Robert Frost (1874-1963)
A selective list of online literary criticism for Robert Frost, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Pages
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Introduction
"Robert Frost." Excerpts of influential critical commentaries for the following poems: Mending Wall; Home Burial; After Apple-Picking; The Wood-Pile; The Road Not Taken; Birches; The Oven Bird; An Old Man's Winter Night; The Hill Wife; Fire and Ice; Good-By and Keep Cold; The Need of Being Versed in Country Things; Design; The Witch of Coos; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; Acquainted With the Night; Gathering Leaves; In a Disused Graveyeard; Nothing Gold Can Stay; Desert Places; Two Tramps in Mud Time; Neither Our Far Nor In Deep; Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same; The Gift Outright; Provide, Provide. Frost's Life and Career, by William H. Pritchard, Stanley Burnshaw. Modern American Poetry (U of Illinois).
"Robert Frost." Poetry Foundation. Ed. Catherine Halley. An introductory article on Robert Frost's career, techniques and ideas, and text for some of his most famous poems.
"Robert Frost." A brief introduction to Frost, with text for selected poems. Academy of American Poets.
"Robert Frost's Contrarieties." Audio file and transcript of a lecture by the legendary critic Stanley Burnshaw, on Frost's themes and techniques. Academy of American Poets.
Barron, Jonathan N. "Robert Frost." Literary Encyclopedia, 12/13/04. Eds. Robert Clark, Emory Elliott, Janet Todd. An introduction to Frost, from a database that provides signed literary criticism by experts in their field, and is available to individuals for a reasonably-priced subscription.
"Robert Frost." A very short biographical introduction to Frost, from educational publisher Gale Publishing.
Literary criticism
Barry, Elaine A selection from Barry's Robert Frost on Writing (Rutgers UP 1973), covers on Frost's ideas on the art of poetry, technique, and theory. Friends of Robert Frost
Bidney, Martin. "The secretive-playful epiphanies of Robert Frost: Solitude, companionship, and the ambivalent imagination." Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2002.
Booth, Philip. "Robert Frost's Prime Directive." On Frost's "Directive." Says Booth, "'Directive' reads to me like the height of Frost's poetry, the poem he climbed toward for perhaps forty years." From Master Poems of the English Language, Ed. Oscar Williams.
Faggen, Robert. The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost (Cambridge UP). Publisher's site, preview available. Chapter 1: Life.
Francis, Lesley Lee. "Robert Frost and the Child Mother Goose and 'the Imagination Thing.'" Massachusetts Review Summer 2004.
Francis, Lesley Lee. Robert Frost: An Adventure In Poetry, 1900-1918 (Transaction Publishers, 2004). Publisher's web site.
Freeman, Donald C. Burning gold: for John Robert Ross ["Nothing Gold Can Stay"] Style, Spring-Summer, 2006.
Frost, Carol. "Sincerity and Inventions: On Robert Frost" [Design, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Death of the Hired Man]. Academy of American Poets.
Glenn, Karen. "Robert Frost in the Petri Dish." On Frost's interest in science. Poetry Foundation.
Greiner, Donald J. A review of Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self by Frank Lentricchia (Duke UP, 1975). Contemporary Literature 18 (Winter 1977).
Guimond, James, ed. Robert Frost Teaching Guide. Heath Anthology.
Hammer, Langdon. "The poems 'Mowing' and 'Out, Out--' are interpreted, and the tensions between vernacular language and poetic form that they showcase are explored." "In this second lecture on the poetry of Robert Frost, the poet's use of iambic pentameter in 'Birches' is discussed. Frost's anti-modernity is evidenced in his interest in rural New England culture and his concern with the lives of laborers in 'Home Burial.' The failure of humanity to work real change is sardonically depicted in 'Provide, Provide,' but a hopeful vision of the power of imagination is presented in the final lines of the late poem, 'Directive.'" Yale Univ., English 310, Spring 2007, Open Courseware, transcript.
Hass, Robert Bernard. (Re)Reading Bergson: Frost, Pound and the Legacy of Modern Poetry [first page of article only]. Journal of Modern Literature Fall 2005.
Hinrichsen, Lisa. "A Defensive Eye: Anxiety, Fear and Form in the Poetry of Robert Frost" [The Vantage Point, The Mending Wall, The Wood-Pile, The Fear, An Old Man's Winter Night, and A Considerable Speck]. Journal of Modern Literature Spring 2008.
Hollander, John. "A Close Look at Robert Frost." On Frost's "The Oven Bird." American Poet Spring 1998.
Jarrell, Randall, Richard Poirier, others. On "Home Burial." Commentary on "Home Burial" from seven important critics, including poet Randall Jarrell. Modern American Poetry (U of Illinois).
Liebman, Sheldon W. "Robert Frost, romantic - poet." On whether, and in what sense, Frost was a romantic. Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1996.
Link, Eric Carl. "Nature's extra-vagrants: Frost and Thoreau in the Maine woods." Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1997.
Lynen, John F. A selection from Lynen's The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (Yale UP 1960). On Frost's use of nature, compares him to William Wordsworth. Friends of Robert Frost.
Monteiro, G. Selections from Monteiro's Robert Frost & The New England Renaissance (UP of Kentucky 1988). On The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, The Draft Horse, The Tuft of Flowers, Mending Wall, and Frost's connection to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Friends of Robert Frost.
Murphy, James "'A Thing So Small': The Nature of Meter in Robert Frost's 'Design.'" Modernism/modernity, April 2007.
Paton, Priscilla M. Robert Frost: "The Fact is the Sweetest Dream that Labor Knows" American Literature 53 (March 1981).
Stambuk, Andrew. "Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement." Twentieth Century Literature, Winter 1999.
Westover, Jeff. "National forgetting and remembering in the Poetry of Robert Frost" [Native Americans]. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Summer 2004.
Zubizarreta, John. "Octavio Paz and Robert Frost: El polvo y la nieve que se deshacen entre las manos." Comparative Literature, Summer 1995.
Biography & Lighter Reading
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. Preview at Google Books. Reviewed in the NY Times, 4/25/99.
"The rehabilitation of Robert Frost."The New Criterion, June 1996.
Short biographies of Robert Frost by William H. Pritchard and Stanley Burnshaw, and a bibliography. Modern American Poetry (U of Illinois).
On Robert Pinsky's "America's Favorite Poem" Project, which determined that Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is the best loved poem in the U.S. Guardian,11 April 2000.
Web sites
Friends of Robert Frost web site provides help for students, articles and book excerpts, and a biography.
Robert Frost reading "After Apple-Picking."
"A Frost Bouquet: Robert Frost, His Family, and the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature." Images of editions, U of Virginia Library.
A description of the Robert Frost documents in the the Jones Library Collection in Amherst, Mass.
An account of Robert Frost's sojourns in Texas. "Literary San Antonio" by Paul McQuien and Kim G. Hochmeister, San Antonio College.
Removed criticism
Burr, Zofia. On similarities and differences in the reception of Maya Angelou's poetry and Robert Frost's. From a talk at the Conference on Contemporary Poetry, Rutgers, 1997 (removed).
Garnett, Edward. A 1915 article in The Atlantic Monthly on Robert Frost by Edward Garnett, hailing Frost as "A New American Poet" (removed).
Sedgwick, Ellery. Article on how Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, rejected Frost's early poems. The Atlantic Monthly (removed).
Senst, Angela M. "Regional and National Identities in Robert Frost's and T.S. Eliot's Criticism," CLCWeb, l 3.2 (2001) (removed).
Van Doren, Mark. "Robert Frost's America," an article from the 1951 Atlantic Monthly (removed).
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