near his farmhouse, apparently hoping that his friends would think that he had come to harm. In the years after Elinor's death, she notes, "his incautious use of pills always stopped short of the ultimate message it was meant to convey...