> Then there were the poems. What Frost seemed to perform, his poetry seemed to embody: simultaneous apotheoses of ease and of depth like points on an axis along which his world rotated. His was not a special world of his own, either, but a world his poems could draw you into, a world in which the thoughts and emotions of common experience have by some grace of insight been brought to wisdom for the space of a poem. If the wisdom didn’t translate exactly into plain English, that was because the poems were written to be experienced just as they were. If the experience seemed not to lead to a little lightning of revelation, perhaps that was him and perhaps that was you.

This is the debut book from Adam Plunkett, literary critic. I laud any writer who ousts their debut to be about something big, so why not a huge biography about the best-known North American poet Robert Frost?

I'm grateful that Plunkett has created this book. It's the work of someone who has both immersed themselves completely in their subject and also picked out favourites from all of Frost's life.

Funny enough, Plunkett starts his book by mentioning the tale of Frost's hand-picked biographer, back in 1962. Frost wanted Lawrance Thompson to write about his life. Thompson adored Frost and looked up to him.

At this stage in Frost's life, he was *the* North American poet. He'd won every prize imaginable. On the other hand, there's the old saying about how one should never meet one's heroes. Thompson completed two volumes of books on Frost and nearly completed a third one, but died in the process. Thompson nearly didn't complete anything because he developed such a personal dislike of Frost.

> Thompson knew the poems well long before he knew the poet well, and professed his love for the poet when he hardly knew the man. If he fell in love with the art; if he also loved the idea of getting as close to it as possible—knowing it, living through it somehow; if he mistook his attachment to the art and his aspirational identification with it for actual love of the artist (he himself being especially charming with new people), Thompson would not have been the first fan of an artist to do so.

Plunkett writes beautifully about human communication and paints a clear, yet poetic picture of Frost's life, from all perspectives. It's clear that Plunkett has devoted himself to a lot of research. However, this is far from the work of a person who's scoured the web a bit and dabbled in poetry himself. This is the work of a natural author who treats his subject with respect, dignity, and honesty.

I must confess that I don't know the first thing about Frost's life, apart from what this book has taught me. I feel that Plunkett has painted an honest picture of a man who was beloved, both privately and professionally, hated in both quarters, and made-of everything in-between. As with nearly all humans, then. There is more to Frost than just 'poetry'.

Frost taught and engaged deeply with his students, encouraging them to excel. He also didn't hold back.

> A number of students recalled him as demanding and exacting about their memorizations. One remembered him “very indignant” when she couldn’t memorize “part of Washington’s Inaugural Address … overnight.” Another remembered Frost’s “wrath” when a student would begin a recitation with the word “Well.” “He would thunder ‘When you recite to me, don’t begin with “Well.”’”

I particularly like this student's memory of Frost:

> Another student, Clarissa Hall, thought that Frost had taught them to observe the little things of life, largely natural, “to the fullest extent possible.” It was a lesson in which a classmate of hers found the meaning of much of Frost’s teaching, that he “in his quiet way taught us that we did not have to seek beauty in far off places.” Hall compared this kind of instruction to Lesley’s recollections of her father’s teaching, published after his death. “He taught us as he did his children.”

Frost was human and naturally committed many human mistakes. But his poetry, his poetry; it spoke in simultaneously wild and tamed ways.

> Then there were the poems. What Frost seemed to perform, his poetry seemed to embody: simultaneous apotheoses of ease and of depth like points on an axis along which his world rotated. His was not a special world of his own, either, but a world his poems could draw you into, a world in which the thoughts and emotions of common experience have by some grace of insight been brought to wisdom for the space of a poem. If the wisdom didn’t translate exactly into plain English, that was because the poems were written to be experienced just as they were. If the experience seemed not to lead to a little lightning of revelation, perhaps that was him and perhaps that was you.

The book contains much dissection of Frost's poetry. I like what Plunkett has done. Some of his work is, frankly, amazing.

