Prospects for the Study of Robert Frost

Abstract

Robert Frost's (1874-1963) life and work continue provide a rich area of study, even as the academic culture vigorously redefines the field of literature within which Frost has been canonically lodged for years and even as he gets resifted various levels in debates about his modernism. Developments during the past generation have made more documents accessible and have deepened and broadened our understanding of Frost's art and life. There is still much work be done in simply cataloging, assembling, and making more available the letters, interviews, talks, and readings, and in giving the biographical approaches and literary interpretations a more definitive cultural inflection than they have taken, but the field has a well-established collection of texts and companion works guide and inspire scholars just approaching Frost, as well as those who have been working on him for years.Often regarded by scholars as regrettable, Frost's popularity across the ranks of readers, sometimes for the wrong reasons, has actually enriched the scholarship his life and works inspire. He did, after all, seek to be a poet for all sorts and rather than be caviar the crowd . . . the way . . . Pound was (Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays [CPPP] 668). In a yearlong survey of Americans that was conducted by Robert Pinsky in 1999, Robert Frost won hands down as the country's favorite poet (Barron and Wilcox 2). And in a poll of American college students conducted by Dana Gioia about ten years ago, Frost's Fire and Ice turned out be their favorite poem (172). features of his poetry that attract both highbrow and middlebrow audiences, or perhaps make the highbrow weary of him because of the middlebrow interest, actually add dimension his poems and essays, as well as his public presentations, and thereby challenge the complacent scholar hedged in by easy academic assumptions about the value of poetry. During the last two generations, new historicist, gender, cultural, and reception theory approaches have professionalized Frost studies and, in certain ways, moved the professional readers closer understanding the expectations of amateur readers. Admiring appreciators of Frost's poetry, as well as collectors and preservers of his records, have allowed the kinds of remarkable work now being done on Frost's career and art. In other words, the broad range of readers fascinated by Frost's poetry, rather than just the professionalized few, keeps him from disappearing below the radar of publishers and preserves his claim a position in the canon, whatever shape the canon takes.There is much in just the nuts and bolts of the Frost scholarly and educational industry prepare and jump-start the scholar seeking new areas of study. publication in 1995 of the Library of America Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays, edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, advanced Frost studies by including plays and masques, various letters, the most generous selection of prose writings up that time readily available, and nearly all (ninety-four) of the one hundred largely inaccessible, uncollected poems in the Frost corpus, seventeen of which are printed from holograph manuscript for the first time. For a volume of its kind, the edition is extraordinarily well documented and edited; in that way and, as is broadly known, in its restoration of Frost's intended punctuation, the 1995 Library of America volume far surpasses Poetry of Robert Frost (1969), edited by Edward Connery Lathem. mere availability of this new material is important: previously uncollected poems, such as The Seven Arts (Kosc, Monstrous Liberalism) and The Mill City (Sheehy, 'Stay Unassuming'), have yielded valuable new studies of Frost's life and politics, areas that will continue require further examination and revision. Though published eighteen years ago, CPPP continues provide opportunities for close study of how previously uncollected poems and a play such as A Way Out (1917), for instance, advance our understanding of Frost's poetry and his place in our culture. …