The Notebooks of Robert Frost - Softcover

Frost, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 067403466X ISBN 13: 9780674034662

Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion--his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War--as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control.

Edited and annotated by Robert Faggen, the notebooks are cross-referenced to mark thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert Faggen is Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Review:

“The notebooks bring Frost alive as a person and poet, showing him in the process of thinking through, rethinking, and formulating many of his most important beliefs, ideas, observations, and epigrams. They will generate considerable scholarship both confirming and reevaluating central issues of Frost's life, thinking, and writing. The notebooks are interesting in themselves. They show a remarkable intelligence at work and provide access to the (typically concealed) processes underlying Frost's performances, as well as a catalog of his most important concerns. Also important are Frost's more general observations on human nature and behavior and on social and governmental organization (these often struck me as remarkably prescient of contemporary scientific and philosophical views.) Faggen's book will be crucial to Frost scholars and students. It will moderate, modify, and intensify existing truisms and debates about Frost's person, opinions, and processes, and it will open new areas for consideration.”―Guy Rotella, Professor of English, Northeastern University

“This work deserves a place with other editions of major writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Twain. One measure of the importance of this edition is that it demonstrates that Frost belongs in the company of America's greatest writers, whose significance grows with our access to their complete works. It was a pleasure to read these notebooks.”―Timothy Materer, Professor of English, University of Missouri

“What modern poet's mental privacy would we rather invade than that of the sly, vexingly evasive Robert Frost? Robert Faggen serves as a reliable guide, conducting us backstage where we are allowed to observe Frost's off-duty pen as it drifts from aphorism to speculation, from opinion and verbal doodling to―yes―the poetry itself.”―Billy Collins

“Frost was a deliberate, masterly, and sometimes enigmatic poet, and these qualities show in his notebooks. Faggen offers a beautifully crafted introduction to this superb annotated and cross-referenced volume. The value of this work is tremendous.”―Anthony J. Elia, Library Journal

“A new book containing unpublished work by America's most famous poet is a literary event. While he was not much of a diarist, Frost avidly kept notebooks throughout his life. He recorded his daily musings in what Frost scholar Faggen calls '"ordinaries," unassuming dime-store spiral pads and school theme books.' This roughly chronological (the poet abandoned and then resumed writing in some notebooks)
and thoroughly annotated edition offers devotees a substantial glimpse of the workings of Frost's complex and often contradictory mind, though it provides little in the way of narrative. In scattered jottings on poetry, teaching, politics and family--to name just a few of the many topics covered--Frost drafts poems ('And oh but it was fetching/ To see the wretches retching'); theorizes about poetics ('The Poem must have as good a point as a [sic] anecdote or joke'); lists topics for later writings ('Subjects used in 1906 Eng classes...Things My Mother Keeps to Remember My Infancy by'); spins aphorisms, stories and sketches; and even shows the development of famous quotes ('No surprise to author none to reader'). Better suited to flipping around in than reading straight through, this is an essential book for Frost fans and serious poetry lovers, who will find it to be a trove of Frost's famously earthy and yet deceptively simple wisdom, as well as a damn good read.”―Publishers Weekly

“While those such as Eliot and Stevens shivered with distaste at the idea of writing poetry that was intelligible to the masses, Frost was determined to evolve a style that would appeal both to an average poetry consumer and, through its secret equivocations, to the more discerning reader. Ideally, it would educate the former, and transform them into the latter...In 1915, Frost returned to the US as something of a celebrity, and shrewdly set about cultivating, on the one hand, a popular audience and, on the other, the esteem of influential critics. The Notebooks of Robert Frost offer an intriguing insight into Frost's mind. They are not, it should be said, at all systematic. The first entries in Notebook 4, for instance, were made in 1909, and the last in the 1950s. Some contain drafts of work in progress, others fragments of lectures and notes for classes. Their scrupulous, perhaps over-scrupulous, editor Robert Faggen, has chosen to reprint the contents of all 49 notebooks in their entirety...While only the most devoted of Frost scholars will find their attention held by every page, this is a great book to open at random...Frost once described poetry as a 'momentary stay against confusion.' There's plenty of confusion in these notebooks, but they also offer a series of vivid glimpses into how and why he fashioned each 'momentary stay.'”―Mark Ford, Financial Times

“The Notebooks of Robert Frost [is] seven hundred pages of wisdom and prophecy, raving and rant, expertly edited and annotated by Robert Faggen...The biggest surprise in The Notebooks of Robert Frost, sixty years of private jottings in preparation for poems and prose, is the spectacular profusion of epigrams, aphorisms, and what Frost called 'dark sayings.'”―Christopher Benfey, New Republic

“The American poet Robert Frost was not keen on having his rough drafts inspected by posterity. Few survive for his poems. Here for the first time, however, are 47 pocket flip-pads, diaries and school exercise books that record his life as a poetic thinker...Frost's notebooks illuminate the oblique concerns of his [poetry].”―Jeremy Noel-Tod, Daily Telegraph

“Since Frost used his notebooks to think through his poems, his essays and his teaching, they reveal only his working mind--and that's revelation aplenty... By now, nobody buys Frost's old image as a rustic autodidact or a versifying Andy Rooney. He read as widely and deeply as any American poet--the notebooks allude to the likes of Dryden, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Einstein, Santayana and Maria Montessori--and funny as he was, he could still outbleak T. S. Eliot. He was also American poetry's biggest ham (at least until Allen Ginsberg), and his poems were performances: not just in his well-known public readings but on the page. These deliberately preserved notebooks, too, might have kept one eye on an audience. But unlike the much-revised poems, they sometimes show this least innocent of men taking himself by surprise.”―David Gates, Newsweek

“Frost was as innovative as many poets more often considered 'experimental'...He's a technician of prodigious agility, yet he generally limited himself to iambics, and favored rhymes like 'reason' and 'season' or 'star' and 'far'...Unlike almost every poet of comparable ability, Frost can claim a general reading audience, especially among readers who want poems that 'make sense'--yet his aesthetic is evasive, arguably manipulative, and has at its core a freezing indifference that would make the neighborhood barbecue awfully uncomfortable...Any Frost reader will benefit from Faggen's thoughtful introduction and be intrigued by the way in which concepts from these largely aphoristic journals animate the poems and vice versa...More than four decades after his death, this most American of American poets still fits uncomfortably into our country's favorite aesthetic categories.”―David Orr, New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 067403466X
• ISBN 13: 9780674034662
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 848
• Editor: Faggen Robert