Donald Sheehy, and Mark Richardson
This is the penultimate volume of a highly laudable mission: to publish all the known letters of one of America’s finest poets, handsomely produced and with first-rate annotations. This period (1937–46) was especially tumultuous for Frost: his wife died in 1938, shortly after which he fell in love with his secretary and asked her to divorce her husband and marry him. She considered it and then declined, but continued to be Frost’s secretary until he died, in 1963. (He apparently wrote hundreds of letters to her, but she destroyed most of them.)
The letters collected in this volume cast new light on how events in his life became reflected in his poetry, and illustrate his pleasure at becoming a celebrity even if critics began thinking of him as middle-brow. Frost is at turns loving, cranky, wise, and rude in these missives, sometimes displaying a peculiar sense of humor (and proof that he is no businessman). A masterful work of scholarship that is both revelatory and fascinating.