Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry

What inspired you to blend Frost's life story with literary criticism?

I was working as a literary critic before writing the biography.

And it's hard to tease apart the different motives and aspirations, especially because it was some time ago.

And I think these things are always something of a mystery, even to ourselves.

And that's one of the great themes, I think, both of criticism and biography, is trying to tease those things apart.

But as best as I understand it, and as I remember it, I was young at the time.

And I had always really wanted to write books, plural, or at least book, singular.

And I was kind of fishing for something to do and not just stay in magazines.

It was kind of a sad time to be writing for magazines.

And I was writing primarily book reviews at the time.

And Harvard released the first edition of its letters of Frost that will eventually be, I think, five volumes.

But these things often add a volume at the end when you have too much material to fit into it.

It's an extraordinary scholarly edition.

And I had known Frost's work pretty well.

I think about as well as one knows it without having really devoted years of study to it.

And then I started reading the letters.

And pretty quickly, I realized that there was something in the way his mind worked that was so much stranger than I could really account for.

And it was very hard to not only account for how his mind worked on its own terms in the letters, but for what the relationship was between the mind that was writing these letters and the mind that was writing the poems I knew so well.

And I thought, this is totally fascinating.

And then I dug into the literature on Frost and realized that there was this live mystery that people had written terrific things about, but people hadn't really, I thought, gotten to the heart of it.

So I kind of fell into it, and I thought I was falling into a pit I'd crawl out of, but it turned out to be an abyss, a bright abyss, I suppose.