Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, by Adam Plunkett, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 512 pages.

Among the countless ways to measure the social decline from the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy to the 2021 inauguration of Joe Biden, among the most obvious—the lowest hanging cultural fruit, if you will—is to note the poetry read on the occasions. 

In anticipation of the Kennedy inauguration, Robert Frost was tasked with composing a new poem, a work that became “Dedication,” but when the day arrived, the winter sun impeded his ability to read the poem. Then and there, Frost pulled from his memory bank one of his earlier poems, “The Gift Outright.” The poem, from 1935, is lovely in that ear-pleasing Frostian sort of way, and stirring in its sentiments—about which more in a moment. 

Either poem by Robert Frost—any poem by Robert Frost—must be judged technically and artistically superior to the poem read, some 60  years after the inauguration of JFK, at the inauguration of Biden. On that cold day in 2021, Amanda Gorman read “The Hill We Climb,” which sacrifices poetic beauty in the name of including the language of far-left activism, as in this line: “We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what ‘just’ is isn’t always justice.” Credit Gorman for presumably being the first inaugural poet to incorporate the phrase “might with right” and manage to make it rhyme: “If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.”

In his new quasi-biography of Frost, the critic Adam Plunkett shares in my admiration for “The Gift Outright”—he calls it “one of Frost’s last truly great lyric poems”—but, following the spirit of the age, he cannot bring himself to admire it for its obvious meaning. In its opening lines, the poem refers to the bonds that exist between a place and its inhabitants: “The land was ours before we were the land’s. / She was our land more than a hundred years / Before we were her people.” To my admittedly untutored ears, Frost is making the point that the colonists inhabited America physically before they were in thrall to it spiritually. “She was ours / In Massachusetts, in Virginia / But we were England’s, still colonials,” the poem continues, underscoring the theme that the early Americans went from occupying a land to embracing it, loving it, defining it—something admitted by Frost’s reference to America being “still unstoried, artless, unenhanced” prior to the arrival of our forebears. 

Perhaps my pedestrian, simplistic interpretation is evidence of why I will never receive a contract to write a biography of Robert Frost (1874–1963), but all the same, I cannot accept Plunkett’s back-breaking attempt to make the poem that which it is not. Although he concedes that “taken plainly, this triumphalism about American belligerence sounds like the most egregious kind of history written by the victors,” Plunkett proceeds to offer his own strained reading. Here, I give Plunkett the floor: “One can square the perspectives by seeing the presence of triumphalism as a comment on the temptation of nationalist sentiment to glorify the nation in its every aspect,” he writes. “Frost indulges this tendency of Romantic nationalism to refashion it into the critical nationalism of the American creed.” 

What is it they say—trust the poem, not the expositor? 

For those still wondering, Plunkett has not written a straight-ahead biography of Frost but a biography augmented by criticism, too often of the indecipherable, jargon-heavy variety. We simple Frost fans crack the spine hoping for an honest, rigorous account of our favorite poet’s life and times, and while we get some of that, we must work for it by slogging through interminable passages of analysis, such as the following account of “The Road Not Taken.” 

Plunkett asserts that this vastly popular poem is subject to dueling interpretations, one “earnest,” the other “ironic.” Plunkett spends an entire paragraph noting that the poem is ambiguous in its presentation of the time frame in which its speaker is addressing the reader—is he speaking of two roads in the here and now, or looking back on two roads pondered many moons ago? Let us ask the expert. “This indeterminate setting raises the prospect that the speaker’s memory has betrayed him the other way around, fooling him into misremembering the roads as more similar than they actually were,” writes Plunkett, who uses this view as his escape hatch to argue that the poem is not, as is commonly understood, a paean to the making of difficult decisions but something far muddier. 

“So it is that what had sounded like a bit of triumphal personal history, like the kind of self-congratulation in which a man of a certain age indulges at a family gathering on the front porch after dinner, comes to sound like something more revealing,” Plunkett writes, rather exhaustingly. “The setting of the poem sounds less like a regaling than an inner monologue, less like a speech than the tentative rehearsal for a speech in the theater of the mind.” Curiously, I remain unpersuaded.

It is not that I am opposed to the dissection of great works of art, but that in subjecting Frost’s much beloved poems to his particular analysis, Plunkett overcomplicates that which is straightforward—so straightforward to make Frost, in his day, not only a multiple Pulitzer Prize-winner but a poet whose popular appeal stretched far and wide. Yet, more than once, Plunkett seems dead-set on disabusing we common readers of our common notions about Frost—to rescue “The Road Not Taken” from being “the poem of graduation speeches, the poem of car commercials (really),” as he puts it, to being the poem of, well, Adam Plunkett. 

