Robert Frost

From 1850s

[edit] Robert Frost

Far be it from me…to regret that all the poetry isn’t in verse. I’m sure I’m glad of all the unversified poetry of Walden – and not merely the nature-descriptive, but narrative as in the chapter on the play with the loon of the lake, and the character-descriptive as in the beautiful passage about the French-Canadian woodchopper. That last alone with some things in Turgenieff must have had a good deal to do with the making of me. Letter to Walter Prichard Eaton, July 15, 1915*

In one book…he surpasses everything we have had in America. Letter to Wade Van Dore, June 24, 1922*

• Both letters are from “Frost and Thoreau,” by Lawrence Thompson. From The Thoreau Society Bulletin, LXXXVIII (Summer, 1964), 4.

A man may write well and very well all his life, yet only once in a lifetime have such luck with him in the choice of a subject – a real gatherer, to which everything in him comes tumbling. Thoreau’s immortality may hang by a single book, but the book includes even his writing that is not in it. Nothing he ever said but sounds like a quotation from it. Think of the success of a man’s pulling himself together under one one-word title. Enviable! - from The Listener, LII (August 26, 1954), 319