Frost: Poems: Edited by John Hollander

By Robert Frost and John Hollander

From one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost's native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not Taken, " as well as poems less famous but equally great.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Jul 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780307823595

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was an American poet. Born in San Francisco, Frost moved with his family to Lawrence, Massachusetts following the death of his father, a teacher and editor. There, he attended Lawrence High School and went on to study for a brief time at Dartmouth College before returning home to work as a teacher, factory worker, and newspaper delivery person. Certain of his calling as a poet, Frost sold his first poem in 1894, embarking on a career that would earn him acclaim and honor unlike any American poet before or since. Before his paternal grandfather’s death, he purchased a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for Robert and his wife Elinor. For the next decade, Frost worked on the farm while writing poetry in the mornings before returning to teaching once more. In 1912, having moved to England, Frost published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. Through the next several years, he wrote and published poetry while befriending such writers as Edward Thomas and Ezra Pound. In 1915, after publishing North of Boston (1914) in London, Frost returned to the United States to settle on another farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he continued writing and teaching and began lecturing. Over the next several decades, Frost published numerous collections of poems, including New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1924) and Collected Poems (1931), winning a total of four Pulitzer Prizes and establishing his reputation as the foremost American poet of his generation.

Reviews for Frost

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was Bernhard's first novel, following on from two collections of lyric verse and some musical collaborations with the composer Gerhard Lampersberg, and was really his breakthrough work as a prose writer, bringing him to the attention of the critics and winning him a couple of major prizes and quite a few important enemies (always a mark of success in Bernhard-land). The narrator is a medical student, who has been given the rather unlikely assignment by his supervisor, the surgeon Strauch, of conducting an extensive undercover observation of Strauch's brother, a painter. The brother has burnt all his paintings, abandoned his life in Vienna, and gone into a Wittgenstein-like retreat in the obscure and impoverished mountain village of Weng, where he is staying in a run-down pub. The narrator tracks the painter down and soon finds himself recruited to go on long walks through the snow with him (Weng is clearly a place where it's always winter and never Christmas) and listen to his increasingly bleak and Bernhardish thoughts about his mental and physical state, the villagers, the landscape, Austria ("...the bordello of Europe..."), the arts, and death by disease, accident, murder and suicide.It's a little bit looser and less intensively musical than mature Bernhard prose, and it uses unexpectedly conventional layout devices like paragraph breaks(!) and chapters, but you can see where it's headed. There's plenty of the usual scathing and very black humour, doctor-bashing, general misogyny, impatience with dullwittedness, and contempt for Austrian folksiness mingled with pleasure in the oddities of Austrian language. One of the main characters is the Wasenmeister, the person responsible for disposing of animal cadavers in the village (roughly equivalent to "knacker" in English). Not a word you will find in many modern dictionaries! Needless to say, he turns out to be in cahoots with the disreputable landlady of the pub. Not a book that is likely to encourage many tourists to visit rural Austria, and probably best avoided if you are liable to depression, but otherwise well worth our time, like everything else I've read by Bernhard. And a fascinating glimpse at how he got to his mature style.

[byebyelibrary · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the darkest and strangest and most unforgettable books I have ever read. Kind of a Tuesdays With Morrie for dark geniuses with aspergers.

