Volume 55, Number 19 · December 4, 2008
The Storm Over Robert Frost
By Christopher Benfey
The Collected Prose of Robert Frost
edited by Mark Richardson
Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 378 pp., $39.95
Fall of Frost
by Brian Hall
Viking, 340 pp., $25.95
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher
by Peter J. Stanlis, with an introduction by Timothy Steele
ISI Books, 452 pp., $28.00
Lionel Trilling shocked the guests at a dinner celebrating Robert Frost's eighty-fifth birthday, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel during the spring of 1959, by suggesting in prepared remarks that Frost, everyone's favorite genial Yankee uncle, was a 'terrifying poet.' Trilling claimed that the Frost he admired expressed 'the terrible actualities of life,' and was different from 'the Frost who reassures us by his affirmations of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling.' According to Trilling, the sunbathers looking out to sea in Frost's apparently anodyne 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep'—
Review, 3705 words
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