VICTOR SCHMITT-BUSH
Staff Writer
There are very few, if any, Pulitzer Prize winning American poets with a standing reputation laden with as much controversy as Robert Frost. As a poet of “countrified wisdom” and “yankee stoicism” as expressed by Fredonia English professor Natalie Gerber, little is known of Frost’s true colors. Much has been done by a mass amount of interpreters to sensationalize the negative aspects of his life, and paint him in a bad light.
Invited by Fredonia’s English department, both Edinboro University English professor and literary scholar Donald G. Sheehy and his colleague Robert Bernard Hass, another English professor and scholar at the same college, led a public lecture in the Williams Center on Oct. 17. According to the campus report, they are “two of four current editors of the Collected Letters (of Robert Frost) and are highly regarded for their work on Frost.” They discussed their findings that evening.
Up until recent decades, scholars and regular folk alike would rely on biographical interpreters like Lawrence Thompson and Jeffrey Myers to have at least some understanding of who Frost was. Nowadays, research on the life of poets like him and other literary giants is as easy as the click of a mouse.
“Today, I am happy to say, academic study of Frost flourishes,” said Sheehy. “You guys have the opportunities for research that I didn’t have coming through school. This edition of the letters would not have been possible without Google. You can explore the world’s libraries without ever leaving your desk.”
As the internet now provides Frost scholars with a much more efficient source for the allocation of Frost’s letters, the integrity of his most well-known biographers is being called into question. It has been found, for instance, that Thompson offered an unsympathetic and highly skewed narrative in his book titled “Robert Frost, a Biography: The Official Life of the Poet.”
Sheehy explained, “As Thompson introduced his hastily assembled and un-annotated selective letters, he offered an invitation to readers. He said ‘One purpose of the editor is to advise any thoughtful and imaginative reader to roll his own biography of Robert Frost.’”
Sheehy argued that Thompson had an agenda that he was trying to push. Thompson might have encouraged his readers to come to their own conclusions about the poet, but it was quite clear that he was “rolling” their opinions of Frost in only one direction.
“To assist in that process,” Sheehy said, “he included the following entries under Frost, Robert Lee in the index; badness, cowardice, enemies, fears, gossip, insanity, masks and masking, profanity, resentment and self-indulgence. Imagine having your life done up with these as the sub-headings.”
To Sheehy, the picture painted of Frost by authors like Thompson was intentional. Frost wrote thousands of personal letters, and Thompson collected only a fraction of that. Simultaneously, as he was constructing Frost’s biography, he had the audacity to pick out specific letters. Sheehy said that they weren’t even presented in chronological order.
According to Gerber, this kind of unfavorable depiction of Frost’s personal life, although unfair, is of no surprise. Both before and after Thompson wrote Frost’s biography, Frost was known “to be a man of many faces.”
“Frost had the distinction of being called many names,” said Gerber. “Elder Statesman is one, so is A Mask of Himself. The other name, and this is a flattering one, is A Bad Man [which was] said by Bernard DeVoto, and as in the wake of the biographers that were published: A Monster, and Lynell Trilling’s, A Terrifying Poet.”
Of much more generous appeal, Jay Parini’s “Robert Frost: A Life,” according to Sheehy, “restored both a seriousness of purpose and a judiciousness of interpretation to an examination of Frost’s life and character.”
However, “Even the more appealing Frost of Parini’s version remains in the shadow of Thompson’s,” he elaborated, “as will every new biography, as long as Thompson’s version remains intact.”
Both Sheehy and Hass explained in their lecture that they are two of four esteemed Frost scholars who are all working together as a team to re-establish a much more accurate depiction of one of America’s most distinguished poets. Their mission is to offer to the public and scholars alike as objective an interpretation of Frost as possible, but it won’t be easy, according to Hass.
“The word objective is a very slippery slope,” he said. “Objectivity is something that you aspire to in science. Even if we aspire to the precision of science in our editorial work, I’m not sure that even we could possibly achieve complete objectivity.”
Their team consists of four members. Two editors, “a Brit and an American,” according to Hass, live and work in Japan while the other two editors, Sheehy and Hass, reside in America.
“I tend to approach Frost via the avenues of science and natural history, and sometimes philosophy and intellectual history, so our collective expertise prompts us to edit the letters because we all come to the letters with different perspectives,” said Hass.
The intention of doing so is to shift perspectives in a way that is not overly sympathetic nor overly critical of Frost’s character. He was human after all.
“If Frost was to be rolled,” said Sheehy, “It was clearly in more ways than one.”