It is not all so bad. Although Plunkett explains Frost’s achievement in “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” in terms likely to be comically elusive to the ordinary reader (“In lines of almost perfectly regular iambic tetrameter fold into a perfectly regular rhyme scheme of augmented Dantean terza rima like that of a foreshortened canto—yet the dramatic force of the lines is to wear their staging lightly and seem to one’s suspended disbelief spoken in pure spontaneity”), he, to his credit, does not endorse the perverse misreading of the poem as being spoken by someone contemplating suicide—as though the speaker is tempted to the woods because they represent death, and is held back only by his “promises to keep.” Frost himself denied this interpretation, insisting that, as Plunkett explains, “the tone of the ending was not that of someone forswearing suicide but that of someone saying, at the end of a pleasant dinner, ‘Well, I must be going on.’” Pleasingly, Plunkett endorses the poet’s view of his own work, although we must chop through our own thicket of wordy woods to discern as much: “The threshold embodied in the poem does not formulate so neatly,” Plunkett writes. “Its dramatic force is in conjuring the sense of a depth of meaning so incongruous with the speaker’s easy tone, an experience bound to surpass the meaning we can assign to it.” Well, I think I agree.

Among the first clues that Plunkett is up to something more arcane than a conventional biography is the first chapter, which opens with a summary of the curious case of Lawrance Thompson, a Frost-obsessed groupie who, upon getting the commission to write Frost’s biography, came to view him scornfully, a perspective that informed his subsequent multivolume life of the poet. This biographical backstory is interesting, but it is a curious way to begin, especially for a book that itself does not come close to doing the work of a traditional biography. 

Plunkett does not entirely abandon the duties of his post. The book capably sketches Frost’s parents, upbringing, and early encounters with poetry, including Francis Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven,” a work that captivated young Frost for its “vision of God as a hound who pursued man no matter how much man fled Him.” His deficient education, marriage to the wife Elinor, and detour as a clumsy farmer in New Hampshire are also dealt with nicely. “Many of the habits of mind that would characterize his work of the next decade grew out of his life of domestic labor and domestic attachments, farming and fatherhood,” writes Plunkett of Frost’s farming years. And there’s this appealing picture of poet-as-teacher from a student at the Pinkerton Academy: “He would lounge against the teacher’s desk, hair and clothes rumpled, hands in his pocket, and quote poetry of the period.” His six children with Elinor were, in the idiom of the 21st century, homeschooled. Wrote daughter Lesley in an uncapitalized journal entry: “almost every day about ten o’clock mama calls us in the front room and we have to sit on the sofa and tell storys then we have to count 12345 and then we sing a song and then read and then we do a b c d”—it goes on like this. 

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

Plunkett has an undeniable command of the facts of Frost’s life, including his rise to literary success in the teens. He is presumably more tactful than his predecessor Thompson in describing the tragedies that afflict our hero, including the death, in 1938, of Elinor and the unhappy fates of multiple of his offspring, as well as his post-Elinor long-term romantic involvement with his married secretary, Kay Morrison. Plunkett shies neither from Frost’s eccentricities nor from his right-wing politics during the Roosevelt administration, including his conviction that the New Deal “conflated the distinct goods of mercy and justice”: “The social justice of the New Deal amounted to mercy, illogical kindness, bestowed on its recipient regardless of qualification”—a hardscrabble perspective befitting a loyal New Englander. 

Plunkett could be a skillful biographer if he would get out of his own way. He too easily deviates from chronological order, and he interrupts what biographical momentum he has developed with pages-long exegeses of Frost’s poems. It is jarring to become involved in some momentous episode in the life of Frost or his family only to be taken on a detour to the English Department. Worse, Plunkett’s exegeses, even when sound, are often turgid, overwritten, and incongruously personal. I happen to think that Plunkett is spot-on in his discussion of “My November Guest,” a poem in which the speaker laments his Sorrow’s abiding affection for autumnal bleakness—“She’s glad the birds are gone away, / She’s glad her simple worsted gray / Is silver now with clinging mist”—before admitting his own affection for the same. Plunkett stumbles over himself in a manner most un-Frost-like: “In this slant of light, the poem reads as a description of his visitation by something from which a part of himself will always be at a remove, like the arresting melancholy in the aftershock of grief, like a spirit other than his own.” 

Through its author’s unsatisfying treatment of his subject, and his interminable flexing of his own critical muscles, this is a book that does not spell out with sufficient clarity that chasm between the inaugural poets of 1961 and 2021—a missed opportunity, to be sure.