The Letters of Robert Frost: Volume 2, 1920–1928 ed. by Donald Sheehy et al. (review)

Here is Volume 2 of Robert Frost’s letters, an enormous editorial project originally planned for four volumes, now for five. It covers the years 1920–1928, beginning with the end of his first stint of teaching at Amherst College (he began working there in 1917) and ending as he was about to publish his fifth book of poems, West-Running Brook. The scope of this edition may be gauged by noting that previously Frost’s letters from this period, as selected in different volumes by Lawrance Thompson and Louis Untermeyer, amounted to roughly 200 pages. In the new book there are 700 pages of letters, fully annotated, plus a glossary of correspondents and a chronology. Three of the four editors have written extensively about Frost: Donald Sheehy has published three long, penetrating essays about Frost’s life; Mark Richardson has edited his poems for the Library of America as well as his complete prose with exhaustive notes; and Robert Hass has published a study of Frost and science. Exemplary is a wholly inadequate word to characterize their joint editorial enterprise. If you’re curious about the scores of a baseball double header between the Red Sox and Cleveland (attended by Frost and his son-in-law in 1928), they are here in a footnote.

Frost once spoke of college as a game you played; these letters from the 1920s sketch out his continuing game with the academy: to the University of Michigan for a year as Fellow in Creative Arts; then back to Amherst for occasional appearances at the college; to Michigan again for a stretch, and eventually, in 1926, back at Amherst for ten weeks of teaching a year, settling into a relationship with the college that would last until 1938, when his wife Elinor died. The letters from the Twenties are singularly lacking in interesting political or social comment on the American scene, except in its literary aspect. He brought contemporary poets to read at Michigan, often to overflow crowds; meanwhile the visits and readings he gave at colleges and universities were ever increasing, as was his own fame—a Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for the volume New Hampshire and the steady accumulation of lyrics and narrative that he would bring together in his first Collected Poems in 1930.

A painful and recurrent concern in these letters, one that the editors treat strongly in their introduction, is the increasing ill-health of Frost’s family. His wife having borne six children (two of whom died in infancy) suffered what Frost calls “a serious nervous collapse” in 1925, coinciding with the last of her miscarriages. There was the prolonged illness of his youngest daughter, Marjorie, who would die after childbirth in 1934. There was mental instability first in his sister Jeanie, institutionalized in 1920, and later in his daughter Irma, who would eventually suffer the same fate. And there was the growing distance between Frost and his son Carol, who took his own life in 1942. (Frost’s own health miseries are minor: plenty of influenza and hay fever.) One of the revelations these letters afford is what a remarkable woman his oldest child Lesley was; along with the poet and anthologist Louis Untermeyer, she is the recipient of the richest of these letters.

In what prevailing manner are they rich? What kind of a letter writer was Frost and how does his correspondence stack up against acknowledged great literary letter writes—Keats surely, Byron or D. H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf perhaps? One of the innumerable striking entries in his Notebooks, published ten years ago, is a four-line poem:

Nothing ever so sincereThat unless it’s out of sheerMischief and a little queerIt won’t prove a bore to hear.

Poetry had an obligation to be unboring and, above all, to be something heard, to be mainly ear—rather than eye—read. It had to...