{"id":5326,"date":"2014-02-05T18:32:09","date_gmt":"2014-02-06T01:32:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=5326"},"modified":"2014-02-08T18:36:49","modified_gmt":"2014-02-09T01:36:49","slug":"killing-monster-frost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2014\/02\/05\/killing-monster-frost\/","title":{"rendered":"Killing Monster Frost"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Road Back: Frost\u2019s Letters Could Soften a Battered Image<\/h2>\n

By\u00a0JENNIFER SCHUESSLER<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely divided an afterlife as Robert Frost.<\/p>\n

Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage, beloved by a public raised on poems of his like \u201cBirches\u201d and \u201cThe Road Not Taken.\u201d But that image soon became shadowed by a darker one, stemming from a three-volume biography by his handpicked chronicler, Lawrance Thompson, who emerged from decades of assiduous note-taking with a portrait of the poet as a cruel, jealous megalomaniac \u2014 \u201ca monster of egotism\u201d who left behind \u201ca wake of destroyed human lives,\u201d as the critic Helen Vendler memorably\u00a0put it<\/a>\u00a0on the cover of The New York Times Book Review in 1970.<\/p>\n

Ever since, more sympathetic scholars have tried, with limited success, to counter Mr. Thompson\u2019s portrait, which was echoed most recently in a short story by Joyce Carol Oates,\u00a0published by Harper\u2019s Magazine last fall<\/a>, depicting Frost as repellent old man angrily rebutting a female interviewer\u2019s charges of arrogance, racism and psychological brutality to his children.<\/p>\n

But now, a new scholarly work may put an end to the \u201cmonster myth,\u201d as Frost scholars call it, once and for all. Later this month, Harvard University Press will begin publishing\u00a0\u201cThe Letters of Robert Frost,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0a projected four-volume edition of all the poet\u2019s known correspondence that promises to offer the most rounded, complete portrait to date.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times The Road Back: Frost\u2019s Letters Could Soften a Battered Image By\u00a0JENNIFER SCHUESSLER Few figures in American literature have suffered as strangely divided an afterlife as Robert Frost. Even before his death in 1963, he was canonized as a rural sage, beloved by a public raised on poems of his like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}