The Notebooks of Robert Frost

Robert Frost is one of the most widely read, well loved, and misunderstood of modern writers. In his day, he was also an inveterate note-taker, penning thousands of intense aphoristic thoughts, observations, and meditations in small pocket pads and school theme books throughout his life. These notebooks, transcribed and presented here in their entirety for the first time, offer unprecedented insight into Frost's complex and often highly contradictory thinking about poetics, politics, education, psychology, science, and religion - his attitude toward Marxism, the New Deal, World War - as well as Yeats, Pound, Santayana, and William James. Covering a period from the late 1890s to early 1960s, the notebooks reveal the full range of the mind of one of America's greatest poets. Their depth and complexity convey the restless and probing quality of his thought, and show how the unruliness of chaotic modernity was always just beneath his appearance of supreme poetic control. Edited by preeminent Frost scholar Robert Faggen and annotated to help readers with the poet's more elusive references, the notebooks are also thoroughly cross-referenced, marking thematic connections within these and Frost's other writings, including his poetry, letters, and other prose. This is a major new addition to the canon of Robert Frost's writings.

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Frost was a deliberate, masterly, and sometimes enigmatic poet, and these qualities show in his notebooks. Faggen offers a beautifully crafted introduction to this superb annotated and cross-referenced volume. The value of this work is tremendous. -- Anthony J. Elia Library Journal 20061101 A new book containing unpublished work by America's most famous poet is a literary event. While he was not much of a diarist, Frost avidly kept notebooks throughout his life. He recorded his daily musings in what Frost scholar Faggen calls '"ordinaries," unassuming dime-store spiral pads and school theme books.' This roughly chronological (the poet abandoned and then resumed writing in some notebooks) and thoroughly annotated edition offers devotees a substantial glimpse of the workings of Frost's complex and often contradictory mind, though it provides little in the way of narrative. In scattered jottings on poetry, teaching, politics and family--to name just a few of the many topics covered--Frost drafts poems ('And oh but it was fetching/ To see the wretches retching'); theorizes about poetics ('The Poem must have as good a point as a [sic] anecdote or joke'); lists topics for later writings ('Subjects used in 1906 Eng classes...Things My Mother Keeps to Remember My Infancy by'); spins aphorisms, stories and sketches; and even shows the development of famous quotes ('No surprise to author none to reader'). Better suited to flipping around in than reading straight through, this is an essential book for Frost fans and serious poetry lovers, who will find it to be a trove of Frost's famously earthy and yet deceptively simple wisdom, as well as a damn good read. Publishers Weekly 20061120 While those such as Eliot and Stevens shivered with distaste at the idea of writing poetry that was intelligible to the masses, Frost was determined to evolve a style that would appeal both to an average poetry consumer and, through its secret equivocations, to the more discerning reader. Ideally, it would educate the former, and transform them into the latter...In 1915, Frost returned to the US as something of a celebrity, and shrewdly set about cultivating, on the one hand, a popular audience and, on the other, the esteem of influential critics. The Notebooks of Robert Frost offer an intriguing insight into Frost's mind. They are not, it should be said, at all systematic. The first entries in Notebook 4, for instance, were made in 1909, and the last in the 1950s. Some contain drafts of work in progress, others fragments of lectures and notes for classes. Their scrupulous, perhaps over-scrupulous, editor Robert Faggen, has chosen to reprint the contents of all 49 notebooks in their entirety...While only the most devoted of Frost scholars will find their attention held by every page, this is a great book to open at random...Frost once described poetry as a 'momentary stay against confusion.' There's plenty of confusion in these notebooks, but they also offer a series of vivid glimpses into how and why he fashioned each 'momentary stay.' -- Mark Ford Financial Times 20060311 The Notebooks of Robert Frost [is] seven hundred pages of wisdom and prophecy, raving and rant, expertly edited and annotated by Robert Faggen...The biggest surprise in The Notebooks of Robert Frost, sixty years of private jottings in preparation for poems and prose, is the spectacular profusion of epigrams, aphorisms, and what Frost called 'dark sayings.' -- Christopher Benfey New Republic 20070122 The American poet Robert Frost was not keen on having his rough drafts inspected by posterity. Few survive for his poems. Here for the first time, however, are 47 pocket flip-pads, diaries and school exercise books that record his life as a poetic thinker...Frost's notebooks illuminate the oblique concerns of his [poetry]. -- Jeremy Noel-Tod Daily Telegraph 20070120 Since Frost used his notebooks to think through his poems, his essays and his teaching, they reveal only his work

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Robert Faggen is Barton Evans and H. Andrea Neves Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College.

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Introduction Editorial Procedures 1. 1890s-1950: "Hunter James" 2. 1903: "The Hermits" 3. 1903-1910: "All these different psycological experiments" 4. 1909-1950: "If I had prayed every day you don't see how I could help calling myself a Utopian" 5. 1910-1955: "Submission to the law of the machine" 6. 1911: "What you expect to find for a teacher in psychology" 7. 1912: "Bring all under the influence of the great books as under a spell" 8. 1912-1915: "A Place Apart" 9. 1913-1917: "Beggars in England" 10. 1916-1918: "All my thoughts of every thing" 11. 1916-1919: "Two Poets" 12. 1918-1921: "A time when nothing, neither religion nor patriotism comes to an apex" 13. 1919: "The Copperhead" 14. 1920-1930: "The furthest two things can be away from each other" 15. 1923-1924: "Learn lives of poet" 16. 1924: "I don't see what you have to complain of" 17. 1926-1930: "You and I" 18. 1926-1928: "Difference between meter and rhythm" 19. 1928: "I learned to laugh when I was young" 20. 1929: "These are not monologues but my part in a conversation" 21. 1930-1940: "Thick skinned: Thick headed" 22. 1930-1940: "True humility is a kind of carelessness" 23. 1935-1951: "True humility lies in suffering" 24. 1935: "Curiously Enough--as a connection" 25. 1935: "America and The Plot" 26. 1935: "Since surely good is evil's better half" 27. 1936: "The question for the original" 28. 1936-1939: "Having Learned to Read" 29. 1937-1942: "Democracy" 30. 1937: "Alcie That Socratic boy" 31. 1937-1955: "Three of those evils parsed in half an hour" 32. 1940-1950: "Leila.: What have you brought him into the house for?" 33. 1940: "Prophetic" 34. 1950: "What is your attitude toward having robbed the Indians of the American Continent? 35. 1951-1952: "Pertinax" 36. 1950-1955: "He and it would satisfy something in him" 37. 1950-1955: "If his own intuitions were correct" 38. 1950-1951: "There is a sense shadow always on success" 39. 1950-1962 "If we are too much given to reflect" 40. 1950-1962: "I wont be talked to by a woman, tell her" 41. 1960-1962: "Dedication to___ of 'The Gift Outright'" 42. Undated: "The more trouble that can be shown to have with a poem" 43. Undated: "First Answerability Divine Right" 44. Undated: "Last Refinement of Subject Matter Voice Imagination Voice as Subject Matter" 45. Undated: "Sentences may have the greatest monotony to the eye" 46. Undated: "Many speak as if it was a reproach to the Puritans" 47. Undated Loose Notebook Pages: "All thoughts all passions all delights" 48. Undated: "Nothing more composing as composition" 49. Undated: "One Favored Acorn" Notes Acknowledgments Index

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