Robert Frost: A Biography

Rating:
Summary: Weak biography
Review: Disappointly poorly done. Statements made without support, poorly written, contributes little if anything new to one's understanding of the man or his work.

Rating:
Summary: Weak biography
Review: Jeffrey Meyers' ROBERT FROST: A BIOGRAPHY is a masterful account of Frost's lives, personal and literary. Cast in the long shadow of Lawrance Thompson's three-volume diatribe against the modern titan, Meyers' work is balanced, judicious, and highly entertaining. It does not deny Frost's tragic shortcomings, but it also lauds his compelling and unique body of work and restores his eminence as a 20th- century virtuoso, all the while exposing the contradictions in the personal and moral life of the intellectual. The work is full of wonderful anecdotes and has unparalleled direct accounts of Frost's early courtship of his wife, Elinor, and of his later complicated relationship with his mistress, Kay Morrison. Meyers is especially adept at providing insight into the biographical events that shaped individual poems. This is the most honest biography of Frost yet written.

Rating:
Summary: All Kinds Of Grief Shall Arrive
Review: Jeffrey Meyers' Robert Frost: A Biography is a thorough, if disjointed, episodic, and often uncomfortably apologetic account of the poet's tumultuous and psychically violent life. While the broad American public continues to lionize Frost and his collected verse, Meyers' volume reveals that there was little to admire in the individual man (a list of character traits in the index includes, among others, "accident - prone," "competitive," "domineering," "egotistic," "fears insanity," "hears voices," "hypersensitive," "insecure," "jealous," "puritanical," "restless," "self - promoting," "temperamental," "tendency to gossip," "uses illness to escape responsibility," and "vanity.") At one extreme, neurotic personalities take their illnesses out on themselves; the aggressively competitive Frost fell into the opposite camp, so that it was his family and intimate friends who suffered primarily, and often fatally, from the grossly irresponsible attitude he adopted towards his own pathology.

Both of Frost's parents, as well as his only sibling, were physically and mentally unstable: "bad blood" clearly ran freely in the family's veins. Emotionally smothered by and dependent upon his "terribly queer" mother, the young Frost was equally at the mercy of his alcoholic, brutal, and vindictive father. Both parents died relatively young after lives of dissolution and extreme hardship.

The circumstances of Frost's youth set the course for his adult existence: year after year, decade after long decade, the poet replicated his fundamental "family romance" and thus found himself surrounded by, and indeed, further afflicting, a variety of tragically disturbed people and families. Generational patterns of mental instability and violent "accidents" were the norm, not the exception, in the lives of the people Frost embraced. Amazingly, the fatalistic and cowardly Frost never became fully conscious of the destructive role he played in the lives of those closest to him. Nor did he learn how to master himself or take healthy control over the calamitous events of his personal life. Tellingly, the poet openly mocked anyone who sought out professional psychological help, which he strenuously avoided receiving himself.

No single event illustrates Frost's grandiose immaturity and reckless disregard for the lives and emotional health of his family more blatantly than the episode in which Frost woke his six year old daughter Lesley in the middle of night, escorted her downstairs where his sobbing wife was waiting, and, pointing a gun at himself and then at his spouse, told her, "Take your choice. Before morning, one of us will be dead!" Perhaps understandably, three decades later, Frost's only son, Carol, 38, committed suicide in front of his own small son under identical circumstances.

Frost's children were raised in isolation on various New England farms and schooled at home; they grew up in a constricted environment dominated by their severe, tyrannical father and exhausted, physically stricken, and ineffectual mother. With the exception of Lesley, Meyers fails to communicate the children's side of their stories to the reader. The author's intermittent presentation of Frost as a loving father who spent much of his free time nurturing his children falls flat.

Frost survived into his 89th year as a wealthy, respected, and world-renowned poet who lunched with American presidents and honored foreign dignitaries, including Nikita Khrushchev, with his presence. It is more than interesting to note that, like an engine of destruction in the mythological guise of a respectable patriarch, Frost's health grew more robust as he aged and as his wife, Elinor ("rather silent, sad and dour" even before her marriage to Frost), and family withered, became severely mentally ill (both Carol and daughter Irma suffered some kind of psychosis; in her 45th year, Irma was committed "as a hopeless case to a hospital for the insane," as was Frost's sister, Jeanie), or otherwise died young (favorite daughter Marjorie at 29). Only Lesley, who Meyers unaccountably refers to as a "harsh and sinewy old harridan" in later life, survived him.

