Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
A major contribution to the field, "The Collected Prose of Robert
Frost" is a first-rate work of editorial scholarship, that gains
from the editor's comprehensive and intimate familiarity with
Frost's life and work, as well as with the vast secondary
literature on both. The textual notes provide the best and in many
cases, only available account of the textual history of Frost's
prose. This volume will fill an important need for anyone
interested in Frost's poetry and prose.--Jonathan Levin, author of
"The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American
Literary Modernism"
As a near-comprehensive, definitive, and convenient edition of
Frost's prose, "The Collected Prose of Robert Frost" is an
invaluable tool. Its critical introduction and notes are
superb--graceful, perspicacious, focused, discriminating, and
deeply informed. This edition offers accurate texts and more of
Frost's prose than has been gathered elsewhere. It will be
definitive.--David Cowart, University of South Carolina
A meticulously edited collection of Frost's prose.--Christopher
Benfey"New York Review of Books" (12/04/2008)
An untidy but wonderful heap of introductions, dedications, lists,
autobiographical sketches and aphorisms. There are stories for
children and pieces for presidential inaugurations.--Niall
Griffiths"Daily Telegraph" (01/19/2008)
By turns gnomic and practical, his thoughts on the writing process,
the importance to poetry of sound--"The surest way to reach the
heart is through the ear"--and his distinction of metre and rhythm
might not amount to a primer, but are essential for anyone
interested in the art.--Stephen Knight"The Independent"
(12/07/2008)
Mark Richardson has brought together, in one meticulously edited
volume, all the articles, introductions, press releases, and
lectures, along with some especially significant letters, which
Frost himself readied for print but never saw fit to
publish...Frost's startling insights into the poetic process, as
well as his frequent jokes, are all the more effective for being
bluntly delivered...[Richardson's] extensive notes offer a wealth
of information, often drawn from unpublished sources, which
wonderfully illuminate Frost's intentions.--Eric Ormsby"New York
Sun" (02/13/2008)
Mark Richardson has given us the fullest critical edition of
Frost's prose ever published, including everything "Frost is known
to have prepared for print, major and minor items alike." Beginning
with pieces he wrote while in high school, "The Collected Prose of
Robert Frost" presents his stories, speeches, talks and essays.
Examples of his wit and insight abound.--Ron Charles"Washington
Post Book World" (04/20/2008)
Mark Richardson...has an alert and discriminating mind. In the
course of his 130 pages of explanatory notes, Mr. Richardson had
the wit to include selections from conversations with Frost that
Frost's biographer, Lawrance Thompson, wrote down but unaccountably
didn't include or take into consideration for the biography...Even
though Frost is the least obviously obscure and difficult of the
major 20th-century American poets, he is also the least clearly
understood of them, perhaps because of the enduring darkness and
confusion that he asks us to accept...and accept with grace. It
should also be said of these writings that Frost is a very natural
and elegant prose stylist in many forms, not least in the charming
and light-fingered, sleight-of-hand stories, included here, that he
wrote for his own children. In or out of prose, he honors our
lonely freedom enough to leave many sayings for his reader to
finish for himself.--Robert Ganz"Washington Times" (03/02/2008)
One's overwhelming impression, on finishing the book, is of
respectful love: Richardson's for Frost, and Frost's for the
English language. If this love comes joined to an ironic wit in
both cases, that is all to the good. The portrait of Frost that
Richardson conveys in his introduction is alone worth the price of
the book, for it seizes on precisely those moments when the poet
revealed both his sense of vocation and his sense of comedy. No
doubt he could not have had one without the other; and this volume,
despite its chicken-farming stories (one of which is actually quite
good), should go some way toward dispelling the image of Robert
Frost as a platitudinous, straw-chewing naif.--Wendy
Lesser"Bookforum" (04/01/2008)
Taken as a whole, this prose collection is a delightful
miscellany...And how wonderful to have this--short fiction by a
young Robert Frost! In these stories, the personality of Frost's
New Englander begins to appear, the philosophical, laconic,
chthonic fellow we see in the later-published narrative poetry like
"Home Burial" and "Death of the Hired Man" and "Two Tramps in Mud
Time."--Louis B. Jones"Threepenny Review" (01/01/2011)
The book follows Frost from high school to the grave and includes
not only important statements on his art but a great many minor
curiosities that show the kind of prose chores the contemporary
poet must undertake.--George Fetherling"Seven Oaks"
(04/08/2008)
The book's chronological order and broad scope provide the reader
with a full view of Frost's prose. Richardson's real contribution
to the field of Frost literature is his enlightening notes
section.--Paolina Taglienti"Library Journal" (02/01/2008)
This book contains a lot of interesting and important insights into
poetry, into the processes of poetic composition and poetic form,
poetic influence and structure and meaning...This is the first
collection of Frost's prose--the stories, the lectures, the
prefaces, the essays--and is a significant addition to the long and
growing shelf of Frost scholarly editions and criticisms...There is
page after page in the "Collected Prose" of this slightly grand and
teasing and ironic sort of talk...Reading the prose, finding him
saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority
is ours also. In the "Collected Prose" we find, to borrow a phrase
from his poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," "The lurking frost in the
earth beneath."--Ian Sansom"The Guardian" (01/12/2008)
This [is a] welcome edition of Frost's prose, 76 items ranging from
a paragraph to a few pages, edited by Mark Richardson in exemplary
fashion...One hundred years later we have not taken the measure of
many of the radical thoughts that fill these meditative
monologues.--William H. Pritchard"Boston Globe" (03/02/2008)
Frost was a highly prolific if disorganized, writer of prose,
penning pieces for newspapers, magazines and events that were never
collected in book form during his life. Following "The Notebooks of
Robert Frost," this volume brings together all the prose written
for publication by America's most famous poet...Frost's earthy
voice and rigorous intellect are on full display in this essential
book for poetry lovers.
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