At the end of his life, Robert Frost was living in a cabin on the 150-acre Homer Noble Farm near the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. The director of the conference, Theodore Morrison, lived in the main house on the farm with his wife, Kay, who would walk a short way uphill to Frost’s cabin to serve as his manager and secretary. Frost and Kay were having an affair.
Frost’s wife, Elinor, died in March 1938. That November, Frost told his friend, Louis Untermeyer, that the affair might be the “perfect” thing for him:
“Then came this girl stepping innocently into my days to give me something to think of besides dark regrets … You can figure it out for yourself how my status with a girl like her might be the perfect thing for me at my age in my position.”
Frost wished he could tell Kay how he felt toward her, so he wrote her a poem, “The Silken Tent,” a poem his daughter, Lesley, thought Frost had written for his wife. Elinor was “the unspoken half of everything I ever wrote,” Frost said. Lesley was planning to place the first line of the poem — “She is as in a field a silken tent” — on her mother’s tombstone when Frost’s biographer, Lawrance Thompson, told her the poem was for Kay.
The poem captures Frost’s sense of being in “bondage” to Kay while she is only “loosely bound” to him. It is, Adam Plunkett writes, in his assiduously close readings of Frost’s poems in Love and Need, “the last great poem that Frost ever wrote.”
The image of Frost today is still largely that of Thompson’s three-volume biography of the poet — a selfish and fault-finding man who can’t be trusted. Frost told Thompson about the affair when Thompson visited him in Key West. Thompson told Kay to end it: “There is no way to satisfy the fierceness of his demanding and demanding.”
There have been several attempts at recovery since. Jay Parini was the first to offer a corrective to Thompson’s account of Frost as little more than a misogynist in Robert Frost: A Life (2020). Frost’s complete letters (now in their third volume) show Frost to be a showman, sure, but also a faithful friend and father. Frost’s granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, remembers him as a complex man who cared deeply for the women in his life. British critic Tim Kendall reminded us of why we love Frost by taking us back to his work in The Art of Robert Frost (2013).
Plunkett’s Love and Need, for its part, offers something of a recuperation of the poet by reminding us that Frost’s fierceness is also a source of the considerable power of his work. There are no revelations in Love and Need, but Plunkett excels at bringing the poems to life with contextual details (such as the ones above) and literary resonances.
Plunket notes, for example, that many of Frost’s poems were, in fact, responses to other poems. He wrote “My Butterfly,” the first poem he ever published, after reading Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven.”
“As ‘The Hound of Heaven’ inverts man’s search for God into God’s pursuit of man,” Plunkett writes, “‘My Butterfly’ inverts the search for inspiration into the spirit’s pursuit of the being it possesses.” Frost’s “Flower-Gathering” is clearly indebted to Shakespeare’s “Carpe Diem” in Twelfth Night. The source of Frost’s most famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Etienne de la Boéce.”
Plunkett traces Frost’s stylized and idealized expressions of beauty in the earlier work to the surefooted simplicity of a poem such as “Mowing.” The early poems are “written from the inaccessible past,” Plunkett writes, and focus on things “outside the bounds of worldly experience.” In poems such as “Mowing,” however, Frost “declares that the richest aesthetic experience of imagination … is to be had by using the power of the imagination to contemplate the world at hand.”
Like many American writers in the 20th century, Frost had to go to England to make it. His first book, A Boy’s Life, was published by David Nutt. Frost wrote Nutt because he was the publisher of the minor poet W.E. Henley, whom Frost admired. Nutt accepted Frost’s manuscript immediately.
Frost met Ezra Pound, who was serving as William Butler Yeats’s secretary and fencing instructor. Pound threw Frost over his back in a restaurant to demonstrate a jiujitsu move and went with Frost to Nutt’s offices to pick up the first copy of his book. Pound reviewed the book for Poetry and praised Frost at the expense of American editors and readers in a way that Frost found tasteless. The two were never close again. When Elinor read Pound’s review of her husband’s work, she cried.
One of the aspects of Frost’s work and character that Plunkett highlights in Love and Need is his spiritual side. “Among Frost’s oldest … convictions was a belief in some version of the transmigration of souls.” Our soul lives on after we die in the bodies of others. Almost every poem Frost wrote, Plunkett argues, could be read as a symbolic account of this journey. How else to read “Bond and Free,” for example, where Frost writes:
“Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.”
The idea of possession returns us to “The Silken Tent,” where the “central cedar pole” points “heavenward” when one chord goes “slightly taut” in a breeze of summer air. One need not believe Frost when he tells us in the poem that the straightness of the pole “signifies the sureness of the soul.”
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Micah Mattix is a professor of English at Regent University.