Robert Spangler Newdick's Books

Newdick's Season of Frost

An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost

By: Robert Spangler Newdick

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Newdick's Season of Frost

An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost

By: Robert Spangler Newdick

In 1935 Professor Robert Newdick of Ohio State University wrote to Robert Frost--already America's most famous living poet--in order to suggest certain revisions in the arrangement of the poet's collected poems. The brief letter was to begin a relationship of nearly five years (ending only with Newdick's untimely death in 1939) in which Newdick assiduously gathered materials from a wide variety of sources for a projected (but not "authorized") Frost biography. Although only part (about 100 pages) of the biography was actually written, Newdick left behind him several files of factual data, as well as observations and comments by Frost and by many people who knew him. These materials have not heretofore been published, nor were they used in any subsequent biography. In the present volume William A. Sutton brings together Newdick's partial biography with his various notes and letters, adding a narrative of the Frost-Newdick relationship which sheds new light on the poet and on the identity of poets. With Newdick, as with subsequent researchers, the fiction-making Frost was often playing a game of hide-and-seek so that he would never be completely "found out" as a mere empirical datum, although there is evidence that his candor with Newdick was at times greater than it would be in later years. Newdick, a perceptive admirer of Frost's poetry, had to struggle with his own realizations of such Frostian characteristics as secretiveness, ambivalence, and capriciousness, and so the book reveals a great poet who could be both generous and arch, a professor relentless in his search for information, a famous man fitfully bothered, then amused by a young academic's earnest efforts on his behalf, and a biographer devoted to, but at times exhausted by, the demands of his biographical subject. Frost appears as one who thought of both biography and biographer as "attractive nuisances." The original materials brought together here manifest, therefore, both a kind of biography, and a chronicle of the act of biography, a fresh look at the creative personality, and a running account of how a biographer attempts to bring such a personality into focus.

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472

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0873953169

ISBN 13

9780873953160

The Letters of Robert Frost

By: Robert Frost

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The Letters of Robert Frost

By: Robert Frost

The third installment of Harvard’s five-volume edition of Robert Frost’s correspondence. The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3: 1929–1936 is the latest installment in Harvard’s five-volume edition of the poet’s correspondence. It presents 601 letters, of which 425 are previously uncollected. The critically acclaimed first volume, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, included nearly 300 previously uncollected letters, and the second volume 350 more. During the period covered here, Robert Frost was close to the height of his powers. If Volume 2 covered the making of Frost as America’s poet, in Volume 3 he is definitively made. These were also, however, years of personal tribulation. The once-tight Frost family broke up as marriage, illness, and work scattered the children across the country. In the case of Frost’s son Carol, both distance and proximity put strains on an already fractious relationship. But the tragedy and emotional crux of this volume is the death of Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie. Frost’s correspondence from those dark days is a powerful testament to the difficulty of honoring the responsibilities of a poet’s eminence while coping with the intensity of a parent’s grief. Volume 3 also sees Frost responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the onset of the New Deal, and the emergence of totalitarian regimes in Europe, with wit, canny political intelligence, and no little acerbity. All the while, his star continues to rise: he wins a Pulitzer for Collected Poems in 1931 and will win a second for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he is in constant demand as a public speaker at colleges, writers’ workshops, symposia, and dinners. Frost was not just a poet but a poet-teacher; as such, he was instrumental in defining the public functions of poetry in the twentieth century. In the 1930s, Frost lived a life of paradox, as personal tragedy and the tumults of politics interwove with his unprecedented achievements. Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, these letters illuminate a triumphant and difficult period in the life of a towering literary figure.

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849

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

067425905X

ISBN 13

9780674259058

Newdick's Season of Frost

An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost

By: Robert Spangler Newdick

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Newdick's Season of Frost

An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost

By: Robert Spangler Newdick

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

472

Publisher

SUNY Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0873953169

ISBN 13

9780873953160

Book's by Robert Spangler Newdick

Newdick's Season of Frost

Newdick's Season of Frost

The Letters of Robert Frost

The Letters of Robert Frost

Newdick's Season of Frost

Newdick's Season of Frost

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