The Collected Prose of Robert Frost

Robert Frost, Mark Richardson

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780674034679
  9780674023116
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674261594
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

During his lifetime, Robert Frost notoriously resisted collecting his prose--going so far as to halt the publication of one prepared compilation and to "lose" the transcripts of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he delivered at Harvard in 1936. But for all his qualms, Frost conceded to his son that "you can say a lot in prose that verse won't let you say," and that the prose he had written had in fact "made good competition for [his] verse." This volume, the first critical edition of Robert Frost's prose, allows readers and scholars to appreciate the great American author's forays beyond poetry, and to discover in the prose that he did make public--in newspapers, magazines, journals, speeches, and books--the wit, force, and grace that made his poetry famous.

The Collected Prose of Robert Frost offers an extensive and illuminating body of work, ranging from juvenilia--Frost's contributions to his high school Bulletin--to the charming "chicken stories" he wrote as a young family man for The Eastern Poultryman and Farm Poultry, to such famous essays as "The Figure a Poem Makes" and the speeches and contributions to magazines solicited when he had become the Grand Old Man of American letters. Gathered, annotated, and cross-referenced by Mark Richardson, the collection is based on extensive work in archives of Frost's manuscripts. It provides detailed notes on the author's habits of composition and on important textual issues and includes much previously unpublished material. It is a book of boundless appeal and importance, one that should find a home on the bookshelf of anyone interested in Frost.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Editorial Procedures
• Chapter 1. 1890s–1950: “Hunter James”
• Chapter 2. 1903: “The Hermits”
• Chapter 3. 1903–1910: “All these different psycological experiments”
• Chapter 4. 1909–1950: “If I prayed every day what you prayed I don’t see how I could help calling myself a Utopian”
• Chapter 5. 1910–1955: “Submission to the law of the machine”
• Chapter 6. 1910: “Bring all under the influence of the great books as under a spell”
• Chapter 7. 1911: “She’s . . . writer I guess you’d call it Wants to go on the stage”
• Chapter 8. 1912–1915: “A Place Apart”
• Chapter 9. 1913–1917: “Beggars in England”
• Chapter 10. 1916–1918: “All my thoughts of every thing”
• Chapter 11. 1916–1919: “Two Poets”
• Chapter 12. 1918–1921: “A time when nothing, neither religion nor patriotism comes to an apex”
• Chapter 13. 1919: “The Copperhead”
• Chapter 14. 1920–1930: “The furthest two things can be away from each other”
• Chapter 15. 1923–1924: “Learn lives of poet”
• Chapter 16. 1924: “I don’t see what you have to complain of ”
• Chapter 17. 1924–1925: “You and I”
• Chapter 18. 1926–1928: “Difference between meter and rhythm”
• Chapter 19. 1928: “I learned to laugh when I was young”
• Chapter 20. 1929: “These are not monologues but my part in a conversation”
• Chapter 21. 1930–1940: “Thick skinned Thick headed”
• Chapter 22. 1930–1940: “True humility is a kind of carelessness”
• Chapter 23. 1935–1951: “True humility again lies in suffering”
• Chapter 24. 1935: “Curiously Enough—as a connection”
• Chapter 25. 1935: “America and The Plot”
• Chapter 26. 1935: “Since surely good is evil’s better half ”
• Chapter 27. 1936: “The question for the original”
• Chapter 28. 1936–1939: “Having Learned to Read”
• Chapter 29. 1937–1942: “Democracy”
• Chapter 30. 1937: “Alcie That Socratic boy”
• Chapter 31. 1937–1955: “Three of those evils parsed in half an hour”
• Chapter 32. 1940–1950: “Leila. What have you brought him into the house for?”
• Chapter 33. 1940: “Prophetic”
• Chapter 34. 1950: “What is your attitude toward our having robbed the Indians of the American Continent?”
• Chapter 35. 1951–1952: “Pertinax”
• Chapter 36. 1950–1955: “And it would satisfy something in him”
• Chapter 37. 1950–1955: “If his own intuitions were correct”
• Chapter 38. 1950–1951: “There is a shadow always on success”
• Chapter 39. 1950–1962: “If we are too much given to reflect”
• Chapter 40. 1950–1962: “I wont be talked to by a woman, tell her”
• Chapter 41. 1960–1962: “Dedication of The Gift Outright”
• Chapter 42. Undated: “One Favored Acorn”
• Chapter 43. Undated: “First Answerability Divine Right”
• Chapter 44. Undated: “Last Refinement of Subject Matter”
• Chapter 45. Undated: “Sentences may have the greatest monotony to the eye”
• Chapter 46. Undated: “Many speak as if it was a reproach to the Puritans”
• Chapter 47. Undated Loose Notebook Pages: “All thoughts all passions all delights”
• Chapter 48. Undated: “Nothing more composing than composition”
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index