For many readers, Robert Frost looms large as the American poet who captured the rhythms of New England life and the patterns of nature in poems like “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Celebrated for capturing ordinary speech in his poetry, Frost incorporated influences such as Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley in his verse, as well as philosophical influences regarding the spirit and the self from Ralph Waldo Emerson to William James. In his moving and insightful Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, literary critic Adam Plunkett performs elegant close readings of Frost’s poems as a way of mapping the poet’s development, his struggles with self-doubt and his relationships with his family and friends.
Born in San Francisco, Frost moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1884, following his father’s death. Always curious about the natural world—he kept hens in his yard in San Francisco—he composed one of his first poems, “My Butterfly,” when he was 20. As Plunkett observes, at the time Frost had been reading Francis Thompson’s 182-line poem “Hound of Heaven” as well as Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” “My Butterfly” writes Plunkett, “reads like a spell that conjures the experience of grace as the poem describes its having passed.” Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913), which he wrote following the death of his mother and his son, resembles Tennyson’s elegy “In Memoriam” and, Plunkett argues, forms Frost’s spiritual autobiography.
Plunkett’s brilliant readings of Frost’s best-known poems offer refreshing, alternative interpretations. For example, rather than being a sentimental reflection on hopes lost or chances not selected, “The Road Not Taken” is a poem about friendship, “the kind that can witness your deepest uncertainties and remember you as you were, long after you have forgotten yourself.” The struggle between the spiritual and the natural animates all of Frost’s poems, and a “measured sense of transcendence touched all things in the best of his poetry like intimations of gold in nature’s first green.”
Plunkett’s refined prose and his astute readings of Frost’s poems in Love and Need offer a candid portrait of the poet’s enduring creative genius.
