The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4
1937–1946
Robert Frost author Mark Richardson editor Robert Bernard Hass editor Donald Sheehy editor Henry Atmore editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Published:30th Oct '26
Should be back in stock very soon
A revelatory new volume of Robert Frost’s correspondence, illuminating one of America’s most renowned poets at the height of his literary fame and the depths of personal tragedy.
By the late 1930s, Robert Frost had achieved bona fide celebrity. He won his third Pulitzer Prize for A Further Range, published in 1936, and he had become an in-demand lecturer nationwide. The penultimate volume of The Letters of Robert Frost—which presents 606 letters, most for the first time—sheds new light on the poet’s inner life as he aged into his sixties and early seventies.
These were heady days indeed—from summers at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, to prestigious fellowships at Harvard and Dartmouth, to winter retreats at the Florida home he affectionately called “Pencil Pines.” Yet even as his literary reputation flourished, personal tragedy struck with devastating force. In 1938, some six months after undergoing surgery for breast cancer, his wife, Elinor, succumbed to heart failure. Two years later, in 1940, his son Carol died by suicide. Between these losses, Frost fell in love with Kathleen “Kay” Morrison, who was married to Harvard professor Theodore Morrison. She soon became Frost’s secretary—though not his wife, as he had hoped—and he credited her with renewing his poetic vitality. In 1942, he published his acclaimed seventh collection, A Witness Tree, for which he won his fourth, and final, Pulitzer Prize.
Thoroughly annotated and accompanied by a biographical glossary and detailed chronology, volume 4 of The Letters of Robert Frost offers a strikingly intimate portrait of a towering American poet.
An immaculate work of biography, literary history, and scholarship. This volume not only preserves the work of a great American poet but also teaches readers how to attend—with care and imagination—to literature itself. -- Heather Cass White, editor of New Collected Poems of Marianne Moore
A major addition to American literature. These were consequential years for Robert Frost, when he wrote some of his most searing, brilliant, and irreplaceable poems. As ever, Frost was a provocative and aphoristic correspondent, and his letters deserve equal space on any shelf of his poetry. He quarried his own life for poems, and the mother lode is here, in the letters. Hass, Atmore, Sheehy, and Richardson have done a magnificent job of ushering this book into being. -- Jay Parini, author of Robert Frost: A Life
This is the penultimate volume of a highly laudable mission: to publish all the known letters of one of America’s finest poets, handsomely produced and with first-rate annotations…A masterful work of scholarship that is both revelatory and fascinating. -- Jim Kelly * Air Mail *
Robert Frost has long been mythologized as the rugged New England poet ‘full of Cracker Barrel wit and Yankee wisdom,’ a solitary genius whose reputation remains deeply contested. Yet The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 4 offers a far more complex portrait—a devoted paterfamilias, a grieving husband and father, and a poet deeply reliant, and appreciative, of the women in his life. -- Martina Castellanos * Guernica *
Frost’s letters say comparatively little about the art of poetry, but they are very much worth reading for those who have learned Frost by heart as well as for those who simply enjoy reading his poems. -- Benjamin Paul Myers * Portico *
A big hefty volume, lovingly and magnificently annotated, covering years that were full of tragedy for the great poet (the death of his wife, his son), surprise joy (falling in love, after the age when some men expect it), and the steadily-strengthening reality of his own celebrity…As with the earlier volumes in this series, this fourth volume is a quiet marvel of concentrated scholarship. -- Steve Donoghue * Open Letters Review *
Offering a wealth of insight into Frost’s later years, these expertly annotated letters invite pleasurable browsing and close reading alike. A must-have volume for scholars of the poet’s life and art. -- Hilary Holladay, author of The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography
These fascinating and revelatory letters come to us from an important period of Frost's poetic career, marked by literary success and personal loss. Anchored by detailed and insightful explanatory material, this volume sheds new light on the life that informed many of Frost’s best poems. -- Laura Kasischke, author of Where Now and Space, in Chains
For an academic or researcher, this volume will be indispensable. Legible, indexed, and carefully contextualized, it offers an unparalleled view of the life, business affairs, and family of a talented and successful man. -- Anne Leamon * The Arts Fuse *
ISBN: 9780674504493
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
960 pages