The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged

by Robert Frost

edited by Edward Connery Lathem

(New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2002)

Trade Paperback, 607 Pages, Poetry Anthology

ISBN: 9780805069860, US$20.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

“I like the straight crookedness of a good walking stick”

—Robert Frost

From the Cover: No poet is more emblematically American than Robert Frost. From “Birches” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to “The Gift Outright” and “Directive,” his poems have refined and even defined our sense of what poetry is and what it can do. T.S. Eliot judged Frost to be “the most eminent, the most distinguished … Anglo-American poet now living.” Frost is the only poet ever to have been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes. Edward Connery Lathem, a Frost scholar and close friend of the poet, has scrupulously annotated the more than 350 poems in this volume. His notes include bibliographical information on the publication of the poems and specify the textual changes Frost himself made over the years. This authoritative collection has stood as the standard Frost compendium since its first publication in 1969.

My Review: The name “ROBERT FROST” has become so inextricably tied to the concept of American poetry, that to try and say something new about him could be the height of folly. I don’t even know that I am the right person to talk about Frost, because I am not really a student of poetry, let alone modern poetry. My field of so-called “expertise” lies in the contemporary/postmodern American novel. Frost is so far outside my realm of knowledge that reading his poetry in my Modern American Literature class was akin to delving into a foreign language.

Modernism—as a school of thought and writing—is so different than Postmodernism, that it took me a day or three to get my head wrapped around the fact that when Frost wrote his poems, he meant for his meaning to be clear, easy and simple to understand, and perhaps therein lies his appeal as an American poet. There is no deconstruction of the English language, no pretentious thought that the idea of a word is more important than the meaning of a word. (And the fact that I understand that sentence means that I am a Postmodern student and critic and not a student/critic of Modernism.) When Frost writes about birches, they are birches. Nothing else and that is, honestly, a little refreshing, if difficult to wrap my brain around.

Throughout Frost’s poetry he is looking for something as humble as a momentary stay against confusion. His poems attempt to act as a pause, a safe harbor in a turbulent and existentially confusing world. Chief among these are such poems as the well-known and almost clichéd (by now) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the sublime poem “Birches,” and the less well-known (and much better, in my opinion) “Directive.” They are poems of journey and pilgrimage, but not necessarily journeys that have an end. They are, instead, poems of journeys of renewal. The steps in “Directive” are ones to be taken as often as necessary in order to keep finding peace in life.

Others, like “Fire and Ice” are quintessentially Robert Frost in that they deal with weighty issues (in the case of “Fire and Ice” it is the End of the World) yet it is written like a home-spun homily that one would expect to find in Poor Richard’s Almanack. It deals with human hatred and passion and human indifference and apathy (especially relevant given the horrors of WWI that the Modernists would have seen and/or experienced) and how each of these qualities are equally destructive. Then, there are poems like “The Witch of Coös” are just plain fun. There are weighty elements to the “fun” poems (“Coös” deals with infidelity and murder and the covering up of one’s sins) but mostly, a poem like this one is just plain fun.

Poetry is still a very difficult subject for me, and I still prefer the contemporary American novel to modern poetry, but reading and studying and—most importantly—enjoying the poetry of Robert Frost has given me a new appreciation for the craft as a whole, and if you’re going to read the poetry of Robert Frost, why not get the “Complete and Unabridged” collection, so that you have everything the poet wrote at your fingertips and you can pick and choose and enjoy his entire œuvre at your leisure? I know that this will not be the last time I pick up this collection.