Robert Frost being my favorite poet, I’m always on the lookout for books by or about him. Back in July 2010, in Carver, Massachusetts, I visited Books & More, a bookstore there, and picked up Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, by William H. Pritchard. It was a used copy, costing me $3.5 plus tax, even though the price sticker on the book was $5.00. Must have been a sale. Of course, when this hardback came out in 1984, it probably cost $5 or a little less (the bookstore cut off the original price from the jacket.

My Frost collection isn’t very large. I have his latest collected poems, from about 1970 (posthumously), a smaller collection that fits nicely in a glove box, and…I think that’s it, along with this one. I’ve read some other stuff on him from libraries. As the title promises, this isn’t a simple biography. Each chapter, dealing with phases in Frost’s life, is divided in two parts. The first tells us what he was doing, where he was living, what his life was like at that point. The second half tells us what he was writing or publishing, complete with analysis of what he was achieving. In fact, the “what” of his writing was more in the first half of the chapters, and the second half was almost all analysis.

Pritchard treats every Frost poem as if it were something about Frost himself. It seems Pritchard must think poetry is always autobiographical, but told through metaphor and simile. Whatever poem he’s talking about, he takes it quatrain by quatrain, or couplet by couplet, quoting the lines, then letting us know what the poem is really saying. Which, of course, is about Frost. I suppose at times he doesn’t say that a given poem is autobiographical, but rather, gives us insight into Frost’s mind right then. Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will, published in England while Frost was living there, sounds autobiographical. And the poems within it have what I recognize as autobiographical possibilities. The first poem, “Unto My Own”, for example, starts

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely move the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom
but stretched away unto the edge of doom.

Yes, I can see that as Frost speaking of himself, perhaps even about his temporary “escape” to England; or maybe about his escape to the Great Dismal Swamp in a pique of unrequited love (from his future wife) when he was a young adult. But I would never be dogmatic about it and say “this has to be about Frost himself.” Why must poems be autobiographical? Not all of mine are. Some are, true, but I have purposely looked for subjects that are not about me. Even my poetry book Daddy-Daughter Day, is not autobiographical. It doesn’t tell the story of a day I spent with my daughter (pity; though we did have enough good times to make up the equivalence). It is a generic story of a day a dad and his daughter spend together. I wrote it to be generic to suit a wider audience.

But I’m getting away from Frost and the book. As could be expected, the book is essentially chronological (except for the first chapter. Without going much into his pre-writing days, Pritchard shows Frost as the reluctant farmer, then the expat, then the shameless self-promoter, then the university poet-in-residence (it’s hard to call him a professor), and finally the aged poet. He also follows the books that correspond to each era in Frost’s life, taking five to ten poems from each for his analysis. I’m impressed by Pritchard’s compact language, as he gets a lot in those 280 some pages.

Is it a good book? Yes, I’d say so. Worth reading for a Frost devotee? Yes again. Enjoyable? Yes and no. I enjoyed the biographical parts much more than the analysis parts, and found myself reading the latter without truly comprehending what Pritchard was saying. Keep it in my library or dump it? I will keep it for now. Some of my reading was in a distracted state, and someday I’ll want to read it at leisure with more concentration. And, as I’ve read less than half of Frost’s published to this point in my own literary life, I may find the analysis parts to be more enjoyable some years from now.