The life journey of Frost—from boyhood in San Francisco to his troubled teenage years in Lawrence to his hard times at Dartmouth and Harvard, through his early marriage, the years he spent on the poultry farm in Derry, New Hampshire, his English sojourn, and his climb to fame as a poet—is well-known. In recounting it, Plunkett draws on a range of biographers from Sidney Cox and Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant through Thompson and any number of more recent biographers. In Love and Need, Plunkett displays an impressively broad and detailed knowledge of this trajectory.
He spends a good deal of time on Frost’s awkward, often painful and overwrought relationship to Thompson, whom Frost named as his official biographer, much to his later regret. Thompson was part of the mix in Ripton, Vermont, where Frost spent long periods on his small farm, and where his companions were Kay and Ted Morrison. (Ted directed the School of English at Bread Loaf.) Frost had an affair with Kay. She likewise had a special relationship with Thompson, though the extent of their feelings for each other remains unclear and subject to lots of hearsay. In any case, there was trouble on the mountain, and Thompson died before he finished his three-volume biography, which has always seemed to me a work of resentment toward Frost. Thompson was no reader of poetry: his tin ear for verse undermines his occasional forays into criticism. But given his unique access to Frost, Thompson’s book has considerable value as a document. The past 60 years, post-Thompson, have seen a rich tradition of Frost biography emerge, with a lot of effort put into correcting Thompson’s various misimpressions.
Frost has been lucky in his critics. In Poetry and the Age (1953), Randall Jarrell, who understood Frost as well as anyone ever has, noted his “stubborn truthfulness, his willingness to admit both the falseness in the cliché and the falseness in the contradiction of the cliché.” Lionel Trilling famously insulted Frost at his 85th birthday celebration by calling him a terrifying poet: “I have to say that my Frost … is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, old simplicities and ways of feeling; he is anything but.” Frost objected, as he would, but generously wrote to Trilling on June 18, 1959, that he was free to give his opinions, adding, “No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body.” That clash of arms has been loud and constant, with various opinions on the meaning of many of Frost’s poems, and includes important books and articles on Frost by Richard Poirier, William H. Pritchard, Karen Kilcup, David Orr, Robert Faggen, Henry Hart, and crucially, Donald Sheehy.