Customer Reviews

The Notebooks of Robert Frost

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I had read and heard Frost too often and had come to think of him as an old poet, too familiar, too crotchety, too tired. This volume re-ignited my interest in his life and his poetry because more than any other volume it reveals his thinking. He thinks all sorts of ways other than poetically, and thinks about poetry as well as anyone ever has.

He acknowledges that the poets "at whose metric feet we worshipped and bowed down were Arnold Keats Browning Tennyson Kipling (wooden music xylophone) Emerson Longfellow" and declares "Poetry is that in us that will not be terrified by science." In Notebook 17 (26-30) he lists 39 things that can be done with a poem besides read it.

For me, this volume makes him more intriguing and much more exciting than he has ever been before. I have gone back to the poems with enthusiasm. Readers are advised to sample back and forth to get a sense of the whole before starting from the beginning and reading through: the first notebooks are by no means the most interesting, or even typical.

As Robert Faggen's introduction emphasizes, this volume presents Frost as a first-class aphorist, comparable to Francis Bacon and Friedrich Nietzsche. Faggen's intimacy with Frost's life, poetry, and other works adds much to the introduction and notes. This must have been an exceedingly difficult task.

A prior reviewer objected to the "dark" Frost. Faggen explains that by "dark" Frost meant a great deal, not least the need to grope in the dark in order to advance. The notebooks have meditations on the dark, including this from Notebook 23:
"Dark darker darkest.
"Dark as it is that there are these sorrows and darker still that we can do so little to get rid of them the darkest is still to come. The darkest is that perhaps we ought not want to get rid of them."

I have two complaints: (1) I wish the book had a better index. Only names and book and poem titles are indexed. Of course, any kind of subject index would have been laborious, but it would have added greatly to value of this very rich book. (2) The proofreading for the editor's introduction and notes is atrocious, so plainly bad that I worried about the accuracy of the transcriptions. For instance, this note: "Enoch Lincoln (1788-1829), a Congressman for Massachusetts and Maine when the two states were one. When Maine was made separate, he represented that state from 1921 to 1926."

Even so, a huge book, hugely wonderful.

This volume includes the forty- eight notebooks which Frost wrote during his lifetime from the 1890's to the 1960's. It contains much about Frost's credo as a poet, and much of his aphoristic thought about a whole range of matters from the political and educational to the philosophical and poetic. Meghan O'Rourke in an outstanding review of the book in the 'Los Angeles Times' points out its inherent contradictions in bringing together two sides of Frost the popular public poet and the dark and difficult skeptic.
" The author was a set of inconsistencies: a Romantic bent on critiquing Romanticism; a pragmatist and quasi-Social Darwinist who wasn't quite convinced of his own views. As Faggen points out in an insightful introduction, Frost returns again and again to the feeling that life "can consist of the inconsistent."

Frost defined himself as an exception in all things, and he truly made a difference by taking the road not taken.
There is a stubborn recalcitrant quality to both his personality and prose which often give the reader a hard-won pleasure in struggling to understand his often deceptively simple sentences. Often only through indirections could his directions be found out.
This is an invaluable work for all students of Frost and all lovers of his poetry.

Robert Faggen has forever changed the course of poetry scholarship with this finely tuned and sensitively annotated collection of all the known notebooks of Robert Frost, arguably America's most famous and controversial poet.

Faggen's comments are helpful without being intrusive and the material itself is all Robert Frost without interpretation or added punctuation. Previously this material would have only been accessible by visiting the special collections of the major institutional libraries that keep it under archival lock and key.

It's the kind of book you can open at random and find something fascinating to read. However, if you take advantage of the well organized and cross-referenced notes, the context in which Frost created these notebooks becomes much clearer, and the poet's creative process is revealed.

Recently, a great deal of publicity was generated when the Barrett library at the University of Virginia uncovered a previously unpublished early poem by Frost in their archives - here in this one collection are 688 pages of material that only a few scholars have ever seen. Frost fans should be lighting some serious fireworks in celebration of such an important addition to the Frost canon.

Apparently, readers beware. I know nothing about this book except the extremely detailed claims of pervasive scholarly sloppiness levelled against it by James Sitar in Essays in Criticism and William Logan in Parnassus. If I were working on Frost, I would do a lot of research on this before shelling out on this book. A new paperback edition by Faggen is supposed to fix the thousands of errors that the two critic/scholars allege. It will be interesting to see what emerges.

It's too bad that none of the reviewers who met this publication with rapture bothered, as William Logan & James Sitar did, to compare the editor's transcriptions with Frost's notebooks. Read Logan's & Sitar's reviews before purchasing this & you will be stunned by Harvard University Press's decision not only to publish the thing in the first place but to reissue it without the literally thousands of corrections it requires. A scandal, a shame, an embarrassment for Mr. Faggen & for HUP.

My Sister has always adored the poet Robert Frost. This book enabled me to provide her with a moment of joy....of this I am most thankful. The book was in fabulous shape and was a full collection of his works!

The few finished essays that Robert Frost offered to his public ("The Figure a Poem Makes," e. g.) are so extraordinarily memorable, so full of canny, down-to-earth shrewdness and overall scintillation that I picked up his _Notebooks,_ edited by Robert Faggen in this attractive, 809 page book from Harvard with anticipation.

I am sorry to say that I was disappointed. The drafts or starts of poems seemed to me mostly flaccid and unfocussed. Of course, these are drafts; they were never meant to be read. Frost seems to have used most all his best lines in his published work. The work here never breaks into the dead-on, stunning revelations, the suggestive aphoristic brilliance of the crystallized Frost. Moreover, there are pages and pages of fragments like "A few words of policy now and then A stroke of policy now and then." That is either obvious and not with saying, or obscure in reference. There are thousands of phrases here that hold no meaning by themselves--e. g., "Not fantastic." So what? What is not fantastic? "What is philosophy. Education as inuring. Tom-tom in poetry." What is that all about?

Faggen has dutifully chased down everything an editor could be asked to chase down--references, dates, connections to other Frost material, sources of quotations. He has reproduced these notebooks with all their cross outs so indicated (and faithfully crossed out), and indicated when Frost switches from pen to pencil. On occasion there are nuggets--blasts against Roosevelt and the New Deal, bracing comic flashes ("And oh but it was fetching / To see the wretches retching"), and insight breaking through obviousness or obscurity every seventy pages. However, as a whole I don't think all this is worth it by itself, nor am I sure how much it helps read the Frost that is worth it, which is the Frost we already had.