Love and Need
The Life of Robert Frost's Poetry
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Braiding together biography and criticism, Adam Plunkett challenges our understanding of Robert Frost's life and poetic legacy in a pathbreaking new work.
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.
About this Author
Adam Plunkett, a literary critic, has received fellowship support for Love and Need from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Leon Levy Center for Biography. This is his first book.
Reviews
"A capacious exploration of Frost's complicated life and poetry...A superb biography that neatly weaves in nuanced and insightful readings of many poems." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"In Love and Need, Adam Plunkett gives us a fresh, expansive, and intimate account of Robert Frost's life and poetry. Blending literary criticism and life writing in innovative ways, Plunkett offers new perspectives on Frost as a poet, friend, husband, lover, and father, and interrogates the damaging myths perpetuated by Frost's past biographers. Erudite, meticulously researched, and beautifully written, Love and Need is a brilliant tribute to one of America's most beloved, complex, and misunderstood poets." --Heather Clark, author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
"Adam Plunkett's book is an impressive fusion of biography and criticism, taking us through Frost's career from beginning to conclusion, always keeping closely in touch with the poems that matter most. Plunkett's own writing is notable for its poetic strength, for bold speculation along with a subtle humor worthy of its subject. Richly convincing, this is a major addition to our appreciation of Frost's achievement. " --William Pritchard, author of Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered
"This is a book I have needed for years, without knowing how much I did. Love and Need, precisely titled, tells the story of great art attained in the course of ordinary human foibles and affections, varieties of decency and rage, in a particular American life. Adam Plunkett's patient, high-grade attention to Robert Frost's life and work cleans away the encrusted stupidities of fame." --Robert Pinsky
"This is an exemplary literary biography--concise, elegantly written, and appropriately focused on the life as a means for understanding the work. I wouldn't have thought I had much to discover about Robert Frost at this point, but Adam Plunkett's book has been a revelation to me." --Christian Wiman
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