A01=Adam Plunkett
American poetry
Author_Adam Plunkett
biography
Category=D
Category=DNBL
Category=DSC
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
great American poetry
Lawrance Thompson
literary criticism
literary nonfiction
New England
New Hampshire
poet biography
robert frost
snowy evening
stopping by the woods
the road not taken
two roads diverged
Product details
- ISBN 9780374282080
- Weight: 720g
- Dimensions: 150 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 17 Mar 2025
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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By the middle of the twentieth century, Robert Frost was the best-loved poet in America. He was our nation’s bard, simple and sincere, accompanying us on wooded roads and articulating our hopes and fears. After Frost’s death, these cliches gave way to equally broad (though opposed) portraits sketched by his biographers, chief among them Lawrance Thompson. When the critic Helen Vendler reviewed Thompson’s biography, she asked whether anyone could avoid the conclusion that Frost was a “monster.”
In Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, Adam Plunkett blends biography and criticism to find the truth of Frost’s life - one that lies between the two poles of perception. Plunkett reveals a new Frost through a careful look at the poems and people he knew best, showing how the stories of his most important relationships, heretofore partly told, mirror dominant themes of Frost’s enduring poetry: withholding and disclosure, privacy and intimacy. Not least of these relationships is the fraught, intense friendship between Frost and Thompson, the major biographer whose record of Frost Plunkett seeks to set straight.
Moving through Frost’s most important work and closest relationships with the attention to detail necessary to see familiar things anew, Plunkett offers an original interpretation of Frost’s poetry, tracing Frost’s distinctive achievement to an engagement with poetic tradition far deeper and more extensive than he ever let on. Frost invited his readers into a conversation like the one he sustained with his literary forebears, intimate and profound, yet Frost kept his private self at a remove. Here, Plunkett brings the two together - the poet and the poetry - and draws us back into conversation with America’s poet.
Adam Plunkett is a literary critic. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, n+1, Bookforum, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City.
