Robert Frost: Farm-Poultryman

by Robert Frost, Edward Connery Lathem (Editor), Lawrance Thompson (Editor)

The story of Robert Frost's career as a breeder and fancier of hens & the texts of eleven long-forgotten prose contributions by the poet, which appeared in two New England poultry journals in 1903-05, during his years of farming at Derry, New Hampshire

A surprising discovery of eleven prose pieces contributed by Robert Frost in two New England poultry journals a decade before his first book is presented here with commentary by the two experts responsible for this significant literary "find." They reprint the full texts of the essays from issues of magazines exceedingly hard to come by and evidently unique in some instances. Indeed, Frost's Eastern Poultryman and Farm-Poultry contributions were largely unknown to both bibliographers and biographers. They show him as an engaging spinner of lively tales and humorous homilies on a subject area that readers of his poems will recognize immediately as the background for "The Housekeeper," "A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury," and others. Scholars and critics can study here the young poet's workshop for producing cadences and speech rhythms of the Yankee idiom, later applied so effectively in Robert Frost's verse. The editors in a long introduction and detailed notes bring forward many new suggestions and additional information about America's greatest and most-beloved man of letters at this heretofore sparsely-documented period of his life.

116 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."