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He has not completed poems to make his books but has made his books from completed poems.


Went downstairs to fetch this today, thought I might flip through it a bit as I worked through Frost's poetry this year.

Was surprised to find that I'd apparently used it quite a bit over half a century ago, must have been one of the two semesters I was an English major in college. Quiet a bit of underlining, notes etc seemingly in my handwriting.

Of course something like this is overkill for most poetry readers, there isn't usually an interest in "critical essays", just want to read and enjoy the poetry. If someone would like to delve into this sort of thing for Frost, this volume could be useful.

Has eleven essays, several by names that I still recognize - Malcolm Cowley, Randall Jarrell, Marion Montgomery, Lionell Trilling. Nice Introduction by James M.Cox. The quote above is from Cox. It refers to the fact that when Frost published his first slim volume (A Boy's Will) in 1913, he was 39 years old, and had simply collected in it what he thought to be related poems that had been written over the two decades previously. His second volume (North of Boston), published the next year, was similarly put together with poems he had already written; and so it went throughout his career, always writing, always staying ahead.

Critical Essays was published in 1962. Cox opens by writing how

it is difficult to comprehend just how deep [Frost's] roots go down into time. When he published "My Butterfly" in the Independent in November 1894, Henry James had not yet entered his major phase and Stephen Crane had not published The Red Badge of Courage. A year earlier, Yeats had published The Celtic Twilight, but Poems had not yet appeared, and Conrad, having closed his career in the merchant service, was beginning one as a professional writer. The careers of Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot, and Pound had of course not begun; Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Hemingway had not even been born.

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