Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry

A TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT BOOK OF THE YEAR

Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost’s life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.

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 clichés 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 scathing 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 reading of the poems and the people Frost knew best, showing how the stories of his most significant relationships, heretofore only partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost’s enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is the fraught, intense friendship between Frost and Thompson, the major biographer whose record of Frost Plunkett seeks to set straight.

Moving through Frost’s most important work and closest relationships with the attention to detail necessary to see familiar things anew, Plunkett offers an original interpretation of Frost’s poetry, tracing Frost’s distinctive achievement to an engagement with poetic tradition far deeper and more extensive than he ever let on. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet he kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together—the poet and the poetry—and draws us back into conversation with America’s poet.