Author Description

This closely textured book reassessment of Frost’s poetry and reputation assumes a reader already familiar with Frost’s major poems and at home in the main traditions of English and American literature and prepared to pay strict attention to a serious critic. That may be assuming a lot. But those who do undertake the critical journey with Richard Poirier -- a journey swift, high, not always smooth -- will learn how a great poet gets from poem to poem, and a poem from line to line, as an enactment of mind. Or in Frost’s own, cannier words: “What a feat it was to turn that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be minded of this by that.” American literary critic Richard Poirier (1925-2009) co-founded the Library of America and served as chairman of its board. He was the Marius Bewley Professor of American and English Literature at Rutgers University and was regarded as one of America’s leading and most versatile critics for his writings on dance, politics, and popular culture as well as for works of literary criticism and theory on Henry James and Norman Mailer. He was also the editor of Raritan, a literary quarterly, and an editor of Partisan Review.