Robert Frost ranks 25th on the Modern Language Association list of top American authors based on the number of scholarly papers addressing their work. With more than 650 articles or books about his poetry, he may be one of the best known, most studied American poets in our history; however, as several biographers have suggested, he may also be one of our least understood. At the risk of getting lost in this jungle of scholarship, Tim Kendall, British poet, editor and professor, has married criticism to anthology with his new addition to the Frost critical canon. The result is a useful collection of a significant portion of Frost's work with short critiques following each poem.
Kendall not only brings his own close reading to the poems, but also quotes generously from other critics and biographers to provide context and even opposing opinions. With a poet as well-known and well-mined as Frost, it is difficult to bring something new to the party, but Kendall sprinkles many fresh insights among the familiar poems. For example, in the much-anthologized "Birches," Kendall notes, "Frost's fully realized account of the boy's swinging is produced 'with the same pains you use to fill a cup / Up to the brim, and even above the brim.' That moment of fine excess describes the boy's careful climbing, but it also serves as Frost's own modus operandi in a poem which celebrates a sense of liberation via poise and endeavor." It is a simple thing to see the meniscus of the full cup as metaphor for the boy's almost reaching beyond his grasp, but it is a more interesting observation to see this also as a metaphor for the ambitions of Frost's poetry. When his poems really work, he stops the fill just before he overfills.
Kendall will even take a contrarian long shot as he does with the poem "The Wood-Pile," where he comments: "At the risk of making an almost unremittingly bleak poem sound uplifting, it may be worth acknowledging that the woodpile... exemplifies a lingering (if meager) human warmth amid the natural world's desolate expanses." While he occasionally slips into professor-speak ("...the spartan trimester, the subject-verb-object structure, the monosyllabic masculine rhymes, the use of anaphora..."), for the most part Kendall speaks with a common tongue that Frost would have appreciated. As Frost said about his poem "The Cow in Apple Time," it is really just "about a cow that runs amok in an orchard." With a poet as complex and deceptively simple as Frost, it is always worthwhile to have a fresh set of eyes and ears take a new look. --Bruce Jacobs
Shelf Talker: Despite the plethora of existing critical studies of Robert Frost, British poet and editor Tim Kendall brings a fresh look to Frost's poems in this combination of anthology and critical study.