Robert Frost Himself Author:Stanley Burnshaw Robert Frost's presence had filled my life from my fifteenth year--first through poems, then a few friendly letters, followed by talks, exchanges of books advice, and "words" through friends. Then the unforeseeable happened, when, in joining the staff of Henry Holt in 1958, I became Frost's companion and editor. His... more » death in 1963 could not take him out of my life--to the contrary, as the picture of Frost changed for the worse in the eyes of former admirers. Any day now, I felt certain, someone properly informed would come forward to right the wrong the detractors had done, wipe away the biases, add the missing essentials, and restore for the world the poet as he really was.
"When one writes about Frost," says Randall Jarrell, "one feels lamentably sure of how lamentably short of his world one is going to fall"--and in writing of random parts of our numberless hours together, these words proved dismayingly true.... "To attempt to speak of this poet, I must go back sixty years to the days when I first encountered Frost as a living presence through New Hampshire, and responded with a schoolboy's piece that appeared in a well-known journal which Frost could have missed. What matters is not My account, but the truth about Frost as I saw it, and see it now, not only out of our lengthy association and numerous talks in the last five years of his life, but equally out of my striving for tenable answers in the decades that followed his death...."
STANLEY BURNSHAW, critic , poet, translator, biographer, has published numerous volumes, best known of which are The Seamless Web, The Poem Itself, In the Terrified Radiance, and the newly issued My Friend, My Father with an introduction by Leon Edel. He worked for twenty years as president and editor of The Dryden Press, then joined Frost's publisher, Henry Holt, in 1958, where he served as the poet's editor. In 1984, the British journal 'Agenda' published a Stanley Burnshaw Special Issue with contributions by Lionel Trilling, Christina Stead, Sir Herbert Read, and others. Robert Frost Himself is the culmination of Burnshaw's lifelong interest in the poet and the capstone of one of the most distinguished careers in American letters. --JacketFlaps« less