by John F. Desmond
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis.
Probably no other American poet has suffered more misunderstanding at the hands of his readers, admirers and detractors alike, than Robert Frost. The range and variety of misreadings of both the man and his poetry are legion: he was simply a nature poet, child of the Romantics; a clever versifier with little depth; a genial country wit; a moral monster; a cranky, iconoclastic reactionary against modernity, and so on. The problem of understanding this complex man and poet was vastly compounded by the publication of Lawrance Thompson’s three volume biography, authorized by Frost himself, which portrayed much of the poet’s life, his thought and his poetry in a glaringly simplistic and often negative light.
