In Review: Love and Need

By Spencer Hupp

Love and Need

Adam Plunkett, Farrar, Straus and Girroux, March 2025

Setting aside the long career, the nonstop plaudits, and the many pages of enduring poems, Robert Frost led a pretty miserable existence. The early and agonised deaths of so many family and friends — a father dead at 36, best friend and fellow-poet Edward Thomas killed in the French offensives of 1917, a son’s death in childhood and another’s by suicide (which through his bossiness and megalomania Frost was in some ways complicit) — made him isolated and gave him terrible insight into the essential frailty of the human animal: “When I am too full of joy, I think / how little good my health did anyone near me”, as Robert Lowell quoted him in Notebooks. Even the career, one of the most illustrious and lasting in American letters, suffered from false starts. His first twenty years as a poet, up to age thirty-nine, were disappointingly fallow, seeing a scant thirteen poems into small-time magazines. Things changed, changed utterly, with the publication of his first two books, 1913’s A Boy’s Will and the next year’s North of Boston; these hailed him as our first national poet since Whitman and our first original poet since Stephen Crane. By the 1920s he was producing at scale, which for him meant about seven poems a year; such cleareyed, seemingly simpleminded poems as ‘The Road Not Taken’ and ‘The Gift Outright,’ poems people read and sometimes even quote from. But there are also perverse, ironical, dark night-and-day of the soul poems, poems by which critics Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling identified the real Frost, poems like ‘Directive’, ‘Home Burial’, and ‘Design’ with its

Assorted characters of death and blight

. . .

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And

dead wings carried like a paper kite.

Adam Plunkett, Frost’s new biographer, makes no mention of this poem in Love and Need, an otherwise copious, carefully studied book and the first major Frost biography since Jay Parini’s Robert Frost: A Life of 1999. Plunkett’s book sells itself as a critical biography, a “life of the poems,” which is to say a biography with criticism or criticism with the accoutrement of biography: dates, figures, authority and sources. Plunkett uses Frost’s life to decode the poems; his progress is broadly chronological, and he invests his criticism with biographical interests.

This sometimes works. In ‘Mowing’, Frost’s first mature poem, Plunkett reads a complex of parental anxieties — a mother’s Unitarian idealism and a father’s cavalier fatalism — resolved in the poem’s penultimate line: “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Plunkett spends three pages on this ambiguous statement of principles: 

the double meaning most fundamental is of realist and idealist visions of knowledge, the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows or the fact as the sweetest dream that labor knows, as if the facts of the world, like dreams, were knowable through imagination. It is the contention of the creed that one could fruitfully pursue these distinct visions of knowledge by the same means. In imagining the sensuous fact, one might know something of its manifold meaning as well.

Forgiving the dizzying syntax — that tempest of prepositions: “of realist . . . of the world . . . of the creed . . . of knowledge . . . of its manifold . . .” (this reader gropes wildly for any something, anything, like a transitive verb) — Plunkett manages to land on an important formula: facts, dreams, and labor are words to live and write by, as central to Frost’s poems as “silence, exile, and cunning” were to Joyce’s fictions. 

Elsewhere, Plunkett offers studied but unsatisfying readings — bowtied, buttoned-down, honors-English readings — of Frost’s poems. He goes so far as to tag the stanzas of ‘Ghost House’ with handy paraphrases (“imaginative unreality,” “movement downward and upward”)  italicised, quietly, in the right-hand margin. In ‘Ghost House’ he finds neither home truths nor hard truths but rather “the first salient instance of a peculiarity of Frost’s protracted intimacies with his literary forebears, which is that he borrowed often from poems that themselves borrowed conspicuously from earlier poems [by Keats and Dickinson]”, repeating the commonplace that poets are alternately comforted and haunted by their influences. This is the kind of inside analysis that appeals most — if not solely — to biographers, who are ever enacting their own anxieties of influence: the student becoming the teacher, the reader becoming the writer, the child the father of the man. When it comes to Frost’s time as a teacher on the New England prep school circuit, Plunkett quotes the most effusive former students: 

One remembered him as a very exacting corrector of writing, another as a careful editor of her writing, others as an encouraging reader. Someone remembered him patiently working with four Chinese exchange students to practice basic English. . . .  “To those of us who loved poetry he was a delight,” one wrote. Another, with dubious grammar, testified that “he got me to writing poetry.” “A remarkable and outstanding teacher,” someone wrote. “There was never any question of discipline in our class,” wrote another, because the students “were spell-bound by his personality.” Another remembered trying to study as a freshman while sitting in the room where Frost taught Senior English and ending up “spell bound” as well.

