Notebooks of Robert Frost

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

The notebooks bring Frost alive as a person and poet, showing him in the process of thinking through, rethinking, and formulating many of his most important beliefs, ideas, observations, and epigrams. They will generate considerable scholarship both confirming and reevaluating central issues of Frost's life, thinking, and writing. The notebooks are interesting in themselves. They show a remarkable intelligence at work and provide access to the (typically concealed) processes underlying Frost's performances, as well as a catalog of his most important concerns. Also important are Frost's more general observations on human nature and behavior and on social and governmental organization (these often struck me as remarkably prescient of contemporary scientific and philosophical views.) Faggen's book will be crucial to Frost scholars and students. It will moderate, modify, and intensify existing truisms and debates about Frost's person, opinions, and processes, and it will open new areas for consideration.

• 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