Robert Frost: the mask of gloom

Adam Plunkett’s Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 500pp, $37), a work of literary criticism packaged as biography, has been highly praised by critics, few of them experts on Frost.  Scrutinised carefully, the author’s interpretation of Frost’s life lacks perception and his criticism of the poetry makes Frost seem boring.

The book doesn’t begin to wake up the reader until Frost goes to England in 1912 and meets his soulmate, the poet Edward Thomas.  The structure is also weak.  Near the end of the book, after describing Frost’s death in 1963, it resurrects the poet, suddenly shifts back to 1957, has a late digression on Emerson, and then continues to describe the events of Frost’s life, including his momentous interview with Nikita Khrushchev in Russia.

Adam Plunkett’s style is often awkward and specialises in seven-line sentences that wander out of control.  He writes, “It was Frost’s wont to allude to” instead of “Frost often alluded to,” and says “impressions of his acumen,” when he means “lack of acumen”.  His simple-minded analyses state “ ‘A Day of Sunshine’ describes a day of perfect weather,” and “Frost compared himself to an ocean.  ‘I am,’ he wrote, ‘like an ocean.’ ”

Frost enriched his poetry with verbal echoes of many poets.  But he did not compose two of his poems by trying to match them to the structure of “Lycidas” and In Memoriam, which would not have enhanced his own work.  Plunkett’s forced parallels are unconvincing: “Sunk low, but mounted high” in “Lycidas” is quite distinct from “And then come back to it and begin over” in “Birches.”  His 7-page account of Tennyson’s elegy for his dead friend reveals that In Memoriam is very different from Frost’s book A Boy’s Will.  “True,” “dear,” “doom” and “gloom” are emotive words used by both poets.  Tennyson’s tetrameter line, “And every thought breaks out a rose,” is not “much like” Frost’s pentameter, “Only more sure of all I thought was true.”  Plunkett’s Frost seems derivative, and all the long-winded comparisons make him look inferior to the earlier poets.

Plunkett doesn’t explain why in 1894 Frost went all the way from New England to the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia.   In fact, three famous authors—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe and the Irish poet Thomas Moore—had described the gloomy place and drawn him to it.

He misses a great deal when discussing Frost’s poetry.  He doesn’t see that, like certain poems of George Herbert, the lines of “My Butterfly” on the printed page take the shape of his subject (butterfly’s wings).  Again, he doesn’t see that “Stars,” with effective repetition, expresses through the goddess of wisdom an echo of Thomas Hardy’s pessimism:

And yet with neither love nor hate,

Those stars like some snow-white

Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes

Without the gift of sight.

Apart from using the same two words—“roaming” and “know”—Frost’s “Flower-Gathering” and Feste’s song “O Mistress mine” from Twelfth Night are quite different.  Frost’s “All for me” is not at all like Shakespeare’s “What is love?”  Plunkett vaguely and unhelpfully concludes: “If the fallout from ‘Twilight’ made it untenable to treat her psyche as idealised abstraction, it meant that he had to approach it as an indefinite thing.”  He also describes Frost’s ideas, in characteristically opaque style: “It was this general skepticism about the power of reflection to answer the questions it poses itself beyond a reasonable doubt that made the bulk of Frost’s more abstract ideas about the ways the spirit might try to resolve the questions it happens to ask.”  As Byron told Coleridge: “I wish you would explain your explanation.”

Plunkett relies on but does not mention that my 1996 biography of Frost has a 12-page Appendix of literary allusions from the Bible and Shakespeare to Donne and Orwell, many of them reprinted in Frost’s favourite book, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.  My list includes all the poets whom Plunkett says influenced Frost.

Plunkett has two blatant examples of intellectual dishonesty and lack of scholarly integrity.  Striving to appear original, he silently adapts my work without acknowledgment:

Meyers, 242: “Kathleen Florence Johnston, the daughter of a Scottish Episcopal clergyman, was born November 18, 1898, in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia, where her father had exchanged pulpits for a year.  Soon after her birth Robert Johnston accepted a church in Stirling, then in Edinburgh. . . . In 1910, when Kay was eleven, Robert was offered an attractive church in Philadelphia.”

Plunkett, 256, no endnote: “Kay Morrison, née Johnston was born in 1898 in Nova Scotia, where her Scottish father, Robert, served his first ministry in the Episcopal Church.  The family returned to Scotland after five years in Canada
. . .before [he received] a prominent rectorship in Philadelphia.”

Meyers, 263: On Anne Morrison in the car with Frost’s dog: “When Ted drove them up to Vermont, she would ride in the back with Gillie and watch Frost, seated next to Kay, with his arm around her.”

Plunkett, 333, citing his interview in June 2022, 26 years after my book: “[Anne] sat in the back while her parents and Frost sat on the bench seat in the front, Ted driving with his arm around Kay, and Frost, to Kay’s right, with his arm around her as well.”