Plunkett's reverence for Frost — the stirring and supportive teacher, the man who loved children — proves deadly to his criticism. He takes for granted that since the man was good, the poems must also be good — yet sometimes selects truly bad poems to scrutinise, devoting himself to poems that, if not yet chestnuts, are certainly huckleberries. The cloying, insubstantial ‘Atmosphere’ is unaccountably one of Frost’s “greatest” lyrics (we’re to take his word for it; he doesn’t quote from the poem). So too ‘Stars’, in whose “snow-white Minerva’s snow-white eyes” and rote angelism Plunkett reads a moral essay: “As a thinly veiled marital argument, ‘Stars’ is less a pure apology than a more familiar kind of marital conversation in which the apologizer misses no chance to defend himself.”

In making a cult of Frost’s earlier poems — including such howlers as ‘Stars’ and ‘Twilight’ — Plunkett gives Frost’s first book, the underrated A Boy’s Will, its first fair shake in many years. Love and Need serves in some respects as an overlong apology for that breezy, brooding debut, a book that, as its title suggests, does well with adolescents. It certainly worked on the young Adam Plunkett; he admits so much in the book’s acknowledgements.

My father gave me his copy of Frost’s Complete Poems on my fifteenth birthday. If memory serves —and who knows — he first thought to read me ‘Into My Own’ [the poem that opens A Boy’s Will] and then, seeing me take to it, declared the book mine, having gotten it for his own fifteenth birthday. I grabbed a Post-it note and copied out the inscription his father had written, struck by how much his graceless cursive matched my own.

This helps explain why the rest of the book feels so desultory, so uninspired. What could have been a useful monograph on the early Frost grows feathers — 400 pages of them — but prefers them to flutter where they might otherwise soar. Plunkett, for his part, never quite leaves the nest:

‘They would not find me changed from him they knew— / Only more sure of all I thought was true.’ Nothing could have felt more reassuring as I sat at the end of childhood. Nothing could have felt more banal once I’d put childish ways behind me. So it was to my great surprise one afternoon in my mid-twenties, as I sat in my bookbestrewn cubicle in the offices of The New Republic, that I realized Frost had intended the banality in those lines as much as the reassurance; had intended the reassurance despite the banality; had done something so much richer and subtler than I had suspected or could explain. I had condescended to the simple-sounding poet, my taste and judgment formed on the giants of Modernism and their aesthetic descendants.

This book comes from its author’s impulse to correct a deficit of Frost in his life, to return to the comfort of him. His is the kind of Frost one hopes for — a big hearted, comforting if notuncomplicated Frost. Love and Need, then, works to get rid of the Frost that so horrified Lionel Trilling, the one whose poems “represent the terrible actualities of life.”

Take, for instance, ‘Directive’, a poem published thirty years after A Boy’s Will during the uncertain first years of the Second World War. ‘Directive’ belongs to a class of Frost poems set in a ruined, weedy, cutover landscape like so much of the territory “north of Boston” where Frost made his home. The setting is rural, specifically highland or valley-rural, somewhat abstract, under-populated or downright empty: mountains, paths, wagons, plus “a few old pecker-fretted apple trees.” Everything, even the interiors, is open to the elements: what remains of the town “that is no more a town” are “forty cellar holes . . . Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.” ‘Directive’ embodies a quality Plunkett himself discerns in ‘Ghost House’: “a strange possibility of posthumousness — the idea that the speaker, having forsworn the world, left it entirely.” Hence the overwhelming sense of the town’s vestigiality, abetted by Frost’s tortured rhetoric, the uncanny music of its nouns and modifiers — "serial ordeal,” “forty firkins,” “harness gall,” “instep arch,” “belilaced cellar hole,” and the meter, whose clustering stresses Frost learned from Swinburne and Tennyson and retrofitted to an American idiom: “Back out of all this now too much for us, / Back in a time made simple by the loss / Of detail . . .” It’s one of the most chiseled and worked — not to say overworked — poems in English; in its sentences you can see the total resources of the language on display. Plus the ending, which winks, grins, bites with a brutal irony — “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion” — a hard sell for a poem about bafflement, about perplexity and pretense, about getting lost, a poem whose speaker gleefully

leads us astray.

This poem scares off the conventional Frost, the one who “reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, old simplicities and ways of feeling” (pace Trilling). While Plunkett evidently prefers new virtues and new simplicities — more sensuous facts, more manifold meanings — when he lands on ‘Directive’, perhaps Frost’s most terrifying poem and certainly his least banal, he nonetheless reads it in the context of an earlier piece, the solemn and grandiloquent ‘Twilight’ (“I fear myself as one more than I guessed! / Am I instead of one so very fair? — / That thou art sorrowful and I oppressed?”) which “takes the reader on a self-consciously imaginary journey whose purpose is ambiguously either the discovery of something imagined or the very act of imagining together.” This thin gloss of Frost’s most characteristic poem doesn’t sit right with me. It feels like an abdication, a cop-out, a deferral to worse poems. Because, in its strange and indirect way, ‘Directive’ shows us more about Frost than any other poem. It tells us not to take him at his word.

SPENCER HUPP is a poet and critic from Little Rock, Arkansas.

Art by Esther Goddard