Love and Need

By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost’s death, these cliches gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vendler reviewed Thompson’s biography, she asked whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a “monster.” In Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost’s life - one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships, heretofore partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost’s enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is