Robert Frost in 1941

Mark Richardson, one of the most prominent scholars on the poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), will be presenting material related to the poet on Jan 21 (for details, please see the right-hand column). In particular he will be discussing an interesting but never published––and never mailed––letter that affords a fascinating look into the poet’s life and work. As preparation for his talk, Mark has kindly provided the list of links below.

Mark Richardson, author of “The Era of Casual Fridays,” lives and works in Kyoto, Japan. He grew up in South Carolina & Georgia, was educated at the University of South Carolina and at Rutgers University, taught for ten years at Western Michigan University (1993-2003), before moving, in 2003, to Kyoto, where he now teaches  at Doshisha University.

His books include The Ordeal of Robert Frost (Illinois, 1997), and, as editor or contributing editor, Robert Frost: Poetry, Prose and Plays(with Richard Poirier) (Library of America, 1995); The Collected Prose of Robert Frost(Harvard 2007); The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1: 1886-1920 (Harvard, February 2014), co-edited with Donald Sheehy; Robert Frost in Context (Cambridge, April 2014); The Cambridge Companion to American Poets (Cambridge, October 2015); and The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 2: 1920-1928, co-edited with Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and Henry Atmore.

****************

For a talk Mark gave on Frost at a session organized for the 2014 convention of the American Literature Association: please click here:
https://eraofcasualfridays.net/2014/05/30/the-natural-history-of-frosts-poetics/
 
The PennSound Project covers a great many 20th century poets besides Robert Frost and can be found at the following link:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Frost.php
 
These recordings are some of the earliest of Frost, and of particular interest is his reading of “The Code”:
https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Frost/Frost-Robert_06_351A_The-Code-Part-1-Take-1_Speech-Lab-Recordings_New-York_1933.mp3
https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Frost/Frost-Robert_07_351B_The-Code-Part-2-Take-1_Speech-Lab-Recordings_New-York_1933.mp3
 
Go here for the text of the poem as it appeared in the first (London) edition of North of Boston in 1914 (digital scan held at the Internet Archive). Title page of the book (signed by Frost):
https://archive.org/details/northofboston00frosrich
 
“The Code” (click on the pages to “turn” them): https://archive.org/stream/northofboston00frosrich#page/80/mode/2up
 
Here is the page for Frost at the Modern American Poetry site (maintained by the University of Illinois, prepared and compiled by Cary Nelson and Edward Brunner). Click on links to find commentaries on often-read/often-taught poems (and on Frost’s life): http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/frost.htm
Another large digital archive of recordings is held at Middlebury College, where the Bread Loaf Writers Conference was established in the 1920s, in large measure under RF’s influence:
http://midddigital.middlebury.edu/local_files/robert_frost/lectures_readings/