ENG 232: American Literature Survey

This new critical volume offers a fresh, multifaceted assessment of Robert Frost's life and works. Nearly every aspect of the poet's career is treated: his interest in poetics and style; his role as a public figure; his deep fascination with science, psychology, and education; his peculiar and difficult relation to religion; his investments, as thinker and writer, in politics and war; and the way he dealt with problems of mental illness that beset his sister and two of his children.

Frost adapted the genteel values and techniques of nineteenth-century poetry, but Barron argues that it was his commitment to realism that gave him popular as well as scholarly appeal and created his enduring legacy. This highly researched consideration of Frost investigates early innovative poetry that was published in popular magazines from 1894 to 1915 and reveals a voice of dissent that anticipated "The New Poetry" - a voice that would come to dominate American poetry as few others have.

George Monteiro's book enhances our understanding of Frost's most valuable poems by demonstrating the ways in which they circulate among the constellations of great poems and essays of the New England Renaissance. Monteiro reads Frost's own poetry in the light of poems and essays by his precursors, particularly Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson. Familiar poems as well as lesser known poems are renewed by fresh and original readings that show why and how these poems pay tribute to their distinguished sources.

In You Come Too, Frost's granddaughter, Lesley Lee Francis, combines priceless personal memories and rigorous research to create a portrait of Frost and the women, including herself, whose lives he touched. Francis provides a vivid picture of Frost the family man, revealing him to be intensely engaged rather than the aloof artist that is commonly portrayed. She shares with us the devastation Frost and Elinor experienced when faced with tragic illnesses, both physical and mental, and the untimely death of family members.

In this incisive and highly readable study, Rachel Buxton offers a much-needed assessment of Frost's significance for Northern Irish poetry of the past half-century. Drawing upon a diverse range of previously unpublished archival sources, including juvenilia, correspondence, and drafts of poems, Robert Frost and Northern Irish Poetry takes as its particular focus the triangular dynamic of Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Buxton explores the differing strengths which each Irish poet finds in Frost's work.

The "people's poet" is covered in memorable essays that cover individual poems as well as Frost's major themes and imagery. Andrea De Fusco wrote this volume as part of the Greenhaven Press Literary Companion to American Authors series.