[fieldnotes_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Here is Thomas Bernhard once again offering the “philosophy of the exacerbated bird’s-eye view of impure thought” as it goes “through the nitrogen of the primal condition of the devil,” “pitch[ing] wildness and quiet alternately at the disquiet of others.” His voicebox is the painter, Strauch, “one of those people . . . who tie tourniquets round the arteries of their thought, but to no effect; who pour themselves out in suicidal word-spate, who hate themselves in truth because the world of their feeling, apprehended as enforced incest, daily smashes them to smithereens.” Get the picture?Strauch’s disdain is breathless. Bernhard ensconces him in an environment, “where vulgarity carries its head as high as royalty. Brutality wanders along like the epitome of gentleness, celebrated, ethical, inimitable.” Strauch deplores the liquor-soaked, “cretins” who surround the rural inn to which he retreated after burning all of his paintings and breaking contact with anyone who might have been in the habit of tolerating him. His brother, a medical doctor, sends an aspiring medical student to observe Strauch’s behavior for thirty days. The book transpires in this implausibly short time period, narrated by the medical student, who quotes Strauch nearly as much as he articulates thoughts of his own. The reflections of the medical student are rapidly contaminated and overrun by the timbre of Strauch’s own inexhaustible venom and while peripheral characters register a few pages worth of speaking, they and the medical student all end up sounding like the painter, which is one of the book’s weak points.If you had a friend like the painter, you would not often pay attention to what he said. When it resonated with your mood or your conclusions, you might perk up; but by and large you can tune out such a person with ease and discover twenty minutes (or pages) later, that they are oblivious to your level of alertness and disinterested in your reception. Worse, you can pretty much immediately get back into the flow of their discourse because it is predictable in its trajectory and stance. It can be difficult to get traction in this book. When I skim through the parts where I made fewest notes, I find passages that I don’t remember reading. At the same time, the book is peppered with rewardingly humorous passages that are one of the things for which I most enjoy Bernhard: “I can’t remember what I wanted to say, but I know it was something malicious. Often, of all the things you mean to say, that’s all that’s left, the sense that you had it in mind to say something malicious.” “As soon as it could blow its own nose, a child was deadly to anything it came in touch with.” “Most of them have never done anything else anyway but load and unload, standing in standing water in their gumboots and knocking in bridge piles.”“It’s like having to make my way through millennia, just because a couple of moments are after me with big sticks.”Themes that run throughout Bernhard’s writing are already making regular appearances in this, his first novel. A loathing of Austria, common Austrians and womankind is everywhere present. Characters fixate on suicide and feel beset and undermined by the destructive, crude and inadequate nature of neighbors and nations. Bernhard’s characters refuse to integrate and then punish themselves for it. The acid humor is the only relief that you will be afforded in your progress through his novels.If you have not read Bernhard before, do not start here. Consider starting with “Gargoyles,” his most episodic work that suffers least from repetition, or his memoir, “Gathering Evidence,” which is shattering, beautiful and cruel. As far as I’m concerned, most of his middle period works about creative people whose creativity is blocked, are a bit too painful for anyone who isn’t a literary masochist.

[jimelkins · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Frost, yet another excrescence of Bernhard's imagination. This time it's a student who follows a painter, or rather a man who used to be a painter, in order to see if he is sane. Of course he isn't: that is so immediately obvious that the question becomes--as of the first five pages of the book--what kind of imagination the painter possesses. The book offers no relief, no pleasure of slowly dawning insight (even if tha insight is going to reveal psychosis, or suicide, or unrelieved pessimism, or bottomless misanthropy). Reading the book is like lying in pig slurry, and raising yourself every few minutes to wipe yourself, and then lying back down, then rising again. It makes Beckett seem prissy and sterile, and it makes nearly every other author look cowardly, because every other author rushes off to a nice conclusion.

[zottel-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Das Buch hat bei mir einen massiven Eindruck hinterlassen, aber keinen guten. Pessimismus, Misanthropie und Depression auf die Spitze getrieben in bildgewaltiger, trauriger Schwärze.Häufig sind die Tiraden des Malers, der vom Ich-Erzähler beobachtet wird, komplett unverständlich, mehr Bild als Sinn – als Leser hatte ich oft ein Gefühl, als würde ich ein abstraktes Gemälde betrachten, mitgerissen, aber ohne verstandesmäßigen Zugang.Schwere Kost, sicher nichts für Leser ohne Ausdauer. Faszinierend, aber auch abstoßend. Ein Ritt, wie kaum ein anderes Buch ihn in mir ausgelöst hat, aber eigentlich zuviel des Guten, oder vielmehr des Schlechten.Letztlich zu schwer verdaulich.

[stillatim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this: I've read most of Bernhard's later work, and always put this one off. I think I'm glad--this was an amazing book, but I was expecting something easier than Bernhard's usual, not more difficult. The rant form is here in nuce, but broken up, like a later Bernhard book smashed into tesserae and scattered before the reader. Allow me to explain the clear with the obscure: it's much more Wittgenstein or Nietzsche, and less Adorno. And I prefer Adorno in every possible way.