> As a thinly veiled marital argument, “Stars” is less a pure apology than a more familiar kind of marital conversation in which the apologizer misses no chance to defend himself. “Stars” is about the instinctive persistence of the will to believe as much as its potential benightedness, the poem prompting its audience to imagine a series of things that, according to the poem, most likely don’t exist but that, once imagined, are hard to tease apart from the world on which they are superimposed. “How countlessly,” the poem begins so that one thinks to count the stars that don’t blend in with high snowdrifts, that don’t care about our fate, that don’t want to see us through to a heavenly place of “white rest,” that neither love nor hate us, that are not the “snow-white” eyes of a goddess but a “snow-white” statue’s eyes, which have no sight. The stars congregate, like congregants, and constellate into Minerva, among the twelve Roman gods in the zodiac, known for her bright eyes, which could see in the night like an owl (her symbol), and for her wise and dispassionate intercessions in the fates of men. She would act “with neither love nor hate” but not indifference, with “keenness”—piercing eyes and wisdom. She turned Medusa into a monster. She blinded Tiresias but, to lessen the pain of her punishment, gave him the gift of being able to listen prophetically. Her name derives from “goddess of the moon,” perhaps from “mind of god.” She was not there.

Some paragraphs in this book leapt out at me, like this one that compared Frost's perhaps closest-ever friendship with that between Michel de Montaigne, essayist, nobleperson, and philosopher, and Étienne de la Boéce:

> In 1913, “Bond and Free” rewrote a source poem’s conflict between characters into a conflict in the nature of the soul. It was not the only such poem that Frost wrote in those years. Another—also tetrameter with four five-line stanzas and in a similar rhyme scheme—was the poem that would become Frost’s most famous and arguably the most famous poem in all of American literature, “The Road Not Taken.” On Frost’s recollection, he began his unassuming monumental work sitting alone by the fire in a cottage in Ryton, Gloucestershire, on a dark night in the last weeks of 1914. He and Edward Thomas had lately been walking. Thomas had a habit of peering down the paths at a crossroads, unsure which path to take. Frost sent a draft of the poem to Thomas from Franconia in early 1915. Thomas failed to recognize himself in it, let alone to recognize the main poetic source of the poem and the role that the source put him in. The source was “Etienne de la Boéce” by Emerson, a poem named for Montaigne’s dearest friend and the subject of Montaigne’s essay “On Friendship.” Frost would go on to describe his friendship with Thomas in something like the superlative terms that Montaigne used for his own boon companion. Montaigne’s essay is a description of ideal friendship as one of harmonious wills, and Emerson’s poem is a sort of essay in verse to the effect that he’ll serve his friend best if he relies on himself. Frost’s poem dramatizes the will’s uneasy harmony with itself.

Here is another beautiful paragraph:

> Frost was fond of saying that poetry was much more of life than of school. He did not mean this in terms of subject matter alone. He was inclined to call some imaginative people who wrote no poetry poets, a theme he extended to other domains about which he thought poetry was distinctly educative, saying repeatedly and in any number of ways that there was more poetry outside verse than in, more love outside marriage than in, more religion outside church than in. It was natural that anyone who believed such things would betray some misgivings about a life spent teaching verse in school.

Plunkett spends much time writing about Frost's relationships with his family. It's worth getting through all of the information; it's not too much, and it's enthralling. Plunkett succeeds where many biographers fail, at least in weaving together fact in exciting ways: to read all of the horrors and wondrous things that happened to Frost and his family, to see how non-wealthy people lived back in the day... For example, Frost needed to travel to make money. And so, his family were separated. Plunkett manages to weave together a fine patch of this-happened-then-that in a way that made me feel as though the story just flowed through different sentiments, those that altogether make a human.

