Robert Faggen’s Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost is an excellent overview that will be useful to students at all levels. Short sections on Frost’s life and contexts provide historical perspective and insight into influences, including the philosophical influences of William James and Henri Bergson. Faggen has played an important role as a critic in making readers aware of Frost’s engagement with science, particularly Darwin and evolutionary theory. That work shines through here in summary form, with many pointers to further reading for students so inclined. Faggen’s discussion of Frost’s poetics should prove useful in guiding students beyond surface readings to engagement with his “sound of sense” and an often revolutionary versification “breaking rhythm across established meter” (29). The formal quality of so much of Frost’s poetry and his lifelong attention to established meter can make him look deceptively conservative. But his fascination with the complexity of ordinary language, the rhythm and sound of gossip, carried him beyond Wordsworth in attention to everyday speech and made him a master of its music. And his attention to the complexity of ordinary lives carried him beyond New England pastoral narrowly defined to serious engagement with an evolving America in which “being versed in country things” is an aid to understanding new “urban” realities.
Much of the book is devoted to close readings of particular poems, for which students tasked with such readings will be grateful. But the strength of the introduction lies in its ability to turn readers to the poems themselves. Students and others who make that turn will be equipped to engage the discussion with which Faggen ends the book in a short section on “reception.” Frost’s poems, which remain vibrantly alive, are still being received. This book will contribute to a community of appreciative and critical readers equipped to continue writing the reception of Frost’s work.
reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Robert Faggen. The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-521-67006-7.