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...LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST TO LOUIS UNTERMEYER. 388 pages. Holt, Rinehart and Winston...
Poet Robert Frost possessed a true genius' insatiable appetite for praise. Critic and Poetaster Louis Untermeyer had a true believer's admiration for Frost's poetry. It was not surprising, therefore, that the two hit it off from the start-or that Frost's side of their long correspondence, now published by Untermeyer less than a year after his famous friend's death, should run to a fine, fat, square volume...
Inevitably, much of it turns out to be chaff; Frost, for instance, was a tireless and occasionally tiresome punster. But from the mass of letters stretching back to 1915, a perceptive reader can piece together a startling self-portrait of the artist. Some of it will go against the grain of Frost's more sentimental adulators. People thought of him, Untermeyer explains, "as benevolent, sweet and serene. Instead he was proud, trou bled and jealous. Robert did not converse, he spoke...
...Return Boastage." When the two friends first met in 1915, Frost was 40 and almost unknown in the U.S.; his first volume of verse had just been brought out in England, where he was "discovered" in 1913. Untermeyer, 29 and full of enterprise, was trying to escape from his father's jewelry business in Newark by establishing a beachhead as poet and critic. The early letters are full of chesty exchanged praises for each other's work-"please send by return boastage," Frost punned to Untermeyer in 1921-as well as attacks on both the free-versers...
...with me," Frost exhorted Untermeyer, who obligingly struck out at old poetic practice by using Frost as an example of how things should be done. "There are times," Frost was generous to admit, "when I think I am merely the figment of Louis' imagination." But these early letters are notable mainly for Frost's continual cross references to his fellow writers-all of whom he took for enemies and deadly rivals...