Frost did mingle with other poets. He did not go well with T.S. Eliot from the start, but this changed, as we learn from this beautiful part of a paragraph:

> One has to think a lot of someone to spend so much time defending the ways one differs from him, and Frost shared his admiration for Eliot’s achievement in a letter to Eliot announcing his trip to England. “You have been a great poet in my reading,” Frost wrote. The compliment was more than reciprocated. In Eliot’s climactic toast, he called Frost “the most eminent, the most distinguished … Anglo-American poet now living.” Eliot paused before deciding on “Anglo-American” as the proper adjective for Frost, charming the crowd by ostentatiously including himself in the comparison. Frost’s localism was universal, Eliot said, listing alongside “the relation of Dante to Florence, of Shakespeare to Warwickshire, of Goethe to the Rhineland” “the relation of Robert Frost to New England.” Frost took a long pause after Eliot finished, then said, “There’s nobody living in either country that I’d rather hear that from.”

The difference between Eliot and Ezra Pound, to Frost, was also wondrous, but more in an S.O.S. kind of way:

> For his part, Pound had written Frost the following letter of gratitude in early April, on “Easter mourn,” as Frost was working on the case:
> > R.F. Thanks for your kind endeavours. Of course I shd/ like a little serious conversation . but then one can’t get everything. Yours Ez P.
> Frost made no reply. Pound was released on May 7. On June 19, eleven days before he set sail for Italy, he wrote Frost a letter that read in entirety,
> > “RF. I hear tell how as yu don’t open yr mail. yrs EP.”
> On disembarking three weeks later in Naples, Pound gave the old fascist salute.

In summation, the book is precisely written, albeit as though in a dream state. Plunkett is a poet and it shows. Frost may have received the honours that he deserved, along with the recognitions of his faculties as though they should be seen by all other humans: in light.

Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry offers a nuanced account of the poet's life and work. Adam Plunkett successfully combines a detailed biography of one of America’s greatest poets with literary criticism and analysis attempting to get to the truth of Frost's life. He reveals a new Frost through a careful and detailed look at the poems and people around him, both colleagues, friends and family.
Whether you are a life long fan of Frost or new to his work, this book is a must-read. I had previously only come across his perhaps most famous poem “The Road Not Taken” which I thought mistakenly had been titled “The road less travelled” but knowing more of his life have grown to understand and appreciate much more of his poetry.
The title “Love and need” is a good one as the book delves deeply into Frost's personal experiences, often reflecting on the pain and grief he experienced after the death and mental illness of family members. His poems explore themes of mortality, the fragility of life, the loss of innocence, and the enduring nature of love, its joys and frustrations.
Love and Need is a scholarly and insightful book which offers a fresh perspective on the poet's work, revealing the complexities of his life and the enduring power of his poetry.

My thanks to the publishers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the author and Net Galley for providing a complimentary ARC digitally, for an honest review. My thoughts and opinions are my own.

The first time I encountered Robert Frost was when I read "The Road Not Taken" in my high school textbook. Since then, I have been a devoted admirer of his work. Although I always wanted to read his biography, I never found the time, and I was concerned that reading about a writer's life might be dull compared to enjoying his poetry. However, this book is a dream come true! For the first time, I have come across such a meticulously drawn perspective on a poet and his craft.

Adam Plunkett has masterfully depicted Frost's narrative, capturing the events that influenced him to create such thought-provoking poems. The author made a commendable effort in his research, ensuring he gathered information from a wide array of sources, resulting in a well-rounded view. It seems he incorporated perspectives from all those who contributed to Robert Frost's development, knitting a narrative that reflects everyone's insights. The author is neither biased in his criticism nor overly generous in his praise of Frost's literary achievements.

Plunkett has employed articulate language and carefully crafted his writing style to resonate with Frost's poetry, making the reader feel a deep connection while reading both. Two of my favorite poems were included, and the accompanying analysis was beautifully done.

I couldn't find any grammatical errors or awkward sentences. I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I greatly admire the author's dedication to its creation. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in gaining insights into America's most beloved poet and to those who appreciate Robert Frost's poetry.

A MUCH needed corrective to Lawrance Thompson's hatchet job. The literary criticism of Frost's poetry is thoughtful and fresh. While I don't always like biographer attempts to corelate art with specific moments in the artist's life, Plunkett makes a compelling case for the overlap between life and artistic creation. A fair treatment of a complex, and sometimes unlikable man who wrote some of the most quintessentially 'American' poetry since Walt Whitman