I was the first biographer of Frost to read Lawrance Thompson’s papers at the University of Virginia and to reveal Frost’s long love affair with Kay Morrison, the wife of Frost’s friend Ted Morrison, who taught at Harvard.  Kay’s relations with Frost were complicated by her surprising involvement with three other men who were close to him.  Stafford Dragon, the hired hand on Frost’s Vermont farm, played the lusty Mellors to Kay’s Lady Chatterley.  She was also involved with Ted Morrison’s best friend, the porcine littérateur Bernard DeVoto.  Frost’s biographer, the “incredibly attractive” Lawrance Thompson, on the scene and eight years younger than Kay, was Frost’s sexual rival.  In an extraordinary and volatile situation, Thompson was also sleeping with the apparently prim, prudish and strait-laced, but sometimes drunk and wildly promiscuous Kay.   Thompson’s intimacy with Kay allowed him to participate in and even change the course of the life he was writing.

Plunkett devotes 3 pages to attacking my interpretation of these love affairs.  He denies the complexity of human emotions, and doesn’t understand the drama of disclosure and withholding, the games of intimacy and secrets.  Biographers must sense the mood, see the hints, read between the lines and seek intimation rather than assertion.  Contra Plunkett, lovers do write in code, don’t leave written accounts of their sexual, especially adulterous, relations and don’t have witnesses taking notes in the bedroom.  DeVoto’s satiric account of the willfully blind Ted Morrison also applies to Plunkett: “He never sees a sexual motive till it’s confessed in court and then tends to scout it as probably misunderstood.”  Kay hid her lovers just as she hid her 25-year affair with Frost.

Frost called love “a mixture of strangeness and intimacy.”  He said his poem “The Schism” meant that Kay no longer slept with Ted, just as Jay Gatsby believed that Daisy Buchanan could not love both him and her husband, and no longer slept with Tom.

To protect himself, Thompson, of course, took pains to conceal his sexual relations with Kay, who was jealous of his wife.  Plunkett naively accepts Thompson’s pro forma denials as truths.  Despite Kay’s affair with Frost, Plunkett misleadingly describes her affairs with Dragon, De Voto and Thompson as mere flirtations, not “reducible to sexual interest” and “unrelated to sex.”  But as Frost wrote in “Mowing,” “Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak.”

Plunkett ignores his own evidence as well as mine.  He doesn’t realize that Stafford Dragon, talking about Kay, was more uninhibited and truthful when drunk than when sober: in vino veritas.  He quotes Kay’s son-in-law, who believed that “Stafford and Kay were sleeping together.”  He also states that Kay’s daughter heard rumours, in their gossipy villages, about Kay’s liaisons with DeVoto and Thompson.  Speciously and tendentiously, Plunkett concludes there was “a psychologically unthinkable level of risk” in Kay’s relations with men.  But the heart is often driven by irrational impulses, and Kay’s adulterous affair with Frost took exactly that risk of scandal.  It was like feasting with panthers: the danger was half the excitement.

The Acknowledgments in this book are a 4-page display of egoistic gratitude, as if Plunkett were accepting applause for a television award.  He seems to thank anyone he ever shook hands with or met in the street, in order to entice or disarm reviewers and show that he is surrounded by a group of admirers.

I’d like to show what Plunkett misses in four of Frost’s greatest poems.  His account of “The Silken Tent” fails to see the allusions to Donne’s “The Baite”: “With silken lines, and silver hooks.”  The poem describes the conflict between Kay’s bondage and freedom as she is pulled, loosely by Ted in marriage and tightly by Frost in love, but remains “strictly held by none.”

In his account of “Mowing” —which concludes “My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make”— Plunkett misses Frost’s quote of “Fear no more the heat of the sun” from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.  He also fails to recognize the profound influence of Andrew Marvell’s equally contemplative poems about the bounty and inspiration of nature: “The Mower, Against Gardens,” “Where willing Nature does to all dispense / A wild and fragrant innocence,” and “The Mower’s Song,” “And thus, ye meadows, which have been / Companions of my thoughts more green.”

Obsessed with Emerson’s minor poem on Montaigne’s friend, “Etienne de la Boéce,” Plunkett does not explain the conclusion of Frost’s most famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” whose title slyly reverses Hamlin Garland’s Main-Traveled Roads (1891).

Two roads converged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The hesitation before the repetition of “I” suggests the difficulty of making this decision, which rejects the easy path, and confirms the speaker’s self-assurance, individuality and independence.

Plunkett mentions the “depth of meaning” in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but doesn’t define it:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost’s repetition of the last two lines emphasizes the arduous number of miles he must travel to complete his life’s journey.  The third quatrain, with its drowsy, dreamlike line—“Of easy wind and downy flake”—opposes the horse’s instinctive urge for home with the man’s subconscious desire for death in the dark snowy woods.  The speaker says, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” but he resists their morbid attraction and presses onward to complete his obligations.

Jeffrey Meyers published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath in 2024.  Forty-Three Ways to Look at Hemingway appeared in November 2025.  The Biographer’s Quest will be out with Mercer University Press in April 2026.

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