For a half-century since his death, Robert Frost’s reputation has suffered greatly from the distorted portrait Lawrance Thompson presented in his multi-volume biography of the late 1960s. Thompson’s biography led Helen Vendler in 1970 to describe Frost as “a monster of egotism” who had left “a wake of destroyed human lives.” Because of their unique detail on the poet’s life, Thompson’s biography and his Selected Letters of Frost published in 1964 have remained the most detailed portrait of Frost the man.
The collected Letters reviewed here should serve as a thorough corrective to Thompson’s view of Frost as a “monster” and a parallel tendency to dismiss him as a poet of seemingly easy favorites like “The Road Not Taken.”1 The letters call for a renewed evaluation of Frost as a poet who drew skillfully, and with playful subtlety, on classic poetic themes and subjects to give them a modern relevance.
In their preface, the editors unreservedly charge Thompson with malice. They quote his introduction to that 1964 “selected” edition of Frost’s letters in which Thompson alleges that the letters reveal Frost’s “gloom, jealousies, obsessive resentment, sulking, displays of temper, nervous rages and vindictive retaliations” and that “he frequently indulged his passion for hurting even those he loved.” Thompson had invited readers to “roll their own” biography of Frost from the letters and, as an aid, provided the following entries in the index