Meyers provides a detailed account of Frost's friendships with other famous poets, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Edward Thomas, William Butler Yeats, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Lowell. His analysis of Frost's work is sound if not always persuasive; his evaluation of the influence of Thomas Hardy's poetry on Frost's feels particularly strained. Meyers' discussion of Frost's classic "The Road Not Taken" in conjunction with one of the poet's letters includes this incomprehensible sentence: "The words "lonely cross - roads," "converged" and neither "much traveled" in the letter become "Two roads diverged" and "less traveled by" at the beginning and end of the poem, and the inevitability of "converged" turns into the perplexity of "diverged."

Meyers also makes a blatant error when attributing an Irish peasant's narrative about capturing and living for several weeks with a fairy, which appears in Lady Gregory's Visions & Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), to Yeats himself. Yeats accompanied and assisted Lady Gregory in her field work for the book, but the narrative in question was clearly not his own, as any reader Gregory's book, which is still in print, can see (the memorate is attributed to "an old man, Kelleher," and his wife). Whether Meyers is repeating a mistake that Frost made concerning the subject, or is making the mistake himself, is impossible to discern from the text, as no source is provided. Considering the extraordinary nature of the claim, Meyers' inaccuracy is difficult to overlook.

Meyers also adopts Frost's biased image of competitor Carl Sandburg, who appears throughout the book as manipulative pseudo - bumpkin perpetually strumming his "geetar" for a gullible public.

Frost placed his poetical ambition and personal fame ahead of everything else in his life, a situation for which his family and loved ones paid dearly, and for which Elinor never forgave him. Ultimately, Meyers' biography is a casebook example of how the human suffering of others can be the price paid for respectability as well as for great art.

Rating:
Summary: A REVIEW, FROM SOMEWHERE NORTH OF BOSTON...
Review: This is a solid, workmanlike biography of Robert Frost. It will probably appeal more to the reader who wants to know about Frost the man as opposed to the reader who is more interested in the poetry. There are some excerpts from the poetry but not a lot, and very little analysis. Probably the best thing about the book is the balanced attitude Mr. Meyers takes towards the poet. The author doesn't gloss over Frost's faults, but doesn't demonize him either. Yes, Frost had a tremendous ego. (Show me an artistic person that doesn't!) He loved to receive praise. He "collected" honorary degrees. Towards the end of his life he made it clear that he wanted degrees from Oxford and Cambridge, so that he could equal the achievement of Longfellow and James Russell Lowell. He was famous enough and knew enough of the "right" people that he was able to get what he wanted. He was extremely competitive and made nasty comments about other poets who he perceived to be a "threat", both in terms of popularity and talent- such as Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Frost made fun of Sandburg's self-created "folksy" persona- playing his "geetar" and combing his long, white hair over his eyes. But Mr. Meyers makes clear that Frost wasn't alone in his competitiveness. Though Sandburg was apparently a very nice fellow, Eliot and Pound had plenty of nasty things to say about Frost and other poets as well. Where Mr. Meyers is most sympathetic is in discussing Frost's relationship with his family. In the past, Frost has been portrayed as a selfish "monster" who ignored his wife and children and caused their unhappiness, mental problems and, in the case of Frost's son Carol, a suicide. It seems clear that mental illness ran in Frost's family, going back at least to his father and mother. Frost heard "voices" in his youth and they came back in times of severe stress, such as right after Frost's wife Elinor died in 1938. Frost had an unnatural fear of the dark and apparently suffered from some degree of depression. He managed to overcome these problems and to live a long, creative life. He did the best he could to be a good husband and father. He remained faithful to his wife despite the temptation of female students "throwing" themselves at him. (After all, even in middle-age, he was a handsome man, as well as being charismatic, artistic and famous.) He tried to be emotionally present for his children, giving advice (if also at times trying to control them) and he was always generous with money. Again, this book is strong on Frost's personal life. But it is a bit weak on analyzing the poetry and it covers Frost's teaching career in too cursory a manner, "flitting" about from place to place too quickly. Some of this is inherent in Mr. Meyers' decision to write a relatively brief biography. He tries to cover in 350 pages the personal life and career of a man who lived to be 88 years old, and who remained creative for approximately 70 of those years. Mr. Meyers had to make choices about what to include and what to leave out and other things had to be compressed. Unfortunately, it shows. This book is not the definitive biography of Frost. That remains to be written. But it is a good introduction, a book that succeeds in being fair-minded and will leave you wanting to know more about the man and the poetry.