[Janet Kenny]

I'm afraid I haven't been able to read this whole thread although it interests me greatly. As one who feels close to the musical mind of Frost I'd like to add that I have never read any biograhical information about Frost that doesn't say he was a complex and sometimes unlikeable character. He was obviously a bit contorted psychologically and Rose's suggestion seems absolutely in keeping with the observations of those who knew him well. There is no reason why a great artist can't also be a bit screwed up. It's the unwinding into art that keeps "them" going
Janet

PS: Here are some extracts from a biography on the net. No wonder he was sometimes misunderstood:

"When he sent his poems to The Atlantic Monthly they were returned with this note: "We regret that The Atlantic has no place for your vigorous verse."
.....
After returning to the US in 1915 with his family, Frost bought a farm near Franconia, New Hampshire. When the editor of The Atlantic Monthly asked for poems, he gave the very ones that had previously been rejected......."

"In 1920 Frost purchased a farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, near Middlebury College where he cofounded the Bread Loaf School and Conference of English. His wife died in 1938 and he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol, a frustrated poet and farmer, committed suicide. Frost also suffered from depression and the continual self-doubt led him to cling to the desire to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature."
......

Although Frost's works were generally praised, the lack of seriousness concerning social and political problems of the 1930s annoyed some more socially orientated critics. Later biographers have created a complex and contradictory portrait of the poet. In Lawrance Thompson's humorless, three-volume official biography (1966-1976) Frost was presented as a misanthrope, anti-intellectual, cruel, and angry man, but in Jay Parini's work (1999) he was again viewed with sympathy: ''He was a loner who liked company; a poet of isolation who sought a mass audience; a rebel who sought to fit in. Although a family man to the core, he frequently felt alienated from his wife and children and withdrew into reveries. While preferring to stay at home, he traveled more than any poet of his generation to give lectures and readings, even though he remained terrified of public speaking to the end..."

[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited May 25, 2006).]